Catherine Richards
«Curiosity Cabinet, at the end of the Millenium»

The spectator/participant climbs inside the cabinet. A closed circuit is created by shutting the doors, and the cabinet becomes a ‹safe› house, an impermeable skin protecting its resident from a sea of electronic and magnetic energy. The signals of the upper RF spectrum such as radio signals, microwave, and TV frequencies prefer to travel through the metal of the box rather than our bodies inside. This energy is seeking to return to its source. The box is connected with a thick copper wire to the ground and thus the energy has a pathway back to its source.
«Curiosity Cabinet» explores blurred boundaries between our bodies and our new technological environments. Our media constantly bathes us in electromagnetic fields, and because we are permeable to this invisible spectrum, we are already plugged in, already ‹cyborgs› (half machine, half flesh.) «Curiosity Cabinet» asks what a separated, unplugged self could mean at a time when such a self is under siege from our own media environments. It holds up the representative of such an autonomous state of being as a kind of endangered species, a rare collectable on display for a moment, a curio. (Source: http://www.interaccess.org/aurora/richards.html)