Peter Weibel
is participant at
Where is Art Contemporary? The Global Challenge of Art Museums II
Abstract
Web 2.0 and the Museum. The Noah’s Ark Principle
The museum embodies something that I would like to call the Noah’s Ark principle. The story of Noah’s Ark is a parable of survival, and of storage. As we recall, the story of the flood and Noah’s Ark is in the first book of Moses (Genesis) chapters 6–9 in the Bible. God chose the patriarch Noah for his sense of righteousness and warned him of the flood. He told him to build an Ark (lat. arca) that could float and to bring in this Ark, himself and his wife, his three sons and their wives, eight people and a great number of animals, two of every sort. According to the story in the Bible, this floating Ark was extraordinarily large for its day, ca. 150 meters long, 25 meters wide, and 15 meters high with three decks and a floor space of 9,000 square meters and a gross volume of nearly 14,000 cubic meters: almost as large as the Titanic. After it had rained for forty days and nights and the whole surface of the earth was covered, and the waters remained high for 150 days, all that was left on earth was what was in the Ark. Everything else that had stirred upon the dry ground, whether human or beast, had been eradicated.
