Cabinets of Curiosities, or Wunderkammer (wonder-room in German), are very curious things (ba dum tiss). First recorded in 1599, they are considered the precursor to the modern museum. Nonetheless, the two are, in some ways, very different from each other. For one, museums carefully organize their subjects by scientific, pre-agreed upon groups in order to tell a certain story or narrative. While, cabinets of curiosities, on the other hand, tend to curate their exhibitions in a much more eccentric fashion, usually by the owner/curator's whims or by fanciful connections spawned more out of creativity than scientific or historical research. Both forms of curation have their own strengths and weaknesses and are educational in their own right.
However, we're going to be focusing on the Cabinets.
This website is an attempt at translating the idea of Cabinets of Curiosities onto the internet.
Cabinets of Curiosity were far from uniformly organized, but their contents could usually be placed into one (or many) of the following categories:
Here are cabinet contents exclusive to the internet. These are things do not physically exist. However, their enigmatic nature and interactivity fit the spirit of a cabinet quite well anyways.
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