The lure of antiquity and the cult of the machine

the long version

The Kunstkammer was a programmatic display of art and oddities amassed by wealthy Europeans during the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. These nascent museums reflected the ambitions of such thinkers as Descartes, Locke, and Kepler to unite the forces of nature with art and technology. The bizarre inventory of the Kunstkammer - ranging from minerals to exotic plants and animals, statues, and machines - was intended to illustrate the mechanistic order of the universe. Such collections confirmed a belief in the continual evolution of man's god-like power of creativity. Bredekamp advances a radical view that the baroque Kunstkammer is also the nucleus of modern cyberspace.