Born out of a major international dialogue held at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice Italy
this collection of essays presents innovative and provocative arguments about the claims of
universal knowledge schemes and the different aesthetic and material forms in which such claims
have been made and executed. Contributors take a close look at everything from religious
pilgrimages museums and maps of the world to search engines and automated GPS.Current
obsessions in information technology communications theory and digital culture often concern
the value and possibility of a grand accumulation of universally accessible forms of knowledge:
total libraries open data bases ubiquitous computing and ¿smart¿ technologies. These
obsessions have important social and philosophical origins and they raise profound questions
about the very nature of knowledge and its organization. This volume¿s contributors draw on the
histories of maps and of encyclopedias worldviews and visionary collections to make sense of
the crucial relation between the way the world is known and how it might be displayed and
transformed.
