e.g. – Multimedia Collections

e.g. In Anticipation of a Double Hatching, 2011

Continuing its journey through the departments of the recently reconfigured Universalmuseum, the Super Egg finds its way into what might be understood as a contemporary archivists dream, a near utopian empty shell – site for a soon-to-be perfectly equipped archive. As yet uncluttered by the vast inventory of photographs, films and sound recordings – the ever growing collection of over 2 million items that make up the Multimedia Collections of the Universalmuseum – this sublime space-in-waiting will play host to an egg.

The Multimedia Collections, a Styrian shadow world, a distilled manifestation of the region it aims to document, is in turn in the process of redoubling itself, replicating itself. Each of the tiny globular silver particles that mass in its images, each of the iron oxide particles that delineate its sounds, like some carefully orchestrated geological deposit that currently embodies our knowledge of the look and sound of Styria’s past and the reach of its present, will be redoubled in the form of dematerialised digital data – the ghost of a ghost.

Despite or perhaps because of this redoubling of the collection, its move into the virtual realm, the original archive is to be newly housed in a purpose built and rigorously controlled facility within Graz’s Joanneum Quarter and until such time the collection will be substituted by an Aleph-like container of all things, a Super Egg. This seemingly virtual stand-in, an object very much on the cusp of materiality, a perfectly-distorting mirror for the empty archive that surrounds it, the egg will sit in momentarily splendid isolation, a pregnant pause, in anticipation of the ghostly double hatching that will soon engulf the empty archive.

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