Classifying Curiosities

I try not to repost all the glorious tidbits of miscellany I enjoy everyday from BoingBoing, but this piece is too incredible not to pass along.

Takeshi Miyakawa Design has come up with the perfect metaphor for our digital age. In an era when everything is miscellaneous, what better conceptual container than a recursively self-deconstructing fractal cabinet of wonders to put them in?

Cabinets of curiosities (also known by their far superior German name, Wunderkammer)have a long history. They became popular during the renaissance as a way for the wealthy and educated to display their knowledge of the world. Acting as a sort of periodic table of the elements for class, owners would display their finest and rarest curiosities in the upper-most drawers and arrange them based on their relation to other objects, either according to popular pseudo-scientific concepts such as "the humors", Ptolemaic cosmologies, or even Goethe's geologic models of Europe.

Takeshi's cabinet is therefore the perfect contemporary inversion of this concept, having no particular beginning or end and thereby placing every object in an unmediated relation with the others.

May 13th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: Wunderkammer, fractal, miscellany