Warburg 2.0
“Warburg was a technophile. He was interested in telecommunication, the press and travelling; all these new technologies enabled new forms of travelling, but also prolonged the old idea of migration that connected civilizations from the beginning.”
Mathias Bruhn – Aby Warburg (1866-1929): The Survival of an Idea
In Part 1 of this article published in Le CENTQUATREVUE we saw the cultural worldview ripening to welcome back Warburg’s avant-garde ideas 70 years after their conception. If he was alive today, taking a quantum leap through time and space and technology, what would his project be?
Warburg wanted to break down disciplinary boundaries, allowing meaning and ideas to flow freely across academic and ethnic cultures, across geography and history, and particularly, across value systems. His procedural technique required the meticulous collection, storage and tagging of randomly accessed archives of various sources and media. He tried, with relatively limited success, to keep snapshots of the relationships themselves that he found between cultural elements.