The Digital Wunderkammer

The Digital Wunderkammer

As digital technology advances at breakneck speed, Images are circulating quicker than ever before. But what is the status of the image in the digital era? In The Digital Wunderkammer, art historian Hubert Burda (born 1940) examines the "iconic turn" in ten themed chapters and conversations with leading cultural theorists. In the first chapter, "The View Through the Window," Burda traces the connection between perspectival painting and the television, demonstrating in the second chapter how the image requires a frame, which in turn requires a material vehicle--the topic of the third chapter--that in our era has become a non-material vehicle with its own formal parameters. In the fourth chapter, "The Mobile Image," Burda shows how images have always been linked to portability, but now migrate to an unprecedented degree, so that anyone with a personal device can globally disseminate, say, footage from a concert via Youtube. A discussion of the capacity of individual images to placate or ennervate leads to a seventh chapter on the appetite for the Sublime and the rhetoric and representation of power throughout art history. Following a discussion of the democratization of celebrity culture, Burda proposes that the Google search box is perhaps the most interesting "interface" of our times, analogous to the seventeenth-century cabinet of curiosities (or wunderkammer). Conversations with Friedrich Kittler, Peter Sloterdijk, Bazon Brock, Horst Bredekamp and Hans Belting further extend this imaginative debate on the "iconic turn."

The Digital Wunderkammer

Creating the Digital Wunderkammer

My research aims to identify the rationale and methodology behind the creation of a Digital Wunderkammer. This Wunderkammer- an assemblage of photographic series, software experiments and found images - will attempt to represent the social and cultural repercussions of the widespread adoption of, and recent advances in, various digital technologies. Like its Renaissance and Baroque counterparts, my Digital Wunderkammer will be an attempt to create the world in miniature, and its final form will be that of the Museo Cartaceo (paper museum) - a collecting technique established in the seventeenth century by the Italian collector Cassiano dal Pozzo.My research identifies the digital cosmos from which the Wunderkammerdraws its parts, before examining two texts on which the conceptual framework of the Digital IFunderkammer is based: the first museological text ever published, Samuel Quiccheberg's Inscriptiones (1565) and Giulio Camillo's description of his "theatre of memory" L 1dea del Theatro (1550). I also identify the various modern photographic projects that have informed my Digital Wunderkammer, beginning with Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas (1924-29) and tracing a line predominantly through the post-war European artist book, toward the current generation of artists working with the artist's book, in the interpretation of the Internet and modern digital technologies. The final part of the research takes the form of an annotated catalogue of the Digital Wunderkammer itself.