Read Susan H. Delagrange, "Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Canon of Arrangement." Give yourself time to work your way through it: it's a complicated text, and the midterm will ask you to do something similar to the ideas Delagrange discusses. Take notes, and make sure to write down and look up any unfamiliar terms. (What isKairos? Episteme?)
Excerpts (no analysis)(Sorry they're messy)
Productive arts, or techné (Aristotle included medicine, architecture, and rhetoric as examples), occupy a middle ground between theory and practice, one that incorporates both abstract and applied knowledge. Rhetoric as techné has four implications: first, it is heuristic, a process of making, and thinking, and re-making, through which meaning and knowledge are made; second, it is situated, specific to the embodied and material conditions of a particular time and place; third, it is mobile and strategic, adaptable to changing circumstances and new challenges; and fourth, it is ethical, founded in specific beliefs and values (which may or may not be those of the community at large).
dInteractive digital media open up new opportunities to “perform” our pedagogy as a productive, rhetorically rich art, and to compose texts and make meaning that are not possible in traditional print.
We can engage with these artifacts and the social technologies in which they are embedded through the practice of what we might call "critical wonder": a process through which digital media designers can thoughtfully and imaginatively arrange evidence and articulate links in a critical practice of embodied discovery.
Visual Analogy" expands the concept of arrangement as heuristic (involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods), because analogy is a trope that lends itself particularly well to the discovery of unexpected affinities in the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate objects (and ideas).
In "Wunderkammer," I argue that these 16th-century cabinets of wonder are models of visual provocation in which objects were manipulated and arranged in order to discover new meanings in their relationships. "Visual Analogy" expands the concept of arrangement as heuristic, because analogy is a trope that lends itself particularly well to the discovery of unexpected affinities in the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate objects (and ideas). "Joseph Cornell" explores the mobile assem-blages of 20th-century artist and bricoleur Joseph Cornell, whose refined use of repetition and small variation predicts the epistemic possibilities of 21st-century interactive digital media.
Wunderkammer:
"Until the end of the 18th century, wonder was defined as "a form of learning—an inter-mediate, highly particular state akin to a sort of suspension of the mind between ignorance and enlightenment that marks the end of unknowing and the beginning of knowing" (Lugli, 1986, p. 123)" Collections of objects, random, big and small -- art, to inspire wonder ..... "In fact, scale is one of the characteristics by which wonder is measured. Gigantic objects like skeletons of wooly mammoths and miniature accom-plishments like portraits of Napoleon painted on grains of rice are equally evocative of wonder... While associative interpretations of natural and man-made wonders led to significant intellectual projects like Linnaeus’s classification system, the scientific apparati housed in Wunder-kammern served not only as fascinations in themselves, but also as the means to examine and explore other objects... Magnifiers, spectacles, telescopes, and microscopes made previously imperceptible detail visible to the naked eye." Visual synecdoche (a figure of speech in which a term for a part of something is used to refer to the whole of something, or vice-versa... like saying the Internet but meaning the World Wide Web) ... "Like the scientifica in Wunderkammern, digital media are "practical inventions" that we may use to multiply, magnify, mirror and otherwise manipulate images and collections of images..... accidental reflection or refraction:" we might see ourselves in the reflection of parts of a Wunderkammern, which changes our perception of the piece/pieces.... "many people find Freud’s references to dreams and slips of the tongue to be fruitful objects-to-think-with about how the mind works, despite the fact that Freud himself considered them relatively unimportant. The Wunderkammer is an object-to-think-with that constructs an uncanny bridge between the mental and physical"... Interactive digital media-as-Wunderkammmer provide new objects-to-think-with about our slippery, provisional, fragmentary understanding of the world, a framework for exploration and discovery of how its seemingly disparate and disconnected pieces can be joined and made sensible, and thereby help us learn how to act. while we may be attuned to thinking of association and analogy in verbal terms, they are also deeply and fundamentally visual.
Visual Analogies:
The making of knowledge through arrange-ment and visual analogy in a Wunderkammer
is a process of analogical manipulation that is deeply rhetorical. Each arrangement of objects creates new taxonomies (defining groups of biological organisms on the basis of shared characteristics and giving names to those groups). It focuses on affinity rather than on difference, it is more likely to produce rhetorical effects that are collaborative and communal. if two things are similar in some ways, then it is likely that they will be similar in others, an insight that is critical to the formation of community. The role of visual juxtaposition and manipulation is to provide an opportunity for the discovery of affinities, but chance, of course, favors the prepared; we must be looking in order to see. Antistasis (From the Greek, "opposition". "In the stories we tell ourselves, we tell ourselves." Catachresis: juxtaposing things together that are not alike, then with the "aha!" moment that reveals their similarities. associative habits of mind that can be equally well employed in the construction and manipulation of digital media designed as technologies of wonder and discovery. Computers, software, and the social technologies in which they are embedded are contemporary devices of wonder. One of the enduring critiques of the use of images in academic discourse is that images are inherently manipulative. It seems to be the particularity of bodies of evidence that raises fears about affective and emotional argument. -- anything not logocentric seems "cunning and inappropriate" --
Joseph Cornell:
(1903-1972), the American assembly and collage artist. relying on the serendipitous discovery of artifacts he associated with his particular obsessions for maps, romantic opera, owls, the Medicis, and more. While his themes may have seemed eccentric, the creative juxtaposition of objects within each box “signals a careful rhetor who researches his subject, composes with specific communicative intentions, and endows his text with a discernable coherence” ...(in his pieces,) provide multiple perspectives while never revealing all, insisting that the viewer both accept the ambiguity and continue striving to construct meaning in the gaps. Like many artists, he worked in series, producing variations on the themes of soap bubble toys, Medici Slot Machines, and celestial navigation, a model for us of the visual tropes of repetition and small variation, and the reason we should seek mobility in multimediated spaces. “Cornell’s interpretation of found objects was distinctive because it also encompassed information—fact upon fact upon fact—that he accumulated about people, events, places, and phenomena” (Hartigan). Pieces were meant to be picked up and handled... This shifts the obligation to learn by doing to the viewer, whose responsibility it becomes to make sense of each object and text.
