Wonderings

“Wunderkammen” are not my field of study, but rather the subject of human “Freaks,” their display in 19th century sideshows, Dime Museums and Anatomy Museums. Anatomy Museums find their roots in Cabinets of Curiosity: Baroque display cabinets of natural “wonders,” taxidermic and dried creatures, eggs and animals skins, objects d’art, curios,  fossils, maps, rare games, “Chinoiserie,” strange or ancient artifacts, special stones, rareties, talismans, scientific and surgical tools, “exotic” relics, hieroglyphics, automoata,  newfangled, failed or experimental technologies from quadrifocals to mechanic bellows and the like.

Not least amoung these was the human body various forms, which allowed a showcase of the body in various staged and artifical contexts, made possible through new and emerging technologies of the time, like new chemical agents, advanced artistic apparati, microscopes, phrenological tools and the like (later, daguerrotypes of the “decorated” dead who were posed to look lifelike through memento mori). Human bodies were most often shown in fragments or representative wholes:  preserved reproductive organs, fetuses, amputated parts, “extracted deformties” like horns, jarred remnants of criminals, shrunken heads, paintings of beautiful nude women,  greek sculptures, human tableaux, clay icons, and porcelain or wax models of men and especially women that dissembled like jigsaw puzzles to reveal the inner body.

How did the body become more than a ‘natural wonder’ a wonder of science, of God’s creation, or of human love? How did it become a static object for display, a kind of New Media Art (before there was such a thing), a model of and subject for technological “progress”?

What is noteworthy to me is the ways in which cabinet collections were regarded as a show of knowledge and required the same; their antecessors, anatomy msueums, picked up what was publicly known as the sinister study of anatomy and moved it into schools where “gentlemen” scandalously studied what to them was a very serious science. The old graverobbings led to Anatomy Acts that protected the poor and the dead from the “butchery” of anatomists — this forced practioners into red light districts at the height of prostitution in London and New York in the mid 19th c, and the birth of Anatomy Museums that sought ever to expand their collections of women’s parts (Jack the Ripper anyone?). Displays were banned from “corrputing” proper women and children. However, curators made a living by posing as quack doctors and opening venereal disease clinics in the back of the house. The Obscenity Act brought an end to all this, and the police delighted in trashing classic nudes and other collectibles in the name of public decency.

See article on Dr. Khan’s Museum.

The “baroque” element survived into later Dime museums, themselves the most popular form of entertainment in England and America at the time. Here, living “Freaks” from sideshows and circuses performed next ethnographic displays amid the old hodegpodge of scientific tools, strange inanimate objects, real and invented creatures, artifacts – only this time, it was not considered indecent. In fact, it was thought to enhance, as a collective experience, the minds and imaginations of generations bent on “progress,” seemingly brought all reaches the Empire to the doorstep, and confirmed, by contrast, one’s palce in the world. 

ANNA MUNSTER

Anna Munster uses the baroque in quite a different way, as an aesthetic form of juxtapositional display that engages the viewer through affect in space and time. The boroque serves as a model for new media art, over which it is “folded” not historically, but as an alternative model for the genesis of mutivalent digital experience.  

Here is a small Glossary excerpted from my presentation notes on Anna Munster’s Materializing New Media (2006).

“Baroque Event” – a concept for the digital, based in aesthetic principles of the Baroque period in European art and display: [a baroque event] summons specific aspects of culture and thought of [the Baroque period] and allows them to produce flow-on effects in the contemporary moment, expanding our limited preconceptions about the aesthetics of digital culture” (5).

–         meant to complicate the “generative base of information aesthetics”

–         related to information aesthetics, new media technologies and ideas about posthuman identity

–         “event” is time-based

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“Baroque space” – drawn form Cabinets of Wonder and Baroque visual displays (particularly relational groupings of info, object, anecdote, etc in natural museums), it refers to the juxtaposition of “spaces of matter, knowledge, memory and technics to each other” through differential, rather than arbitrary, connections and affects.

– Baroque space applies or extends to digital space also: “both baroque and digital spaces engage the viewer visually, seductively and affectively. They operate by creating clusters of objects, images, sounds and concepts that belong together in variation and in dissonance” (6). Balancing real and artificial, aesthetic and scientific, etc, “lures the viewer into an affective experience of baroque space” just as digital spaces “induce participation through sets of unfolding differential relays”

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“Gap”/”Difference” – discontinuities in matter-flows

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“Fold” – Based on the concept of Gilles Deleuze (in turn derived form Leibniz), the fold refers (conceptually and aesthetically) to the simultaneous enfolding and unfolding of matter in structure, form and process. The “parts” being folded into and upon one another are “both continuous and differentiated” and are indivisible. Folding changes the physical properties and characteristics of the thing(s) being folded, “marks points of inflection” between elements, and both distinguishes and connects different surface areas from one another (7). Munster here points to Deleuze’s example of a folded piece of paper as an imaginative example of folding. It is a dynamic that contracts and extends in complex ways.

-Munster sees a fold between digital aesthetic experience and the baroque, particularly the “relations between bodies and technics” (7).  She does not fold baroque and digital history as part of a direct teleological line of influence, so much as time and aesthetic, relational and affective principles which, taken together, form an alternative genealogy for digital and new media technologies. The fold is more than a device for various digital histories however; it “simultaneously describes the experience of living in the discontinuities and connections of digital sensory experience. [In other words, the experience of] crossing thresholds” (8).

– “The device of the fold provides us with two interrelated ways for thinking about this genealogy. First it produces a dynamic manifold that circumscribes the space between past and present and connects a series of early modern singularities to the events [of] information aesthetics. Second, the fold, while allowing historically and conceptually different times to touch each other … also produces discontinuity. These … reverberations demand conceptual and sensory crossings” (8).

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“Interfacial” –relates predominantly to the ‘face-to-face’ relations we have with computers (face to screen operational design) which place the human in a command-control scenario while tapping into our innermost psychological and physiological responses to the presence of a face in any form. This form of interaction, to which we are largely limited with computers, forces us to fold information into our physical being through a form that echoes mutual “cognition.”

“Interface” systems continue to draw on faciality in their design.  Munster seeks to analyze and dismantle “facialized assemblage.” While Posthumanism is exploring other forms of human-computer engagement, the interface continues to “subordinate the sensate body to the transcendent technological world” (21).  

“Faciality” “ is a social, aesthetic and technical machine that organizes corporeal engagement and representation into a relation of subordination to the face” (21). The face in turn is fundamental to Western culture and history and is related to “personality” and the systems by which people are evaluated, as with our ‘reading’ of facial features to convey ‘mind’ underneath.

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“Transversal” – Similar in ways to the fold. “The transversal can be configured as a diagram rather than a map or territory: directional lines across each other, forming intersections, combining their forces, deforming and reforming the entire field in the process.”  Munster recommends this as a new means for “traveling the circuits of new media” as a way of understanding digital culture as “itself a series of diagrammic lines” (24).

Rather than searching for a cultural meaning for the digital, Munster uses the transversal as a means of indentifying the points of intersection between digital flows and issues of embodiment.

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“Opening”- The origin of digital information spaces, ‘information science,’ was a practice of radical incompletion and of opening rather than closing (77).

“We need to treat the matter of humans and the materiality of technologies as open-ended propositions continually being made and unmade” (17).

~ Sarah