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Introduction
"...obviously there is no clasification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural.
The reason is very simple: we do not know what the universe is."
-- Jorge Luis Borges
In 1995, Mark Meadow and Bruce Robertson, both of the Department of History of Art at the University of California at Santa Barbara, curated an exhibition at the University Art Museum entitled Microcosms: Objects of Knowledge (A University Collects).
In this exhibition we explored the functions of material objects (as collected by the full range of departments and institutions at UCSB) in the production of knowledge. The exhibition was generated both because of a mutual interest on our parts in historical models for organizing universal knowledge visually, and because of ashared curiosity about the status of material objects in the university on the eve of their supposed dissolution into virtual reality as computers and the internet loom ever larger on the horizon. We wanted to explore the origins of utilizing collected objects as a way of knowing the world, as well as current ways of using them. To this end we played sixteenth-century ordering principles against modern ones.
The 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, 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.