9.4.1 Since 1995, two art historians, Mark Meadow and Bruce Robertson, have been developing an ambitious project called "Microcosms: Objects of Knowledge." The work of the project is to research a material "economy of knowledge" within the university, and then to plan and mount a series of exhibitions and symposia to be held throughout the University of California system and beyond, from Fall 2001 through Spring 2002, exploring the relationship of objects to knowledge today. Central to the overall concept of the project is the realisation of two modules, the construction of Samuel Quiccheberg's 1565 ideal princely Wunderkammer and the reconstruction of Giulio Camillo's Memory Theatre of the 1530s. [1]

9.4.2 The Camillo Memory Theatre is to be used as a structuring interface to the Internet, but perhaps more crucially as a matrix for examining the interrelationships among material objects, their representations, and the abstract space of the Internet. Using the curiosity cabinet and memory theatre in particular requires that we acknowledge the historical interrelationship of 'naturalia' and 'artificialia' as well as the intermediate position art works held in such an episteme. Objects displayed are selected for their utility rather than their aesthetic value, thus reinforcing an analysis based on functionality.

9.4.3 The Microcosms project is highly pan-disciplinary, exploring our understanding of visuality from the narrow range of text-image relations to which it is normally confined, to the broad totality of visual skills used to study all facets of the macrocosm. It is focused on Universities as containers of knowledge and examines the crisis that university collections face as they are increasingly being neglected. Most disciplines have moved from the study of material things to a study of processes, giving a lower priority to material collections. At the same time the instant ubiquity of digitised information provided by the Internet seems to hold a greater promise of productivity than any single object or collection.

9.4.4 I have been in dialogue and an active collaborator with Mark Meadow and Bruce Robertson since 1996, and we are in agreement that there is no reason to see an investment in the electronic future as antithetical to a continued hands-on engagement with objects. This year Robert Nideffer and I were participants in a six-month workshop organised by Mark Meadow and Bruce Robertson at the Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine. Together with a group of scholars we have advanced ideas on how to utilise the Information Personae agent system for the Camillo Memory Theatre. The rich discussions that have been taking place regarding issues of collections, archiving, and databasing in the context of sixteenth-century practices and philosophies has greatly expanded my viewpoints about the current databasing practices. Just as we spent an entire year conceptualising philosophically the development of the Information Personae, so too we spent a significant amount of time discussing the historical and philosophical context of the Camillo Memory Theatre. [2]

9.4.5 We are about to begin development of the networked component of the Camillo's Memory Theatre that will be physically reconstructed and exhibited in 2001. In the exhibit the audience will be given the opportunity to create their own agent, which will be in the form of a 3D Camillo's Memory Theatre. Then they will proceed to attach information they want to remember from the exhibition to their personal theatre and save it. Their theatre remains accessible on the network where they may continue to attach more information and keep expanding it as well as be in communication with other memory Theatres. Thus the idea of the King of France being in the centre of all knowledge and becoming 'God' becomes deconstructed, accessible, and distributed. Everyone is given the opportunity to be the centre of knowledge and possess their own memory theatre. [top]