The Science of Liminal States of the Museum
"The Universe that we know was born from a point at which, for one fleeting moment, all times and all spaces came together. Such a point might serve as an ideal model for the museum, since the main function of a museum is that of unification in a limited space. But the cosmos that we know today, with all its beauty, grandeur and eternal order, cannot answer to the criteria of an ideal museum, because, when examined more closely, it dissolves into a constantly changing (temporary) collection of traces of the disappearance of other worlds. If this is a museum, it is a museum in a liminal state.
Since the time of the Big Bang, that which seems to be stabilisation is really a just moment, bounded in time and space only by the circumstances of its formation or the specifics of our perception. A moment in the sequence of extinction. The museum in our Universe smells of oil (like everything else). Oil is the product of the transformation of billions of dead organisms gathered together, which, tens of millions of years later, makes life possible for other billions of organisms that have gathered together. This same product makes it possible for certain things under the name of "works of art" to be gathered together in a museum exhibition, etc.
The withering of the past and the breakdown of the cosmic order is the main condition for the formation of a museum collection. Recall Alfred Barr’s torpedo, which ran on the liquid fuel of modern art. Or, more broadly, our Planet, this cradle of humankind, which, as interpreted by Nikolai Fyodorov, travels through the void with a mission to expand its resurrecting museum network. In Fyodorov’s vision, Earth is a museum-spaceship and the Universe is a museum network. Geology is an expanded museology. Geography is an expanded museography.
But Earth has its own time limitations. For a glimpse of its future, look at Mars or Venus, which show what may happen when a museum institution the size of a planet goes beyond its limits. Certainly, Mars and Venus, as they are today, also have their own strength limits. But they differ qualitatively from what is usual on exoplanets that are similar to ours.
At all events, stabilisation within certain limits is a source of conflict. And to view the museum as a zone of conflict is to view it correctly. This is equally as true on an "interplanetary" scale as it is within the confines of those provincial exhibitions that preserve a set of evil banalities about the origin of humankind. To study them is akin to studying the results of lab experiments which can sometimes offer more accurate information about what is happening outside the laboratory than field measurements. Traces of class, racial and gender-based violence are built into the microcircuits of the museum machine. This is not transgression of limits; it is the everyday working of the institution. Or, put differently, it is transgression with regard to freedom and equality, a beyond which has become an internal norm. Inside the "torpedo" there is horror and darkness, which, however, do not stop it being itself.
Perhaps, for all these reasons, the science of the museum should avoid the traps of stasis and "grounding". Its brave adepts will set off into spaces devoid of life to gather materials on mechanisms which elude observation in ordinary conditions. They will be the first to visit the mysterious world of the local void of the Milky Way; to organise excavations of long-abandoned regions of the Internet, such as GeoCities; to study the activity of dormant social media accounts, to investigate criminal schemes for the turnover of dead capital and the market of funeral services, to document new burial technologies."
Arseny Zhilyaev