Abstract
The universe that the human creature once thought it inhabits does not exist. The elusive but nonetheless sought after utopia of some neatly ordered Edenic paradise dissolves within the apocalypse of what the French urbanist Paul Virilio calls the integral accident. It is the accident that directs the universe. It is the accident’s consequential landscape that sharpens dulled senses and shifts the human creature’s visual field from an introspective and incarcerating cosmological familiarity, to the open terrain of a universe that does not deal in human emotions. The universe is manifest not by design but by chance and change, it operates by the chaos of the random and the unexpected, and it inspires vitality in the human creature not through safety and comfort, but through testing that creature’s capacities. Participation in the universe is the revelation of opposites in simultaneous and equivocal play where the indeterminacy of the grey is the ubiquitous horizon of the universe and black and white no longer demarcate boundaries. In its search for what it means to be human in the universe, in the post-apocalyptic landscape wherein the invisible is made visible, that the human creature meets its test. The universe of the accident is a proving ground with only one rule: engage with it or die. Virilio, P. (2009). Grey Ecology (D. Burk, Trans.). New York: Atropos Press.