TERATA

The story

TERATA is a return to an older project of mine. In 2015 I harvested over half a million stray images from the Internet Archive's book-digitization process — everything its text recognition could not read: illustrations, photographs, diagrams, decorative ornaments. It was a kind of digital beachcombing: picking up what the tide of digitization washed aside, and building a tool to sort and study the finds. Searching them for spirals years later, I came across a dense cluster of shell engravings from nineteenth-century natural history books. Shells had never particularly interested me — which is usually a good reason to look longer.

Looking longer, I fell into the history of shell collecting — a history of genuine mania. In the Amsterdam of the tulip craze the same fortunes chased rare shells; a Dutch poet mocked the "shell-lunatics" in one breath with the tulip fools, and at one auction in 1796 a single cone shell brought several times the price of a Vermeer sold the same day. The science never quite outgrew the cabinet either: the study of the living animal became malacology, the respectable discipline, while conchology — the science of the shells left behind — remained the collectors' pursuit, a little suspect, a little too much in love with its objects.

It also led me to teratology, the old science of monstrosities — from the Greek "térata": monsters, marvels. Conchology has exact names for shells that deviate from their plan: sinistral specimens that coil the wrong way, scalariform ones whose whorls pull apart, growth that breaks off and resumes under different rules. The collectors of that era prized these above all; a fine monstrosity was worth more than a perfect shell.

This collection follows that logic to its end. Of these one hundred specimens, nearly all are deformed — here the flawless shell is the great rarity. Each specimen is grown rather than drawn: a growth rule winds the shell turn by turn, raises its ribs, cords and spines, and paints its pattern along the growing edge, much the way living shells are built. A specimen's nature — its form, its surface, its particular deformities — is fixed for good. But within that nature it is never done: time and again it lets go of its present shape and grows into another one its rules allow, wandering the space of its possible forms without ever settling. Its keeper can pick it up, turn it, and set it spinning. The specimen is a living piece of software, rendered in real time in the browser; the still image is only its portrait.

From the cabinet — a short history of shell madness

Plate II — the deviants: limpets, worm-shells, uncoiled and irregular forms, ammonites. Emanuel Mendes da Costa, Elements of Conchology, London 1776.

Plate IV — the beauties: murexes bristling with spines, turrets, cones. Same work. The spined and snouted specimens of TERATA descend from this plate.

Shell collecting was once a speculative fever. In the Netherlands it ran alongside the tulip mania and often gripped the same people — the poet Roemer Visscher mocked the "shell-lunatics" together with the tulip fools. At an Amsterdam auction in 1796, a single Conus cedonulli — "I yield to none" — sold for 273 guilders while a Vermeer in the same sale brought 43.

And within that fever, the connoisseurs paid their highest premiums not for perfection but for error: sinistral shells that coiled left where their species coiled right, scalariform freaks whose whorls had pulled apart, specimens whose growth had broken and healed under new rules. Teratology — the study of monstrosities — was the collector's secret aesthetic long before it had a name in the books.

Plate scans courtesy of the Internet Archive — the same digitization process whose leftovers began this project.

The collection

Six of the one hundred — shown in scrambled order that reveals nothing about which token holds which specimen.