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In the Uppsala University Museum Gustavianum stands a famous early 17th century cabinet, the so-called Augsburg Art Cabinet. Created by the Augsburg art dealer and diplomat Philipp Hainhofer, it is an elaborate piece of artistically designed furniture containing miniaturized curiosities, many tools and other objects. Taking 30 craftsmen from Augsburg under Hainhofer's supervision six years to construct (from 1610 to 1616), it is the only cabinet of its kind from the turn of the 17th century whose collection remains intact. Its approximately 1000 objects aim to symbolize the knowledge of all of humankind in one place. Art cabinets were regarded highly in the world of regal fashion of the time and the Augsburg Art Cabinet made for a luxurious gift, presented to King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden when he visited Augsburg in the spring of 1632.

Since then, this "Reise-Wunderkammer", with its many objects, such as stuffed animals from distant lands, rare pearls and precious stones, coral and ostrich eggs, has been in Sweden´s possession. Hainhofer designed such furniture for progressive nobles and the wealthy upper class who wanted to exhibit their sense of cosmopolitanism and curiosity, as well as wealth and education. Virtually everything that looked strange and mysterious, that exuded art and skill was presented. Chinese porcelain and globes, wax figures, skulls, mother-of-pearl plates, silver coconuts, music boxes - the more diverse a cabinet was, the better.

The intellectual, empirical and artistic study of these objects came to be the starting point of the modern scientific approach. The purpose of my paper is to examine the musical pack of cards that house the collection of the art cabinet. This multifunctional piece of furniture in ebony, which can save as a dressing table or pharmacy, contains musical instruments and a large number of games as well as an altar. I will concentrate on the function of the musical playing cards within the framework of the art cabinet concept, the aim being to find out what function they had. Was the actual intention to make music with the musical deck of cards? If so, this begs the question, who would have been able to do this and how?

In contemporary society temporalities in different scales coexist, cooperate and collide. Clock time serves as a main reference for time, although a lot of processes have nothing to do with clock time and can’t be measured by its scales. One of the dissertation’s points of departure is that temporal narratives is a key factor for affecting how people act and think, and therefore there is a need for visualizations, conceptual figurations and cognitive objects for complex forms of time. The dissertation evolves around art works, visualizations and theories that deal with today’s multiple temporal forms and narratives. One of the questions the dissertation sets out to answer concerns how temporality is visualized in contemporary art and visualizations. It also aims to demonstrate the relevance of visual studies in the new field of environmental humanities. A number of temporal concepts are explored in relation to art works. One such concept is heterochrony, a term referring to a multifaceted temporality, that art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud claims is common in contemporary art. Another is timescapes, a term for an entangled temporality, described by sociologist Barbara Adam, and chronoscopy coined by philosopher Paul Virilio, referring to an extremely short-termed perspective. Space of flows and space of places are concepts formulated by sociologist Manuel Castells, denoting the spatiotemporal logics that have emerged in the network society, where citizens simultaneousley can exist in physical and virtual spacetimes. Also two concepts for a vast time span are discussed: anthropocene, a suggested new geological era, and the long now, a perspective formulated by the artist and musician Brian Eno. One conclusion is that complex and sensous understandings of temporality can be accomplished through art works and visualizations. Artistic expressions have the potential to inspire, worry and affect viewers and produce narratives of the multiple temporalities embedded in climate changes. Multiple forms of temporality can be found in the discussed works, and the narratives that emerge are entangled and heterogenous and speak of heterochrony, chronoscopy, and anthropocene, that is, of temporal forms that cannot easily be related to a human lifetime or to everyday understandings of time.

The French anthology Nouvelle Histoire de la Photographie, published in 1994 under the editorship of Michel Frizot and translated into English in 1998, has been recognized as presenting a new way of writing the history of photography. Its precursors were surveys of the development of photography as an art, imbued by a modernist aesthetics of media specificity. Conversely, Nouvelle Histoire de la Photographie is generally acknowledged as having illuminated more aspects of the multifaceted medium of photography, used for many ends other than art. While this article recognizes the book's departure from the model once provided by the histories of art, it claims that it has not similarly departed from the modernist evolutionary tendencies of its earlier precursors. In renouncing the influences from the history of art, it has in fact made these even stronger, turning the book into a celebration of the medium in itself.