Martin Wattenberg: The WonderWalker, to me, is a way of using collections to communicate. I found that in working with Marek on the project, we would often have conversations conducted by placing icons and web pages on the map. Rather than talking by e-mail or phone, we’d talk using icons and links. I think that pre-museum collections often work this way: they are designed to communicate information using the collected objects as vocabulary.

Marek Walczak: You have Peter the Great, travelling in Europe in the 17th century, picking up all kinds of curiosities, coming back to St. Petersburg and dumping them in a palace. Then he imports European intellectuals to start his first university, most of whom were in their 20s. The grafting of a new system of ideas onto an ancient culture, it’s a bit like the internet!

Steve: What have you learned about the history of wunderkammer, memory palaces, cabinets of curiosity and their ilk in the course of creating the WonderWalker?

Marek: Memory palaces, as written up by Francis Yates' The Art of Memory and in Jonathan Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, created equivalencies between ideas and imagined spaces. Their purpose was to retain a large “world” of thought prior to cheap printing and paper. A world of common thought shared by individuals. At a certain point, I guess, the contents of intellectual thought exceeded even the memory systems devised to hold them, and as hierarchical methods of knowledge took over, it was no longer necessary to hold “everything.” You could proceed up and down the hierarachy, like the classification system of a library. And yet, we ourselves hold information in a non-hierarchical manner, perhaps our own “world” is more like cabinets of curiosities.

Martin: I looked at how the concept of the wunderkammer is being applied today. I found a surprising number of personal references on the web, whose tone was, more than anything else, nostalgic. This nostalgia inspired me to create a social space that, although public, could allow for personal and individual interpretation.

Steve: What’s the connection of collecting to memory?

Martin: Memory involves not just recording facts, but also inference, rehearsal, and building a context for thought. The WonderWalker helps with all of these: the map is a context, the relations between objects help you infer meaning, and the process of collection forces you to rehearse your memory.

Marek: It’s not so much memory itself as objects of thought. For me, coming from architecture, buildings are concrete expressions of ideas. A collection of idea-objects representing a “world”? When you go to a show, you try to get immersed, you see people engaging with some “other”–that which isn’t themselves.

Steve: Describe your collaborative process. How do you think about your roles in the process?

Marek: Martin and I meet once a week for lunch, we always order the same curries. We e-mail constantly. I create fixed images, Martin creates programlets of “actions.” We show each other things we find interesting and have short conceptual discussions. In everything we do you see a fraction of what we thought had potential. It’s like making soup, you create a rich mix of ingredients to work with, then select what’s freshest.

Martin: I agree with Marek’s characterization. I think we are both people who enjoy exploring many ideas at once. What you see in the WonderWalker is a particular constellation from a very large sky!

Steve: What is the role of the audience in relation to your work on the WonderWalker?

Marek: A couple of years ago we had been toying with the idea of replacing language on the web with 3D hieroglyphs. To read would mean to travel in virtual space. The problem was how do you create meaningful shapes? In the WonderWalker links are represented by icons that people draw themselves. Also the spatial relationship of links is important, as you can create areas based on particular themes. Martin and I used the beta as a sort of messageboard between ourselves. It became apparent that we were creating a social space as well. We would add links based upon their relationship to the project, then others would add theirs to ours.

Martin: The social space is critical. As Hannah Arendt says, actions performed in public are generally superior to actions performed in private. When people add an icon, they know that others will look at their comments and choices, and that makes them work and collect with a higher standard in mind.

Steve: How would you describe your level of engagement with the idea of open source software, broadly defined?

Martin: I’m only slightly engaged with open source software. I’ve worked on some projects with Rhizome.org that are open source. I think open source is important, and I’d like to do more. As in my answer to the previous question, I believe that when people know they are being watched by others, including the programmers, they perform at the highest level of excellence.

Marek: Not sure if I am engaged with open-source as much as the idea of self-organizing systems. I am designing a hat shop today for Amy Downs, who tends to change her shop decor every season. Instead of creating a design I am designing a variable system of components. One season there is a wall of flagpoles (beneath hats), the next season a bunch of animal masks. Inventing potentials for social interaction!

Emil Hrvatin, Drive in Camillo
http://mila.ljudmila.org/camillo/front.htm
"The Camillo project stems from the ideas of the newly discovered Renaissance genius, philosopher and theoretician of the art of memory, precursor of the language of installation in contemporary art and anticipator of the Internet, Giulio Camillo (1480-1544). His fundamental project, The Theatre of Memory, is one of the first attempts at interactive communication on the Internet. The Theatre of Memory was envisioned as a place where the entire knowledge of the Universe would be accessible. A continuously renewable memory machine with no limits between the past, present and future.”

Terri L. Kelly, Memory Theatre
http://www.randomviolins.org/~dwap/academia/theatre.htm
A thorough set of links to the Memory Arts.

Carl Malamud, Memory Palaces: A Millennial Metaphor?
http://mappa.mundi.net/cartography/Palace/
“Spatial positioning of thoughts as an aid to memory turns out to mirror our natural thought processes of cognition.”

Microcosms: Objects of Knowledge
http://microcosms.ihc.ucsb.edu/intro.html
“is a multiyear, interdisciplinary project that seeks to research comprehensively a material "economy of knowledge” within the university" of California.

Museum of Jurassic Technology
http://www.mjt.org/
An entertaining study of a modern Wunderkammern with references to the vintage representations, can be found in Lawrence Weschler’s Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology aka the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Encyclopedia of Peter’s Kunstkammer
http://www.kunstkamera.ru/english/panorama/index.htm
“Peter [the Great] accumulated the first group of objects in Russia large enough to be called a collection. It formed the foundation of the "Tsar’s Cabinet”, and then of Peter’s Kunstkammer.“

Shiralee Saul, Wunderkammer: the museum on the digital shoreline
http://www.maap.org.au/maap99/shoreline/shiralee/index.html
"This work is intended to function as an electronic Wunderkammer – a cabinet of curiosities both in its organisation and its contents. Like all Wunderkammer, this one is destined to keep growing and changing. Already I can see gaps in my collection – and whole new areas of knowledge to include in the future. Pulling together the insights and opinions of writers and thinkers from the disciplines of cartography, history, geography, arts and sciences, electronic theory etc., as well as contributions from myself, it has been an opportunity to explore the interconnections between my own current obsessions (memory, natural sciences, digital media, European history, collections, navigation and map-making).”

Janine Wong and Peter Storkerson, Hypertext and the Art of Memory
http://www.id.iit.edu/visiblelanguage/Feature%20Articles/ArtofMemory/ArtofMemory.html
“More than computer metaphor, The Art of Memory is presented to offer insight into intelligibility. It is offered as a model for the non-text based organization of multimedia presentation: one that can provide semantic contexts within which communications are intelligible.”

“What looms ahead or rather what has to be done is the reprise of the wonder chambers. Johann Valentin Andrea, the founder of the Rosicrucians, once advocated an archive that would include not only artworks, tools, and instruments, but also their technical drawings. Under today’s high-tech conditions we have no choice but to start such an archive or endorse millions of anonymous ways of dying.”

In my 15 minutes today, I would like to briefly sketch some experiences with technologies of memory and pose some open-ended questions about how the idea of the wunderkammer might be an interesting way to think about “putting things in their places.”

Many artists are working today with issues around technology and the archive, from Muntadas’s File Room to Sawad Brooks' and Beth Styrker’s DissemiNET to Fred Wilson’s Road to Victory to George LeGrady’s Slippery Traces to Natalie Bookchin’s Databank of the Everyday to Cohen-Frank-Ippolito’s Unreliable Archivist to Eugene Thacker’s ftp_formless_anatomy to Zhang Ga’s Censorium to Rick Rinehart’s Boolean Typhoon to Eduardo Kac’s Time Capsule to Noah Waldrop-Fruin’s Impermanence Agent to Thomax Kaulmann and the Open Radio Archive Network Group to C5’s 1:1, just to mention a few.

These efforts form the ecology of experimentation within which my efforts at the Walker Art Center are informed. libary-archive-museum With the Borgesian dream of an archive of everything–or is it a library or a museum, or even a map–a distinct possibility, at least digitally, distinctions begin to blur and erode.

And when you begin to archive, collect, provide access to “objects” “born digital,” because intellectual access is coextensive with physical access, because the same interface provides acces to the metadata and the data, the library-archive-museum is conflated even further. This is the case, for instance, with the Walker’s Digital Arts Study Collection, which was initially formed upon the acquisition of the pioneering website äda'web. But I am not going to focus, today, on the issues specific to archiving digital media. Rather I want to talk about the yin and yang of interface and database and strategies to take advantage of this ability to blur and conflate boundaries in a digital, networked environment.

One of the Walker’s first major web-based projects was a collaboration with The Minneapolis Institute of Arts at first called IAIA, Integrated Arts Information Access, which was eventually given the public interface, ArtsConnectEd. The point of this project was precsely to provide unified access to information classified according to different knowledge domains–the collection, the archive, and the library, as well as publications, educational materials, and any other information we could lay our hands on. In addition, it concatenated this information from both institutions–Walker and MIA, truly blurring the boundaries not only between disciplines but also between institutions.

On many levels ArtsConnectEd had been tremendously successful, from it’s 25,000 visitors per month to Gold Muse Awards from the Association of American Museums two years running to continued funding by the State of Minnesota.

At the same time, it has been a lesson in humility. We did extensive user testing of the site on two occassions, and we found that while users could find the information in various scenarios, too often, especially with the students, the response was “so what?” The facts we have assiduously collected in our information management systems–provenance, materials, dates, etc.–do not necessarily help build a connection to the work. Like the archivist in Woody Allen’s Sleeper, they wanted to know what objects meant. What stories the data could tell. Why they should care. repository of the given One of the truisms of the digital age is that information at your fingertips does not necessarily lead to enlightenment. Museums are remarkable repositories of facts and information, but the promise of access to all this information through digital networks seems as likely to result in a Babel of knowledge. As Hal Foster asked in “The Archive without Museums,”

“… what might a digital recording underwrite? Art as image-text, as info-pixel? An archive without museums? If so, will this database be more than a base of data, a repository of the given?” classification According to Sara Breckinridge, “The object in a wonder cabinet celebrated nothing but itself as rare, sensational and unusual.” In other words, it was an object for wonderment and the provocation of curiosity. Of course, even as early as 1884, Thomas Greenwood was suitably aghast at this un-order, writing: “The orderly soul of the Museum student will quake at the sight of a Chinese lady’s boot encircled by a necklace made of shark’s teeth, or a helmet of one of Cromwell’s soldier’s grouped with some Roman remans.”

For an important distinction between the early museum and the wunderkammer was classification of objects, a trajectory from the singular to the representative. Kittler derides this classification impulse as a prime culprit of the museum-as-mausoleum, initially seen in Denon’s historical hanging of the Louvre galleries. And Douglas Crimp writes in “On the Museum’s Ruins”:

“Foucault’s project includes the replacement of those unities of humanist historical thought such as tradition, influence, developoment, evolution, source and origin with concepts like discontinuity, rupture, threshhold, and transformation.”

For Crimp, the museum belongs in Foucault’s project along with the prison and the asylum. Is there a way, however, that museums can use the digital realm to negotiate a hybrid third way, inbetween classification and wonder, inbetween facts and stories, inbetween teleological narratives and hyperventilating sampling? telling stories One option, of course is to tell stories that undermine the univocal authority of the institution. One step in this direction at the Walker is a project called Through Your Eyes, which creates a digital trace of the interactions of six different visitors to the Walker over a period of months. The idea, not uncommon at contemporary institutions, is to model museum-going behaviors–primarily to encourage asking questions and understanding that there are very few right answers–with lay people rather than experts.

Through Your Eyes, to my mind, is a valuable effort, a kind of mapping of the museum according to individual curiosity. Nevertheless, it remains a unidirectional, pedagogical device, where interactivity and participation by the user is limited to randomly accessing the exemplary experience. open_source Nor is it enough, if one takes Kittler at face value, to simply include the blue prints with the collection; to comingle context and object, to cross the boundaries between library and archive and museum, although it is a start. This leaves out or at least leaves in, implicitly, the idea of a bounded instition, when in reality to paraphrase Sun Microsystems, the network is the museum-archive-library.

This is, in part, the attempt with Art Entertainment Network, a project I curated and produced, which uses the network-specific concept of a portal as the inteface to a database of links to distributed artist projects. The use of the portal concept, of course, is self-reflexive, a kind of meta-portal that attempts to subvert users' already formed expectations through a changeable interface that sidetracks the expected functionality.

In the case of AEN, there was user participation as part of a parallel listserv discussion called Entertainment Art and Technology. Another inspiration inspiration for a modified model of the museum-library-archive is Muntadas’s File Room. The point I would like to emphasize is the gesture of creating a structure to allow users to input their own information about censorship incidents into the database alongside the starting “official” information.

If there is anything that museums and institutions in general hold onto in the vertigo of Internet uncertainty, it is our role as a filter and vetter for and of authoritative information. This is not necessarily bad, but nor is it unequivocably good.

What if user point of view was more than a specific project like Through Your Eyes or an empty bulletin board like so many that exist on institutional sites as vestigal attempts at community and bi-directional discourse? What if, like the File Room, users could add their own information into the museum’s databases about its objects? A kind of open source art history. It is not an ultimate answer. There is no single answer. But it is an avenue to pursue; one which the Walker is pursuing as a collaborative project with Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg, along with preliminary work by Rick Rinehart, Brett Stalbaum and their students to create a global, online wunderkammer. the network At first blush, of course, the wunderkammer seems like an absurdly self-limiting vehicle for an open source database. And perhaps it is. But here is the plan.*

Anyone will be able to create a new “cubbyhole” for the wunderkammer via the Internet. There are three requirements: to insert (via a link) an object into the cubbyhole; to link it to at least one other object with an optional comment for each link; and to rate it on a pre-defined but editable set of x/y/z continuums such as aesthetics and practicality and complexity or evolution and rupture and stability or whatever. In essence, then, the wunderkammer has 3 modes of access/interface. One is contiguity. You can browse the cabinet up and down and across. As the cabinet grows, of course, the liklihood of seeing everything diminishes and there is also a bias toward the centered cubbys–assuming this is kept constant, which it need not, as with the interface for the Art Entertainment Network portal.

The way this interface/interaction is modified, is by chosing to display the cubbys according to one of the x/y/z coordinate schema. The contiguity of objects in the physical world is made malleable in the virtual world and also self–or more correctly–collaboratively organizing through a kind of collective intelligence.

Finally, one will be able to hyperlink from one node to another, like a mini-network, regardless of contiguity. Like the original wunderkammer, objects of particular wonderment abut other objects with no rhyme other than the order in which they were created. Unlike the physical version, one can follow virtual trails from object to object based on anyone’s input, which is also very different than the original curiosity cabinets, which were privately owned and access was generally severely restricted. interface/database/authority As I said, I do not believe that this collaborative project is some kind of ultimate answer to the online museum-archive-library and “putting things in their place,” but it does attempt to use the network to subvert the traditional institutional imperative–or rather, to support its mission while attempting to modify its univocal authority.

This is an edited version of a talk given at the symposium “Excavating the Archive: New Technologies of Memory” as part of the panel “Space, Time and Artifacts: Putting Things in Their Places” with Muntadas, Steve Dietz, and Lise Anne Couture, June 3, 2000, at the Parsons School of Design.

• An important fact about the “WonderWalker” project is that Marek and Martin took it–completely appropriately–in directions that interested them more than those originally envisioned at the time of this talk.

Excavating the Archive: New Technologies of Memory
http://archive.parsons.edu

Muntadas, The File Room
http://www.thefileroom.org

Sawad Brooks and Beth Stryker, DissemiNET
http://disseminet.walkerart.org

Fred Wilson, Road to Victory
http://www.moma.org/onlineprojects/wilson/

Janet Cohen, Keith Frank, Jon Ippolito, The Unreliable Archivist
http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/three/

Eugene Thacker,ftp_formless_anatomy
http://gsa.rutgers.edu/maldoror/formless/

Zhang Ga, Censorium
http://199.105.132.210/censorium/

Richard Rinehart, An Experience Base–A Boolean Typhoon
http://www.coyoteyip.com/eb/

Eduardo Kac Time Capsule
http://www.ekac.org/timec.html

Noah Waldrop-Fruin’s Impermanence Agent
http://www.cat.nyu.edu/agent/

Thomax Kaulman Open Radion Archive Network Group
http://orang.orang.org

C5 1:1
http://www.c5corp.com/projects/1to1/

äda'web
http://adaweb.walkerart.org

Integrated Arts Information Access
http://www.walkerart.org/iaia/

ArtsConnectEd
http://www.artsconnected.org

Through Your Eyes
http://www.walkerart.org/ace/tye/

Art Entertainment Network
http://aen.walkerart.org

Entertainment Art Technology
http://www.walkerart.org/salons/eat/

Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg, WonderWalker (A Global Online Wunderkammer)
http://wonderwalker.walkerart.org