The Museum of Accidents as Form

For an experiment, let's re-view Virilio (as though in the rearview mirror) and attempt to see how his choice of narrative form can inform an idea of how to go about structuring the kinds of narrative we will attempt through Contrast.

So, we're back to Target.

Rather than utilizing popular narrative or myth, Virilio employs the museum modality for his gallery of accidents. How does this particular strategy function? How does the choice of the museum-as-exhibition site differ from, say, the movies?

First and foremost, the museum is an institution. Rather than assembling things according to the comparatively loose space of narrative, the museum functions as a site for collecting and exhibiting those works deemed to be of importance to the target culture. So, first and foremost, Virilio institutionalizes the accident.

But then again, as a sign system, how does the museum function?

While exhibitions and installations certainly create and drive according to their own personalities, what the museum typically does is to collect things, to assemble them in some order, to make sense of a given range of work through the act of exhibition.

So, once again, we get back to Virilio's exhibition-as-sign.

In an earlier post, I'd said that Virilio's sign system seems to pose a fixed and fundamental signified for the "raw material" of the accident. To follow-up with Baudrillard's concern over cause and effect, what's interesting about Virilio is that he doesn't seem to be terribly concerned over cause or effect but simply in the sign, in proposing the sign of a particular accident and arranging those signs, raising them to the nth power in succession in order to build to...something (kind of like the blog form, I suppose).

Sure, the individual exhibits have facts about the place, date, size and magnitude of the accident, but if you click on the picture, as if to find out more about it or perhaps to zoom in, we go back to the page we just came from. Depth is not a concern here. Accumulation is presented as a mode of institutional awareness. We'll understand the accident through accumulation, it would seem.

I guess this is where our project might split off. We might take the fundamentals of Virilio's approach (the accident-as-sign, use of images to portray the concepts, etc.), but it seems to me that we're replacing his bare, transparent signified with...something.

Pataphysics? Whatever that is.



Digitized, the museum no longer functions as conscious sketching away of the borders of a collective culture's artifacts but simply as a resting spot for the detritus of a series of images, symbolic without depth, raised to the nth power, put into ecstasy through the mode of accumulation.