An aluminium hat, a grounding kit, earplugs, foam spikes, a rescue blanket, a neck cooler, a spectrometer, a part of a canopy, a polarising filter, special glasses, a bucket of water and a handful of road surface.
These are just some of the objects that make up our Cabinet of Waves. Pre-modern cabinets of curiosities (also known as Wunderkammern) were precursors to today’s museums. They presented collections of unusual and mysterious things so that the unknown could be known. They allowed visitors to admire the rarity of heterogeneous objects yet to be understood and explore and discover their forms and characteristics. These collections, assembled as if by chance, eluded existing categories and taxonomies and offered other ways of organising things. Cabinets of curiosities were places where things that do not belong hang together.
Our Cabinet of Waves recovers this tradition to offer insights into social-scientific research in the EU-funded ERC project WAVEMATTERS at the Institute for European Ethnology. The project focuses on physical waves as a matter of urban coexistence and asks how people learn to be affected by sound waves in the form of noise or electromagnetic waves in the form of sun radiation, light at night, or mobile communication signals.
The cabinet shows objects taken from our field research – and also from our twin project “The Urban Microclimate Regime” – in Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Fukoaka, a city near the Adriatic, Berlin and Brussels where we studied how residents, regulators, activists, scientists and policy makers relate to and respond to noise, light, wireless signals and urban heat. Each of the objects of the cabinet come with an ethnographic or personal story. Some reflect interactions with research partners who mediate, shield or protect themselves or their companions from wave exposure. Other objects display the ways in which we interact with physical waves in our everyday lives, in buildings or specific environments. Last, but not least, you will find objects that invite you to test and play with them.
With the Cabinet of Waves, we invite visitors to join us in understanding and grasping the strange and wondrous dimensions of electromagnetic waves and sound waves as social phenomena. The Cabinet is thus not just a display or a representation of waves, but invites you to perform wavy relations, to explore how they constitute an order of things, an order that is held together through the elusive, ephemeral, unruly natures of waves.
For this iteration of our Cabinet of Waves, we present the following 23 objects with their stories. (To read more about them, please follow the links):
- Paranoia (and the Aluminium Hat)
- Focus (and Seren Specs)
- Rainbow (and the Spectrometer)
- Good Sleep (and the EMF Silver Canopy)
- Blinds (and the Polarising Filters)
- Sssswhoooosh (and a Contact Mic and an Audio Recorder)
- Imprecision (and EMF Meters)
- Electrosmog (and the Electromagnetic Transducers)
- Protection (and EMF Turtal Paint and the Grounding Kit)
- Multifuntional (and the Rescue Blanket)
- New Noise (and the Waterbucket)
- Clubbing (and Ear Plugs 1)
- Shade (and the UV Cut Umbrella)
- Pain (and the PEMF Hat)
- Porosity (and Asphalt)
- Surveillance (and the Cable Cutters)
- Contracted Quietness (and the Ear Plugs 2)
- Surprising (and the Bone Headphones)
- Cyborg (and the Neck Cooler)
- Radiation (and the Dog Cooling Gear)
- Attachment (and the Ear Plugs 3)
- Bureaucracy (and the Card Game)
- Warmth (and the Radiant Heater)
