CHArt CHArt Computers and the History of Art - 1998 Conference Paper Abstract
Cabinets of curiosity and Kunstkammer have been of increasing interest to people working in or around museums recently. They are often invoked by artists, such as Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Spoerri, Joseph Kosuth, Joseph Cornell, Susan Hiller, and Damian Hirst. Such a revival of interest would seem to accompany interests in the discursive and rhetorical nature of museums, and the forces which underlie the orders of knowledge they represent.
This paper proposes that the cabinet of curiosities, the so-called ‘irrational’ cabinet is an appropriate model for the representation of visual and material culture in digital technology. As such it can operate as a metonym of the idea of incompatible orders of knowledge, the acknowledgement of which makes us aware of the discursive nature of the museum. As an institution its concern with signification is appropriate to a postmodern concern with textuality and rhetoric.
Revival of interest in such institutions is accompanied by a new interest in the Baroque as a period and style that has much in common with the present. Following the work of Walter Benjamin, this paper proposes that interactive media can become the site of a new ‘emblematics’ in which objects and texts are juxtaposed in different configurations to engender new meanings.