The Nature of Illumination: Cultural Heritage and the Technology of Culture.

At the Paris Exposition of 1900, Smithsonian
Secretary S.P. Langley led historian Henry Adams
through the halls of the exposition ... Langley
introduced Adams to the Dynamo, the electrical
generator that would define our current era in its
reliance on electricity:

“To him [Langley], the
dynamo itself was but
an ingenious channel
for conveying
somewhere the heat
latent in a few tons of
poor coal hidden in a
dirty engine-house
carefully kept out of
sight ...”
Smithsonian Secretary, Samuel Pierpont Langley
Henry Adams. The Education of
Henry Adams (1918)

“...but to Adams the
dynamo became a
symbol of infinity."
Henry Adams
Henry Adams. The Education of
Henry Adams (1918)

But back to the
dynamo. Today, the
lowly, dynamo, is one
of the key tools that
powers our innovation
and I want to use that
as an example of the
principles we need for
tools in our current
information-based
environment.

For Adams, the Dynamo would replace the
Cathedral, the electricity generated would create a
light that shown on, and that lit up, not one that
would illuminate, or show the inner light.

One's first visit to a great cathedral is
like one's first visit to the British
Museum; the only intelligent idea is to
follow the order of time, but the
museum is a chaos in time, and the
cathedral is generally all of one and the
same time. Henry Adams, Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904)

From the time of the European Middle
Ages that saw the rise of the great
cathedrals, through the Renaissance,
to the Enlightenment, when museums
as we now know them began to form in
the late 18th century, the chaos that
Adams sees in the museum becomes
the dynamism of our own time.

Museums: cemeteries!… Identical,
surely, in the sinister promiscuity
of so many bodies unknown to
one another. Museums: public
dormitories where one lies forever
beside hated or unknown beings.
Museums: absurd abattoirs of
painters and sculptors ferociously
slaughtering each other with
color-blows and line-blows, the
length of the fought-over walls!

They become lost in their idea of a
museum and forget its purpose. They
become lost in working out their idea of
a museum and forget their public. And
soon, not being brought constantly in
touch with the life of their community
through handling and displaying that
community's output in one or scores of
lines …

they become entirely separated from it
and go on making beautifully complete
and very expensive collections, but
never construct a living, active and
effective institution.
John Cotton Dana, The Gloom of the Museum (1917)

A great city department store of the first
class is perhaps more like a good
museum of art than are any of the
museums we have as yet established.
John Cotton Dana, The Gloom of the Museum (1917)

When printed pages are bound together
to make books or journals, many of the
display features of the individual pages
are diminished or destroyed. Books are
bulky and heavy. They contain much
more information than the reader can
apprehend at any given moment, and the
excess often hides the part he wants to
see...

Books are too expensive for universal
private ownership, and they circulate too
slowly to permit the development of an
efficient public utility. Thus, except for
use in consecutive reading — which is
not the modal application in the domain
of our study — books are not very good
display devices. In fulfilling the storage
function, they are only fair.

With respect to retrievability they are
poor. And when it comes to organizing
the body of knowledge, or even to
indexing and abstracting it, books by
themselves make no active contribution
at all.
J.C.R. Licklider, The Future of Libraries (1965)

If books are
intrinsically less
than satisfactory for
the storage,
organization,
retrieval, and
display of
information, then
libraries of books
are bound to be
less than
satisfactory also.
J.C.R. Licklider
The Future of Libraries
(1965)

We need to substitute for the book a device
that will make it easy to transmit information
without transporting material, and that will not
only present information to people but also
process it for them, following procedures they
specify, apply, monitor, and, if necessary,
revise and reapply.
J.C.R. Licklider
The Future of Libraries (1965)

And opening the window of his cell
he pointed out with his finger the
immense church of Notre-Dame,
which, outlining against the starry
sky the black silhouette of its two
towers, its stone flanks, its
monstrous haunches, seemed an
enormous two-headed sphinx,
seated in the middle of the city.

The archdeacon gazed at the gigantic
edifice for some time in silence, then
extending his right hand, with a sigh,
towards the printed book which lay
open on the table, and his left towards
Notre-Dame, and turning a sad
glance from the book to the church,
—"Alas," he said, "this will kill that."”

As an agent of change, printing altered
methods of data collection, storage and
retrieval systems, and communications
networks used by learned communities
throughout Europe.
Elizabeth Eisenstein

A means to fulfill a human purpose
(e.g. a specific tool, a pencil writes)
TECHNOLOGY ...

An assemblage of practices and
components (tool boxes of individual
technologies)
TECHNOLOGY ...

An entire collection of devices and
enginnering practices available to a
culture (think book printing in the
15th century, metal casting, wood
carving, paper making, etc. etc.)
TECHNOLOGY …

It is the business of the
future to be
dangerous.
A.N. Whitehead
Science and the Modern World
(1925)

The closer we come to
the danger, the more
brightly do the ways
into the saving power
begin to shine and the
more questioning we
become.
Martin Heidigger. The Question
Concerning Technlogy | Die Frage
nach der Technik (1954)

Dangerous tech … circa 370 BCE

You have invented an elixir not of
memory, but of reminding; and you
offer your pupils the appearance of
wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will
read many things without instruction
and will therefore seem to know many
things, when they are for the most part
ignorant and hard to get along with,
since they are not wise, but only
appear wise.
Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Fowler, 1925. 275a

Likewise, the essence of technology is
by no means anything technological.
Thus we shall never experience our
relationship to the essence of
technology so long as we merely
represent and pursue the
technological, put up with it, or evade
it.

Everywhere we remain unfree and
chained to technology, whether we
passionately affirm or deny it. But we
are delivered over to it in the worst
possible way when we regard it as
something neutral.
Martin Heidigger. The Question Concerning Technlogy |
Die Frage nach der Technik (1954)

TIME MOVES IN ONE DIRECTION,
memory in another. We are that
strange species that constructs
artifacts intended to counter the
natural flow of forgetting.
William Gibson, "Distrust That Particular Flavor" in
Distrust That Particular Flavor

'Forever' institutions such as libraries,
universities, museums are especially
important in uncertain times because
they provide stability and continuity
G. Wayne Clough, 12th Secretary of the Smithsonian
Institution (2014)

The worth and importance of the
Institution are not to be estimated by
what it accumulates within the walls
of its building, but by what it sends
forth to the world.
Joseph Henry, 1st Secretary of the Smithsonian
Institution (1852)

BUILDING THE NEW
ILLUMINATING INSTITUTIONS

He uploads it to the CIC database —
the Library, formerly the Library of
Congress, but no one calls it that
anymore … even the word “library” is
getting hazy. It used to be a place full
of books, mostly old ones. Then they
began to include videotapes, records,
and magazines. Then all of the
information got converted into
machine-readable form, which is to
say , ones and zeroes.

… as the methods for searching the
Library became more and more
sophisticated, it approached the point
where there was no substantive
difference between the Library of
Congress and the Central Intelligence
Agency.
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

By making many reproductions it
substitutes a plurality of copies for a
unique existence. And in permitting
the reproduction to meet the beholder
or listener in his own particular
situation, it reactivates the object
reproduced. These two processes lead
to a tremendous shattering of
tradition which is the obverse of the
contemporary crisis and renewal of
mankind.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction (1936)

“The mass is a matrix from which all
traditional behavior toward works of
art issues today in a new form.
Quantity has been transmuted into
quality. The greatly increased mass of
participants has produced a change in
the mode of participation. The fact
that the new mode of participation
first appeared in a disreputable form
must not confuse the spectator.”
Benjamin

Traditionally, this is how we've viewed
our culture on a collective scale. Our
libraries, archives, and museums have
put their collections on a pedestal and
the role of the keeper, librarian,
curator, was to control access to that
contained in the "magic circle."
Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library

To me, audiences are second … Our
primary responsibility is to the works
of art. We are responsible for the
guardianship, for scholarship. Then
comes the matter of bringing it to the
public.
Phillipe de Montebello (2000)

The museum of the past must be set
aside, reconstructed, transformed
from a cemetery of bric-a-brac into a
nursery of living thoughts … and in the
great cities co-operate with the public
library as one of the principal agencies
for the enlightenment of the people.
George Brown Goode, The Museums of the Future
(1889)

And as for the Library (which was linked to its
neighbour by a system of passageways whose
subtlety would extend almost beyond the
possibility of symbolic representation), here
there lay mysteries which were greater still. The
same Classification was used as in the Museum -
the two buildings forming mirror images each of
the other … Each object in the Museum … would
have been associated with a book (or several
books) in the Library.... One had then … a
perfectly balanced edifice, in which everything
which the human mind is capable of inventing or
understanding has its place.
Andrew Crumey. Pfitz (1995)

The people’s museum should be
much more than a house full of
specimens in glass cases. It should
be a house full of ideas, arranged
with the strictest attention to
system.
George Brown Goode, The Museums of the Future
(1889)

Probably the most conspicuous
connotation of the word knowledge for
most persons to-day is ...the rows and rows
of atlases, cyclopedias, histories,
biographies, books of travel, scientific
treatises, on the shelves of libraries … The
mind of man is taken captive by the spoils
of its prior victories; the spoils, not the
weapons and the acts of waging the battle
against the unknown, are used to fix the
meaning of knowledge, of fact, and truth.
John Dewey, Democracy and Education

In the name of 'progress', our official
culture is striving to force the new
media to do the work of the old … We
approach the new with the
psychological conditioning and sensory
responses to the old ... Both represent a
common failure: the attempt to do a
job demanded by the new environment
with the tools of the old.
Marshall McLuhan, Medium is the Massage

A HAPPIER age than ours
once made bold to call
our species by the name
of Homo Sapiens. In the
course of time we have
come to realize that we
are not so reasonable
after all as the
Eighteenth Century, with
its worship of reason and
its naive optimism,
thought us;

hence modern fashion
inclines to designate our
species as Homo Faber:
Man the Maker. But
though faber may not be
quite so dubious as
sapiens it is, as a name
specific of the human
being, even less
appropriate, seeing that
many animals too are
makers.

There is a third function …
and just as important as
reasoning and making—
namely, playing. It seems
to me that next to Homo
Faber, and perhaps on the
same level as Homo
Sapiens, Homo Ludens,
Man the Player, deserves
a place in our
nomenclature.
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

In our heart of hearts we know that none
of our pronouncements is absolutely
conclusive. At that point, where our
judgment begins to waver, the feeling that
the world is serious after all wavers with it.
Instead of the old saw: “All is vanity”, the
more positive conclusion forces itself upon
us that “all is play”.
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

The reasonable man
adapts himself to the
world: the
unreasonable one
persists in trying to
adapt the world to
himself. Therefore all
progress depends on
the unreasonable man.
G.B. Shaw, Man and Superman
(1903)

It’s because it describes
the power that even a
twelve-year-old can
have: the power to
expose human
hypocrisy, to shatter
secrecy, to shine a light
on truth, and to feel the
freedom that lies
beyond.
Lois Lowery, “Preface”, The Giver

...People of Earth: The sky is open to the
stars. Clouds roll over us night and day.
Oceans rise and fall. Whatever you may
have heard, this is our world, our place to
be. Whatever you've been told, our flags
fly free. Our heart goes on forever. People
of Earth, remember.
Cluetrain Manifesto (1999)

All mistakes and errors
are solely the
responsibility of
Wikipedia.
David Weinberger
Too Big to Know

The Nature of Illumination: Cultural Heritage and the Technology of Culture.

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