Difference between revisions of "Museum Fictions"

Revision as of 07:59, 18 December 2014

Debbie's Notes for the Library:

In 1971, the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky wrote a short science fiction novel known as “Roadside Picnic’. It was later used as the basis for the screenplay of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, although the movie bears little resemblance to the quirkiness of the novel itself, as the first cut of the film had allegedly been shot on poor stock, and financial pressures caused the film to be edited to become a cheaper, simpler allegorical version of the original Roadside Picnic.

Most alien visitation stories imagine that humans are worth the alien’s time in making contact with, or even worth expending resources on to blow us up. We assume that it we can understand aliens on our terms. But what if, similar to Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, the aliens visiting us are so far removed that no meaningful communication is possible? What if they just came and went without so much as noticing us? Like humans stopping by the road to have a picnic, leaving their random, meaningless detritus along the way for the animals to find but never understand?

A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around… Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow…

A highly rational culture threw containers with artifacts of its civilization onto Earth.

In short, the objects in this group have absolutely no applications to human life today. Even though from a purely scientific point of view they are of fundamental importance. They are answers that have fallen from heaven to questions that we still can’t pose

The items left behind were just pieces of garbage, discarded and forgotten by their original user, without any preconceived notions of wanting to advance or damage humanity. Users, inscrutable, whose motivations we cannot understand. The humans pick over the god-like alien’s refuse, some of which the humans use to revolutionise human technology, some of which have unexpectedly destructive effects on the humans. At the end, it leaves the humans rushing to make up theories to explain for the visitation.

TRADING AND ECONOMY: The novel revolves about an economy that has developed around the zone. Stalkers enter the zones to pick artifacts, whilst having to negotiate around the police who restrict passage into the zone and clamp down on the black market. Items move from the zone (this one being in Canada) to external markets such as Europe where highest prices are obtained.

• The previously unstudied ethnographic collection - how to make it relevant to routes of exchange, migration. trading ideas and goods. this a constellation of enigmatic objects and the personal connections they bring to mind.

Ideas

• shift from material culture to immaterial knowledge
• Trading ideas and goods / museum space as trading post of agencies // Museum and museological assemblages as running side by side along with commercial interests and international trade

References

• Martial Museum of Terrestrial Art
• Eugenio Donato, 1979: The set of objects the Museum displays is sustained only by the fiction that they somehow constitute a coherent representational universe. The fiction is that a repeated metonymic displacement of fragment for totality, object to label, series of objects to series of labels, can still produce a representation which is somehow adequate to a nonlinguistic universe... Should the fiction disappear, there is nothing left of the museum but “bric-a-brac...” a heap of meaningless and valueless fragments of objects (which are incapable of substituting themselves either metonymically for the original objects or the metaphorically for their representation.