THE WORLD MADE VISIBLE

Despite our increasing dependance on tools which gather information unseen to the naked eye, visuals are still important vehicles of knowledge, especially diagrams, models, and maps which describe what we cannot otherwise see. These visuals are metaphors which follow (often poetic) conventions of communication. Images also played an important role in curiosity cabinets, representing aspects of the natural world impossible to contain within a room as well as standing as the finest examples of human artifice. Images play even more varied roles today, and the means by which they are created range from those familiar in the sixteenth century, such as pen-and-ink, to modern photographic and computer technologies.

Because images are so overwhelmingly abundant now, and because we spend so much time looking at them, there's a temptation to believe that all visible things may be reduced to images on a computer screen with no loss of information. This exhibition demonstrates that this is not so. Moreover, "hard-copy" images, whether in books or on walls, convey data and fulfill many different functions beyond those available on video screens. Nonetheless, many of the categories of images, such as maps, may be just as much at home in both formats, or even created in one and produced in another. Even the category of "art"--one of the most privileged of categories of images in the sixteenth century and in the present day--increasingly crosses the boundaries between physical object and electronic image.