Inverted Triangular Room or The Wondrous Smacroscopin
Marshall McLuhan argued that “the printing press, the computer, and television are not… simply machines which convey information. They are metaphors through which we conceptualize reality in one way or another…Through these media metaphors” says McLuhan, “We see [the world] as our coding systems are. Such is the power of the form of information.” So the internet and social media not only deliver each of us more information than has ever been available to any single person in human history, they also contextualize the world. But the idea that the form information takes is a metaphor for understanding extends to the scientific enterprise. Science is a method of understanding and brings with it a retinue of technologies—media metaphors which steal into our lives and change our world view. During the Enlightenment educated classes responded to the introduction of the sciences with the practice of keeping wunderkammer, or cabinets of curiosity. These were attempts to address the sense of wonder felt at the realization of an expanding universe filled with hitherto unknown forces. People catalogued wondrous objects, using an approximation of the scientific method, in an attempt to contextualize their own lives with the metaphors of the science through which they found their world newly represented.
This piece is about wonder. It is my attempt to use the metaphors of the internet and of social media, through which I now find my world represented, to contextualize my sense of wonder at the amount of information presented to me by that media metaphor. It is my wunderkammer for a rapidly expanding world and it makes reference to the cabinets of curiosity of the Enlightenment. Among other art objects and photographs, the piece contains a twitter box which scans the social media sight every 20 seconds and illuminates a trunk of obsolete devices whenever the word “curious” is used in a tweet . . . my own curiosity expressed through the medium of twitter and contextualized in the metaphor of social media.
This piece is about wonder. It is my attempt to use the metaphors of the internet and of social media, through which I now find my world represented, to contextualize my sense of wonder at the amount of information presented to me by that media metaphor. It is my wunderkammer for a rapidly expanding world and it makes reference to the cabinets of curiosity of the Enlightenment. Among other art objects and photographs, the piece contains a twitter box which scans the social media sight every 20 seconds and illuminates a trunk of obsolete devices whenever the word “curious” is used in a tweet . . . my own curiosity expressed through the medium of twitter and contextualized in the metaphor of social media.