Handout for "Wunderkammer"

Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Canon of Arrangement

Susan H. Delagrange

http://www.technorhetoric.org/13.2/topoi/delagrange/index.htm

Designing constructive digital media—a process of mapping and remapping our physical and conceptual worlds in order to determine their meaning.

Techné	Wunderkammer
Any form of productive arts that occupies a middle ground between theory and practice.	A form of learning—an intermediate, highly particular state akin to a sort of suspension of the mind between ignorance and enlightenment that marks the end of unknowing and the beginning of knowing.
“Critical wonder”	Wunderkammern
a process through which digital media designers can thoughtfully and imaginatively arrange evidence and articulate links in a critical practice of embodied discovery	A practice of building cabinets of wonders

Other key terms of the visual canon of arrangement：

• Scale
• Taxonomies
• Manipulation (measure, cut, weigh, balance etc.)
• Multiply lenses
• Visual synecdoches
• Multilinearity
• Associative, analogical thinking
• Combinational practices of emotion and reason
• Visual analogy

• Visual tropes (metaphor/metonymy/synecdoche, hyperbole, antistasis, catachresis, homologies)

Critiques:

1) Images are inherently manipulative;

2) The particularity of bodies of evidence may lead to affective and emotional argument

3) Logocentrism