Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge Gebunden

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 accum ulation 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.