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The Microcosm exhibition was divided into two sections;the first representing an early modern example of collecting objects as a means towards universal knowledge, and the second exploring the current use of the same objects in the university as an institution that itself purports to represent all knowledge. In the first room, we constructed a latter-day Curiosity Cabinet or Wunderkammer in which we suggested the associative process of structuring knowledge of the world which characterized the sixteenth-century episteme. In the second of our installations, here called Contemporary Curiosities, we laid out examples of what scientists and scholars do today with much the same objects found in the Curiosity Cabinet, demonstrating some of the categories and paradigmatic examples by which we construct knowledge today. |
