PROVO, UTAH.-At first glance, the terms “nostalgia” and “technology” make an unlikely, even incompatible combination. Technology invites change. Nostalgia resists. Technology looks to the future. Nostalgia clings to the past. But for centuries, these adversarial ideas have been harmoniously fused together, facilitating an acceptance of change and innovation by appealing to the past.

“Nostalgia & Technology: Embracing the New through Art and Design,” at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art through May 13, 2006, explores the role of art as a mediator in society’s acceptance and use of new technologies through objects, art, and ephemera representing a selection of domestic technologies. From the scientific instruments that shared shelf space with art objects and taxidermy in the collections of 17th-century nobility to the cabinet radio disguised as period furniture, technology often enters the home with familiar company.

“We go about our lives as if nothing could be more natural than to consult Jeeves (the internet butler) for help with homework, to buy faceplates for our cell phones and skins for our IPods, or to step around the trilobite-shaped robot that’s vacuuming our laminate ‘wood’ flooring. We don't give a second thought to the fact that our television is hiding inside a piece of fine furniture or that deceased world leaders, like Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr., try to sell us computers. We forget the foreign that has been grafted onto the familiar,” says Marc Olivier, BYU professor and guest curator of the exhibition.

The practice of using the familiar to contextualize the new dates back to the Renaissance, when an increase in travel and exploration exposed people to a variety of new technologies and ideas. Noble travelers housed the objects they collected from abroad in cabinets of curiosities. These cabinets consisted of a room or rooms filled with natural history specimens, art objects, scientific instruments and curiosities from around the world. Cabinets of curiosities gave the noble collector a sense of mastery over the foreign, the alien and the new. They also allowed viewers to make connections between unrelated objects, uniting nature and art, antiquity and modernity in an overwhelming visual display. The unsettling unknown placed alongside the familiar in the homes of the elite made possible the idea of discovery without disruption to the status quo. Visitors will experience a recreation of a 17th-century cabinet of curiosities at the beginning of this exhibition.

Building on the themes illustrated by the cabinet of curiosities, “Nostalgia & Technology” highlights key moments in the development of new technologies, specifically those of the 19th and 20th centuries. The exhibition explores how nostalgic ornamentation and design have been used to facilitate society’s acceptance of innovations such as, electricity, sewing machines, typewriters, point-and-shoot photography, radios, televisions, automobiles, space exploration, atomic energy and wearable technology.

“Nostalgia & Technology” also presents a 20th–century mirror image of the cabinet of curiosities that visitors encounter at the beginning of the exhibition, where 17th –century objects have been replaced by their modern counterparts. A collection of decorative cell phone faceplates mirrors an arrangement of shells. A Palm Pilot resembles a cuneiform clay tablet. A Magellan Roadmate GPS device looks back at a universal equatorial sundial. By juxtaposing contemporary curiosities with objects which seemed so foreign 300 years ago, visitors will begin to question their relationship with “the new” and how art facilitates interest in and acceptance of technological progress.

“Nostalgia and Technology: Embracing the New through Art and Design” is sponsored by the George S. and Dolores Eccles Foundation, Bruce and Barbara Christensen, and the Robert and Amy Barker Foundation. Admission is free.