Devices of Wonder

How has it happened that we spend so much time looking at a screen—whether phone, computer, TV, or watching a film at a cinema?

The 2001 Getty Research Institute (GRI) exhibition Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen answered that question, revealing that our fascination with the Internet and today’s visual technologies stretches back several hundred years.

Devices of Wonder traced a history of visual thinking that started with a 17th-century Wunderkabinett. This “cabinet of wonders” was designed to hold a host of spectacular natural artifacts alongside cutting edge instruments, their sum a kind of compendium of world knowledge. Today we find knowledge and new information on our laptops by clicking an icon; back then people gained insights with each Wunderkabinett viewing and interaction, prompting new resonances and relationships among the objects on display.

The Wunderkabinett was staged as the conceptual underpinning of the show: surrounding it were early-modern instruments, such as a Gregorian telescope, celestial globe, portable mechanical model of the solar system, pocket sundial, Maghribi astrolabe-quadrant (used to determine the position of objects in the night sky), and model of the eye. These objects were mounted alongside rare natural specimens, including an obsidian mirror (used by the Aztecs to divine the future), Gibeon meteorite, and an orange-skinned back coral fan that together promoted learning through interactive study and entertainment.

Throughout the galleries, provocative juxtapositions of modern and contemporary works of art exposed how later artists have been inspired by the sense of wonder or continued their own voyages of discovery. Frank Gehry’s crocodile chandelier hung above a 1655 engraving illustrating Danish physician Ole Worm’s room-size collection packed with natural specimens.

Across the way, American assemblagist Joseph Cornell’s exquisite interactive boxes, sourced from scraps of 20th-century urban and natural debris, were featured below Antonio Diavolo, a trapezist automaton created by master magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin for his famous 19th-century Parisian theater. Early automata, such as a 1764 writing hand built by Austrian clockmaker Friedrich von Knauss, shared Diavolo’s stage, and a life-size clarinetist, created by Cornelis Jacob van Oeckelen in 1838 to tour the Dutch East Indies, stood nearby.

Dazzling, humorous, and offering many surprises, Devices of Wonder proved hugely popular, even though it opened shortly after the catastrophic events of September 11, when museum attendance across the US fell dramatically. It’s remarkable that the show opened at all, and on time. Many of the 400 objects were loans promised from public and private collections across the US and Europe, and their shipping became vastly more complicated because of the global fear of air travel.

Fortunately, the largest object in Devices of Wonder, Lucas Samaras’s 1966 Mirrored Room, had already reached the Museum, shipped early for conservation treatment from its home at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Measuring 8 x 8 x 10 feet and covered in mirrors inside and out, Mirrored Room delighted visitors by projecting them into an “alternative reality” space as they approached, entered, or retreated. The work was displayed near examples of its early modern predecessors: small 18th-century mirrored boxes designed to study the angles and physical laws of reflection.

This and other interactive aspects of the exhibition were replicated in the then state-of-the-art Devices of Wonder website, which featured several of the rare, sophisticated instruments and magical technologies on display in the show’s 12 sections: “Artificial Life,” “Special Effects,” “Little Epiphanies,” and “Home Entertainment” among them. Using Flash, JAVA, and Real Player—2001’s latest digital technology—the website allowed users to play with selected devices, including a “BIObot” developed by researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, 19th-century Indonesian shadow puppets, and a multiplying “sorcerer’s mirror” from the 18th century. The website won a Webby Award for the best site of the year in the “Weird” category, defined by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences as, “sites so forward thinking they seem strange or abnormal when viewed without the future in mind.”

Involving seven years of research and planning, this unique exhibition inspired the GRI’s 2001 scholar year theme, “Frames of Viewing: Perception, Experience, Judgment.” If you’d like to learn more about that theme and see some of the extraordinary and extraordinarily wide-ranging objects once on view, pick up the Devices of Wonder catalog (Getty Publications), which includes essays penned by me and my co-curator, Barbara Maria Stafford. We explore how the devices of wonder that humans have used to augment reality over the past several centuries have shaped perception, altered our consciousness, and inspired the very screens we use more and more.