The Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Science, des Arts et Métiers, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond D'Alembert, was to have been the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment. The project sought to encode in one database all human knowledge concerning the sciences, arts and trades. The editors sought to accomplish this task by exploiting a modern and readily available technology of information storage and retrieval--printing. In the end, the project comprised seventeen volumes of text and eleven volumes of illustrations.
In order to achieve the goal of total comprehension, the texture of the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné was bifurcated. This necessary duplicity is immediately evident in the disjunction of the title. As an Encyclopédie, the text endeavored to provide an overview of the entire domain of human knowledge, demonstrating both its structure and interconnections. As a Dictionnaire Raisonné, it explained the general principles and necessary details of each individual science and art. These two objectives were understood to be mutually incompatible. The former emphasized breadth, while the latter advocated depth. The incompatibility of these two goals is rooted in an analogy to the science of optics and has been affirmed by the structure of subsequent information systems.
The Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné dispensed with this incompatibility through its very systems-architecture. The overview of the entire system of human knowledge was presented in a global map or flow chart that demonstrated the relative position of each science or art.
The detailed explanations were inscribed in another place. They followed the flow chart in a data base that was arranged alphabetically. And the illustrations, which were necessary components of the detailed presentation of
the mechanical arts , were included in a separate set of volumes.
The interconnections between the encyclopedic overview, the detailed dictionary definitions, and the numerous illustrations were indicated by a network of cross-references. In this way, the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné not only pushed print technology to its limit but delimited the functions and rationale of multimedia and hypertext .
The general layout of the Kleptoman Cell conforms to this encyclopedic systems - architecture. The rear window serves as a global map or catalogue of the plethora of information that comes to be embedded and stored in the cell walls. These two separate elements, in turn, communicate though a complex system of cross-references and pointing devices.