The conference attends to historical procedures of aesthetical presentation and spatial ordering of knowledge. As performative practices these procedures play a substantial part in the production and reception of knowledge. In this respect, the libraries, cabinets of curiosity, and laboratories as well as the urban topographies of early modern times are paradigmatic. With those rooms and spaces the material preconditions of knowledge and science in their interaction with symbolic orders and imaginary processes also come to the fore. For it is not only their architecture, which influences the diverse actions taking place there such as arranging, depicting or representing objects of knowledge, but also their medial fittings and apparatuses that actually facilitate a specific interaction with the objects and exhibits.
Hence, the concrete rooms are at the same time contextual frame of and intervening actor in the production and reception of knowledge. In their materiality they impose their own conditions on the abstract systems, on the basis of which the knowledge objects are ideally classified and ordered. Correspondingly, there is an ongoing conflict between the theoretical systems and the practical ordering of the objects; especially because these systems--whether conceptual, mathematical or geometrical in nature--tend to be decontextualized and non-localizable and by means of this ostensible universal validity suggest a possible control of knowledge.
At least two dynamical processes are thus set off in the libraries, museums, and urban topographies. On the one hand their rooms and spaces can become a disruptive factor of the ideal systems; for instance if their material disposition forces a particular arrangement of the objects, defines bounds, or directs attentiveness. On the other hand they are productive in the sense that they transform existing systems and in this way participate in the reorganization of knowledge. From this point of view, ‘space’ becomes a parameter of epistemological processes and changes.