Wunderkammern: ‘Please do not touch the walrus’

BoingBoing’s David Pescovitz on Wunderkammern:

CABINETS OF CURIOSITY. Taxidermy. The weird, the grotesque, the freakish. Marginalia. Taxonomies of the unorganisable. Sensawunda. Organised properly, maybe even some kind of mathematical sublime, through the sheer volume of heterogeneous artefacts? The entire world in a single collection.

Museum Wormianum; seu, Historia rerum rariorum, tam naturalium, quam artificialium, tam domesticarum, quam exoticarum . . . (1655)

Some of my own photos, from a trip to the Horniman Museum, South London:

There are some wonderful examples of Wunderkammern in London and southeast England. The Booth Museum of Natural History (mostly stuffed birds; Brighton), the Wellcome Collection (rational technoscience meets Victorian fetishism), and the Sir John Soane’s Museum (which I’ve yet to visit, and has half of Charles Babbage’s brain). Even my hometown has got in on the act, with its own explicit, self-described ‘Corridor of Curiosities’.

Oh, and the BBC has a radio show - ‘The Museum of Curiosity’, which develops the concept in a more … abstract manner, as various celebrity and polymathic guests donate their own curiosities and entities to the fictional museum of the title. Highly recommended.

If Pescovitz is right on the whole Maker Faire, DIY, edupunk, citizen science thing – and I really hope he is, there could be lessons here for education and the public understanding of science. Certainly, at the Horniman earlier today, I ended up talking to my friends about the domestication of dogs, geological time, and hybridity in religion (and, admittedly, how it would have been impossible to domesticate the auroch simply by shipping multiple specimens to Madrid). As long as you are with people, the artefacts are reframed as social objects – as much, if not more, than items from history (all in italics).

Hmm. Here, I’m reminded of:

• Captain Hammersley’s article on biohacking, from August 2009.
• Design fiction infiltrating the Science Museum.
• A friend of mine who’s planning to attend a 3D printing workshop in Tel Aviv at the end of next month, under the auspices of the Architectural Association.
• My promise to Catt that we’d compare notes while attempting to engineer (assemble) our own theremins, as a project for the autumn.
• TV Commons – a speculative art/design installation I worked on with a couple of other Goldsmiths students, and that we exhibited at a warehouse in Hoxton earlier this month (more on this to come later … probably).
• Super-Empowered Individuals, Hopeful and otherwise.

So, if the future of the Wunderkammer is a world of kite photography and DIYbio – and it certainly looks as if my future might be, it could be pretty great.

Important questions: How can we create Wunder-communities? Wunder-collaboration? How can we stop other people from touching your walrus (heh), and do we even want/need to?

(hat-tip to Klint Finley, over at Technoccult)