Genre and Wunderkammer

Susan Delagrange's digital media project, "Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Canon of Arrangement," takes the form of an interactive wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities. The new media project transcends the genre conventions of traditional academic works, functioning instead as a hybrid genre. 

When you navigate to Delagrange's project, you immediately see a closed cabinet. Clicking on the cabinet opens the drawers and allows audiences to see the culmination of Delagrange's work in the form of tiles that fill the cabinet. Clicking on any of the tiles will take you to a screen that is half text and half moving image. You can interact with the tiles in any order and still get the overall meaning of Delagrange's work (which is what she encourages); however, I chose to follow a linear progression by navigating through the project via the line of tiles along the top of the screen. 

The description of Delagrange's project as "small pieces loosely joined" immediately made me think of Burroughs' fold-in method of composing. While the Wunderkammer showcases various artifacts in a way that encourages free exploration from the viewer and allows for endless arrangement and re-arrangement, Burroughs' fold-in texts enable endless possibilities for making meaning through the combination of different passages of text. 

That being said, it was Delagrange's experimentation with genre that captured my attention the most. Bawarshi's theory of genre as  constitutive is clearly reflected in Delagrange's Wunderkammer. Bawarshi writes, "genres shape and help us generate our communicative goals, including why these goals exist, what and whose purposes they serve, and how best to achieve them" (Bawarshi 23). It is obvious that Delagrange was consciously thinking of how genre played a role in the overall goal of her project. She chose the genre of digital media because it enables flexibility and audience interaction, yet she still followed some of the conventions of the academic paper genre, such as the tone of her project and her reliance of alphabetic text to get the bulk of her message across. The wunderkammer juxtaposes the linear progression of information (present in the line of tiles at the top of the screen) with the ability to explore the information in any order. 

Delagrange writes, "like the scientifica in Wunderkammern, digital media are 'practical inventions' that we may use to multiply, magnify, mirror and otherwise manipulate images and collections of images; and at the same time they are also 'philosophical instruments' which give us insight into the objects and concepts we are exploring" (Delagrange "Natural Magic" tab). This reflects Bawarshi's argument that genres "maintain the desires they help fulfill" by guiding our creation as authors (Bawarshi 25).

Bawarshi includes the following quote from Charles Bazerman in his paper, "genres are the familiar places we go to create intelligible communicative action with each other and the guideposts we use to explore the unfamiliar" (Bawarshi 25). I truly believe this is how Susan Delagrange views genre. She draws from familiar genres such as the academic paper and the visual instillation, and uses them as a security blanket to comfort her students as she introduces them to the unfamiliar genre of the wunderkammer. 

Sources: 

Bawarshi, Anis. “The Genre Function.” In Genre and the Invention of the Writer. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2003.

Delagrange, Susan. "Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Canon of Arrangement." Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 13(2). 2009. Retrieved March 7, 2018 from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.2/topoi/delagrange/index.html.