Markus Wintersberger · Viola Rühse · medienwerkstatt006
No restoration – an experiment.
The cabinet of the cabinet of curiosities.The title is an anamorphosis: it only comes together from one point – find the yellow ring.
Origin & readings · 0 – III
Exhibition 2027 · the six chapters · Museum Kaiserstiege · Göttweig Abbey
◆ Exhibition 2027 · GöttwAIg Wunderkammer(21). Barock Digital EXHIBIT · Museum Kaiserstiege, Göttweig Abbey · Opening of the Wunderkammer(21): late June 2027 · provisional date, exact date to be announced · 13 March 2027 postponed · gottwaigwunderkammer21.com ↗
IKAMMER ⇄ KÖRPERthe third museum above the river · 06.11.2026→
IISIDVS GOTWICENSEthe Wunderkammer as a black box in the Landesgalerie · 07.11.2026→NEW
The project has two strands. [XR] GöttwAIg [AR] is the origin and remains the project’s address; IMAGO PROXIMA, FORMAT ET ILLVSTRAT and the game PUNCTUM read the same material as a world model, as anamorphosis and as a game of the right point of view. The second strand are the six chapters that will structure the exhibition GöttwAIg Wunderkammer(21) in the Museum Kaiserstiege of Göttweig Abbey (opening late June 2027, provisional date).
Dynamic, immersive 3D, AR and AI artefacts as speculative cabinet pieces: historical collection, baroque orders of images and knowledge, AI, 3D scanning and augmented reality interlock into a fragile system of appearances.
The cabinet as a world model: estimated depth, point clouds, wireframes and re-collages from each collage; an autoregressive image feedback grows every image from the previous one – until the sheets fly into the antechamber and tower room of the imperial wing.
Three sheets from the print collection – Weigel’s knight, Will’s landscape head, Tröschel’s satyrs before the mirror cylinder – become an operator: the AI image, too, is an anamorphosis, legible only from the point of view of a prompt.
Six images in the octagonal cabinet – stretched, bent, shattered, turned. Each comes together from one point only. Eye height and direction are up to you; at the end you cast your own image into the room with the projector.
The exhibition GöttwAIg Wunderkammer(21) will be structured in six chapters. They correspond to chapters K1 – K6 of the Wunderkammer archive; each chapter has its new version with a 4K AV film, a 3D scene, a game and labs.
A boy pulls a thorn from his foot – for 2,300 years, in bronze, marble, plaster, chrome and data. No version shows the thorn. SPINA reads the 1,980 entries of archive chapter K1 as a genealogy of the copy, from Theocritus to the Lateran, the Capitol, the Kunstkammer and Göttweig hill.
Around 1744 Salomon Kleiner engraved two rooms of the Göttweig museum – the only image of this order. MICROCOSMVS reads the 5,766 artefacts of archive chapter K2 as a history of the Wunderkammer, from Quiccheberg’s theatre of the world (1565) to Bessel’s cabinet, its dispersal, the return of wonder and the latent space of AI.
Bessel rebuilt the abbey after the fire of 1718 as an “Austrian Escorial” and published the Chronicon Gotwicense (1732), a foundational work of diplomatics. Its criteria – script, material, date, seal, provenance – are applied to the 993 objects of archive chapter K3.
On 17 June 1718 fire destroys the old abbey. Johann Lucas von Hildebrandt draws an ideal plan in the manner of the Escorial; only about two thirds of it are ever built, and Salomon Kleiner’s bird’s-eye view of 1744 is the only place where Göttweig is complete. AEDIFICANDVM – what is still to be built – reads the 2,488 artefacts of archive chapter K4 as a history of models: wood, plaster, engraving, laser scan, AI variation.
Göttweig’s inventory lists a magic lantern of brass “with various figures painted on glass, in a separate wooden case”. The lantern is lost; the box survives – eight wooden sliders, 36 painted glass slides, some inscriptions in mirror writing. PROIECTIO follows one image through its media – glass, wall, engraving, file, projection, AI – and sets the anamorphoses of the graphic collection against the lantern: both demand a standpoint. Based on the 723 artefacts of archive chapter K5.
The cabinet of curiosities of Göttweig is lost – it survives as a print, in Salomon Kleiner’s engravings of c. 1744. With more than 30,000 sheets the abbey owns Austria’s largest private collection of historical prints, over 20,000 of them acquired by Abbot Bessel. IMPRESSIO reverses the path: AI montages and 3D scans go back to paper with the Neuhauser Kunstmühle in Hohenberg – inkjet ground, laser on zinc, colour lithography, the edition “GöttwAIg Wunderkammer 21 / 1–13”. And the AI prints without a plate. Based on the 796 artefacts of archive chapter K6.
| 0 · [XR] GöttwAIg [AR] | I · IMAGO PROXIMA | II · FORMAT ET ILLVSTRAT | III · PUNCTUM | Chapter 3 · DISCRIMEN | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image idea | The artefact appears in space – seeing twice | Every image grows from the previous one | Every image is a point of view | Find the point of view yourself | Every image is a testimony |
| Material | collection · 3D scans · AI collages | 40 collages · Spinario · LOCUS | Weigel · Will · Tröschel after Vouet | sheets + AI collages as stations | archive K3 · portraits · Kleiner 1744 · Chronicon |
| Methods | AR · XR · Sketchfab · AI Co-Creation | depth · point cloud · image feedback | length, cylinder, point, colour, time anamorphosis | coherence metric · projector · atelier | diplomatics · seal · archive data · 3D reconstruction |
| Space | extended space · smartphone | antechamber KS.SF 1.06 · tower room KS.SF 1.07 | octagonal cabinet | cabinet · browser · exhibition | Göttweig hill · ideal plan · Imperial Staircase |
| Colour | night · cyan | night · magenta · gold | engraving · yellow | brass · violet | night · seal red · parchment |
Find the puncta. A coherence bar and a tone whose beating closes into unison show how near you are to the right point of view. Once found, the camera glides into the exact eye point – Weigel’s knight stands upright, Will’s head appears in the mirror cylinder, 336 fragments of an AI collage come together.
ATELIER: upload your own images, compute them as anamorphoses (mirror cylinder · plate · floor), make them legible in the room and export as JPG print template or video.
I · IMAGO PROXIMA · GameWorld-model gameWalk · prompt · drift: 21 mirabilia in a walkable world model, recording as video, catalogue sheet.
0 · [XR] GöttwAIg [AR] · GeneratorMirabilia MachinaCabinet generator(21): combine · roll · hallucinate – every mirabile has its own address.
I · IMAGO PROXIMA · LabRoom labTower room and antechamber 1:1 – showcases, projectors, light, your own GLB, camera move as MP4.
II · FORMAT ET ILLVSTRAT · LabAnamorphosis labTilt Weigel’s plate, compute your own image into the mirror ring, turn the puzzle, shift colour layers.
GöttwAIg – Wunderkammer(21) is an art & science project that explores and presents the connection between the baroque – through the cabinet of curiosities of Göttweig Abbey – and digital AI aesthetics. No restoration – an experiment: by means of AI the fragmentary Göttweig cabinet becomes the cabinet of the cabinet, contemporary art a test laboratory for translations and AI plausibilities.
The project links baroque cultures of knowledge, images and collecting with current artistic methods: AI co-creation, XR, 3D scanning, digital sculpture, speculative reconstruction, media translation and performative activation. As in Duchamp’s “La Boîte-en-valise”, the collection becomes a portable new constellation – “The world is everything that is the case.”
This is the English overview of the project page /goettwaig-xr/, which gathers everything in one place: [XR] GöttwAIg [AR] with its applications (Mirabilia Machina, Speculative Fieldwork, collage gallery, AV montage), the new versions IMAGO PROXIMA and FORMAT ET ILLVSTRAT and the game PUNCTUM.
The films of the new versions play on their own pages with chapter marks: IMAGO PROXIMA in five chapters from MEMORIA to LOCUS, FORMAT ET ILLVSTRAT in four parts PUNCTUM · SPECULUM · VEXIER · LATENCY with opening and closing credits; DISCRIMEN in seven movements from SIGILLUM to DISCRIMEN. The sound is synthetic – in FORMAT ET ILLVSTRAT the engravings become audible as spectrograms.
| 3D scene | Content |
|---|---|
| AR cabinet object | artefact in space · smartphone AR |
| Sketchfab-Collection | Spinario transformations · EXHIBIT(21) Spiral Museum |
| LOCUS · tower room | imperial staircase · antechamber · tower room · drone flight · GLB |
| SPECULUM CYLINDRICUM | cabinet of anamorphoses · mirror shader · 2 animations · GLB |
| PUNCTUM | the same GLB as a playable simulation model |
| ESCORIAL | Göttweig hill · Hildebrandt’s ideal plan (unbuilt in cyan) · Imperial Staircase · art cabinet · camera flight · GLB |
| TERRA GOTWICENSIS | game · seven seals · space & time · cabinet · AR |
II · Obliquetilt Weigel’s plate until the knight stands (58°)
II · Mirror · own imageupload → ring plate → JPG · video
II · VexierWill’s landscape turns into a head
I · Collage → spacepoint cloud · relief · wireframe · strata · drift
I · Prompt machineimage feedback steered by prompts
0 · Mirabilia Machinaars combinatoria from documented material
IV · Sealyour own wax seal with legend and checksum · PNG
IV · Genuine or falsesix tests following the criteria of diplomatics
IV · Timeline1672–1749 (–2026) · archive K3 in numbers
GöttwAIg Wunderkammer(21). Baroque digital – art & science within Digical25.
XR/AR artefacts, Sketchfab collection, Mirabilia Machina, AV montage – project page.
Book chapter by Viola Rühse and Markus Wintersberger in the Springer conference volume.
New version I – the world model.
New version II – the anamorphoses.
The game – web, exhibition, macOS app.
Chapter 3 – Abbot Gottfried Bessel: films, ESCORIAL 3D, the game TERRA GOTWICENSIS, labs.
From the terrace of the Landesgalerie Niederösterreich in Krems one sees Göttweig hill: 4,579 metres, the Danube, 13.4 seconds of sound. TRANSLATIO thinks the cabinet of curiosities and the eXperimentalmuseum TORSIO into one another – Kleiner’s engraving of 1744 is set from the photographs of the 2026 walk, the twisted shell of the Landesgalerie is skinned with 4,758 artefacts of the archive. Between them a third museum emerges that exists only on the axis: 21 stations from octagon to 30° rhombus, from the abbey’s foundation in 1083 to its millennium in 2083.
AV long version 5:55 · trailer 3:33 · 4K · 3D scene (GLB) and film 222 s · game “The game of the third museum” (web, macOS, Windows, AR) · 3D experience · labs
The second version of TRANSLATIO turns the Landesgalerie itself into the stage: SIDVS GOTWICENSE. The façade becomes a projected archive skin, the building a black box with mirror floors, haze and lines of light. The twist of the five storeys orders a cosmology – INFERNVM, TERRA, MICROCOSMVS, DISCRIMEN, CAELVM – around a helix of 4,758 artefacts. Nothing is rebuilt: the old returns as light, particles, reflection, scan and stream, with anamorphoses, magic lantern and quadratura as pointers to the image machines of the Baroque.
Website, new versions and games: medienwerkstatt006 · Vienna 2026 · programming AI-assisted (Claude, Anthropic); concept, selection and decisions: Markus Wintersberger. The historical sheets from the Göttweig print collection are scanned unaltered and only transformed geometrically.
