Expounding a New View of Accidents

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Thursday, December 26, 2002
Expounding a New View of Accidents
By ALAN RIDING

PARIS, Dec. 21 — Accidents happen. In fact, they have
always happened, from the asteroid that presumably
wiped out the dinosaurs to the great fire that razed
central London in 1666. But there are accidents and
there are accidents. A good many, like earthquakes and
tornadoes, are unavoidable acts of nature. But many
more are human accidents provoked by the very
technology that we celebrate: they represent the dark
face of progress.

Paul Virilio, 70, a French urbanist, philosopher and
prolific writer, began developing this thesis after
the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in the United
States in 1979. Now, he believes, we are more
accident-prone or rather, technology and
communications have made accidents more global in
their impact. In his view, if an accident was long
defined as chance, today only its timing and
consequences are hard to predict; the accident itself
is already bound to occur.

To underline the importance of this unwelcome variable
to modern society, Mr. Virilio is promoting the
creation of a Museum of Accidents. "The museum's
purpose would not be to 'spread fear' but to confront
what is no longer a chance event," he explained.
"There is an increasingly present cumulative reality
related to a sudden globalization in which accidents
and terrorist attacks have merged to become an
anonymous undeclared war."

Now, as a sort of pilot project for a Museum of
Accidents, Mr. Virilio has been given a chance to
illustrate what he means in an unusual exhibition
called "Unknown Quantity," on display at the Cartier
Foundation for Contemporary Art here through March 30.
Accompanying it is a large catalog in which, amid
myriad photographs of every imaginable natural and
man-made disaster, Mr. Virilio elaborates on his
argument that recalling accidents is the best way of
avoiding them.

It is not an art show as such, although the
foundation's two first-floor galleries have been given
over to works by three American artists: a reassembled
version of Nancy Rubins's "MOMA and Airplane Parts,"
which evokes a crash; a forest of aluminum tubes by
the New York architect Lebbeus Woods, which he calls
"The Fall" and which suggests the protruding ruins of
the World Trade Center; and a sound installation by
another New Yorker, Stephen Vitiello, which translates
light and movement into a symphonic murmur.

On a lower floor the accident theme is addressed more
literally in movies, videos and photographs evoking
hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, deadly train
derailings, plane crashes, the explosion of the space
shuttle Challenger and the devastating explosion of a
chemical factory in Toulouse, France, last year. This
section, though, is dominated by the attacks of Sept.
11, 2001.

It may be arguable whether the destruction of the
World Trade Center can be termed an accident, but Mr.
Virilio contends that it falls into a new category of
"war disguised as accident" because it had the
surprise element of an accident, but used technology —
two aircraft — as the weapon. "Thus humanity's
technology is turned against itself," he explained.
"But this risk is present in all technology. If you
build a plane for 800 passengers, one day you will
have 800 dead."

Four films in the show address Sept. 11....

[...]

The fire at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine in
1986 is presented as perhaps the most dramatic example
of sophisticated technology running amok. Images of
the ruined reactors are in the show, but the accident
is also addressed at length in a filmed conversation
between Mr. Virilio and Svetlana Aleksievich, who
interviewed hundreds of witnesses and victims of that
disaster for her Russian-language book "Voices From
Chernobyl: Chronicle of the Future."

"The victim of the Chernobyl accident was science,
knowledge, even consciousness," Mr. Virilio says in
the film. "The consciousness accident is also a
reality. We had an extraordinary example of it with
Auschwitz. Now, in a way, Chernobyl, like Auschwitz
and also like Hiroshima, is a consciousness accident —
that is, there is no insight into this event because
it exceeds consciousness."

"In a sense, the Chernobyl accident foreshadowed a new
kind of warfare," he went on, "terrorist war, wars in
which you cannot differentiate between attacks and
accidents, where the declaration of war does not
exist, where there are no uniforms, no flags, where
there is simply evil-doing."

If Mr. Virilio at times has to work hard to squeeze
every form of disaster into his accident thesis,
"Unknown Quantity" does convey the potent idea that as
technology advances it leaves accidents in its wake.
Yet if inevitable, can they still be called accidents?
Today oil is pouring from the sunken tanker Prestige
off Spain. In reality, the ship's rusting single hull,
which ruptured in rough seas, was an accident waiting
to happen. Perhaps Mr. Virilio has a point.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/26/arts/design/26ARTS.html

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