Starting from the Enlightenment concepts of collecting and archiving in Cabinets of Curiosities, Aurel Fischer demonstrates a new possibility of storing and accessing one’s personal memory with its fragmentary and associative recollections. In his project, he explores scenarios for staging the complexity of information and the capacity of memory of the human brain. These scenarios are constructed from thematic fields, such as ‘the 21st century archive,’ ‘information,’ ‘knowledge’ and ‘spatial storytelling.’
In contrast to a physical Cabinet of Curiosities, however, Fischer exhibits his own personal and hidden inner world of associations, abstractions and insights as a digital memory space. In an evident reference to computer games, with questions packaged as narratives, he encourages self awareness in the tradition of the ancient Greek motto “Gnoti seauton!” (Know thyself!). With his narrative – projected as an intelligent data-archaeological future program – the audience too is incited to reflect upon themselves, their own reminiscences and memory space.
The designer has built a complex and extended virtual Cabinet of Curiosities from his assortment of fragmentary recollections in the form of photographs, texts, photogrammatic images and freely distributed 3D-objects. A world through which one can wander through multi-layered stories with or without narrative direction, looking for clues beyond objects.