Cabinets of Curiosities

There has been an apparent revival of interest in the idea of wunderkammern (literally 'wonder-chambers', otherwise cabinets of curiosities) over recent years. These collections are seen as the forerunners of modern-day museums, from which, however, they differed in a number of important respects. Wunderkammern (and kunstkammern, 'art-chambers') comprised exhibits whose purpose was to arouse wonderment rather than edification. Their emphasis was on the precious and rare, the novel and the marvellous. They were, moreover, organised according to pre-scientific criteria, arranged in some cases to suggest a microcosm, a model of the wider world. They were, moreover, oftenest compiled by aristocrats or royalty for private rather than public display.

One of the most famous of all kunst- & wunderkammern was that amassed under the supervision of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague ca. 1576-1612. Some of its exhibits are displayed here. Another renowned collection was built up by the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in Rome. Its catalogue, first published in 1678, inventoried perpetual-motion machines, optical tricks, a mermaid's tail, the bones of a giant and a host of other natural and artificial marvels. Britain's oldest public museum, the Ashmolean, in Oxford, can also trace its origins to a cabinet of curiosities acquired by Elias Ashmole (under somewhat suspicious circumstances) in the 1660s from the Tradescant family.

One of the most noteworthy attempts to breathe new life into the wunderkammer tradition has been David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. As described in Lawrence Weschler's book Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, this establishment juxtaposes genuine wonders with elaborate hoaxes to disconcerting effect, in an apparent effort to induce that ever-more elusive sense of wonder in its visitors hearts & minds. Also interesting is Georg Laue's latterday kunstkammer in Munich.

What brought me to write all of this down was that, this morning, I happened upon a thought-provoking project to compile an on-line wunderkammer created by artists/designers Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg. A few years back they developed WonderWalker, a graphical tool for individuals to collect their favorite links, forming a collaborative map of web objects. I'm not sure the graphical interface to these links is altogether successful, but their ulterior aim of creating a virtual nexus of overlapping wunderkammern out of web-sites appealed to me immensely. I suppose its not so conceptually different to such admirable & on-going endeavours as memepool and metafilter. Indeed, another such site, boingboing, advertises itself as a directory of wonderful things, by which it can be said to claim a direct inheritance from the wunderkammer tradition.