COSOR Defined
Roadside Unseen
Like motels, gas stations, and gigantic billboards directing drivers to Exit Now for World's Largest, cars on the side of the road are intrinsic to the blazing highway landscape that creates the visual language of American consumerism-cum-individualism.
Attractions
It is easy to see the car on the side of the road as highway Americana if we consider automobile-themed roadside attractions. You may have been a pilgrim of the legendary car on the side of the road, adding hundreds, even thousands, of miles to your odometer to see one. These are bucket-list items for roadtrippers, places like Cadillac Ranch (Amarillo, Texas), Carhenge (Alliance, Nebraska), and Old Car City USA (White, Georgia). The cultural significance of those famous cars on the side of the road has been extensively analyzed. Travel guides and must-see lists lure tourists with quirky facts, while university presses offer esoteric narratives for social scholars.
Overshadowed by flashy roadside attractions, there is another type of car on the side of the road, one we take for granted even though their presence is far more prevalent: abandoned automobiles. If you have ever driven on an interstate, it is safe to presume you have encountered one—a highway occurrence spied through the windshield, a flicker on the shoulder, often unseen or unremembered. Perhaps you made up a story to explain its desertion as you sped past, then forgot it a mile later. Whereas famous cars on the side of the road are preserved to protect the invisible histories they encapsulate, abandoned automobiles are not typically considered meaningful, nor do they remain roadside very long.
Arrival of The COSOR
Definition
COSOR is more than just an acronym. COSOR is a recontextualization of the abandoned automobile as visual feature and sociohistorical artifact, presented as a new word to bridge a gap in the meaning of the terminology discussed above. Neither the umbrella phrase "car on the side of the road," nor its subtypes "roadside attraction" and "abandoned automobile," encompass the non-visual characteristics of an abandoned car. By contrast, "COSOR" signifies its dual nature as a visible, tangible highway feature and an invisible structure that illuminates obscured sociocultural histories (and others such as chronological, technological, and ecological). A COSOR can also be a location an automobile is conspicuously missing—a site with analogous dual nature—for example, an abandoned gas station. Or perhaps a place where the automobile is assumed to be lost.
Implications
By instigating an exploration of the absence surrounding an abandoned automobile, the COSOR may trigger an investigation into the circumstances underlying cryptic causation or consequence. The COSOR, by nature—a machine, at rest, unoccupied—cannot help but emphasize what is missing from its interior. Its very presence implicates someone as having abandoned it. Voluntary or not, in the case of a COSOR, abandonment is the action precipitating absence. By extension, the COSOR may also indicate something more elusive, a strange symptom of modern capitalism presenting alongside interstates: disappearance.
