The project Orbis Pictus Revised functions on three levels: as an artistic experience, as a learning tool, and as a research instrument. It is a collage of historical styles in which you can move effortless. It offers a play- ful learning process involving different senses, looking, touching and speaking, connecting object and image with language and vice versa. It opens up the specialist field of comparative iconographic research to non-specialists.

As an exhibition the project Orbis Pictus Revised combines the creative and the associative with the didactical. It abolishes the prevailing division between an aesthetic artistic approach, and a historical documentary approach.

In the domain of language the project Orbis Pictus Revised introduces a wide audience to the Latin of the 17th. century. The Latin of that time, which formed the basis for international cultural and scientific exchange in Europe, will be dynamically compared with different living European languages.

The project Orbis Pictus Revised uses the latest developments in technology, yet without the use of a modernistic 'high-tech' look, a style which tries to break with the past. On the contrary the project tries to show that a long tradition exists in the creation and development of learning tools and learning methods, which on the level of their content are not much different from what we now experience as specifically 'new'. The project is also an attempt to realize didactical ideas from the past by using modern technology. It is a practical answer to those who see in the computerization of society only the dangers of greater control and less freedom. The project Orbis Pictus Revised sets out to mobilize the liberating forces also contained in the new technology.

Evaluatie door Tjebbe van Tijen