#science and technology museum

[theres-whump-in-that-nebula]

There’s a real paranormal attraction near me open at night!!! :D

…but everything is done in such a tourist-attracting way that the whole business appears to hinge upon sensationalized exploitation of the mentally ill >:(

[itshuiz-blog]

#photo

#art

#biscornu

[conhecimento-racional]

LEIA O LIVRO UNIVERSO EM DESENCANTO!

[elizabethkiwm]

[mechanicsandmagic]

Five german steam locomotives shunting in Neuenmarkt-Wirsberg station.

* * * * * * * * * *

Fünf Dampfloks rangieren in Neuenmarkt-Wirsberg.

🎥 Mine

[auroravirtualbankio]

Why not create our own cryptocurrency bañķ.fi?

Who wants to build a community cryptocurrency bank with me in the metaverse pegged to real world value? I've a few the coins sorted

[subbalakshmisastry]

Science for Kids Visvesvaraya Science Museum Bangalore

[tianalaurence1]

Written by Timothy Laurence

[markashtonlund]

Next Selection

Patterns (1956) Last week I received notice that First Launch, the sequel to First Signal, was an Official Selection of The Flight Deck Film Festival. When I decided to submit First Launch into the festival circuit, it was my hope that festivals would keep the “First World Universe” in conversation. I use the word conversation as it is every filmmakers goal to get their project recognized. As…

[severianurth]

In the dusky corridors of the Citadel, where shadows stretched long and the light of the New Sun filtered through high, narrow windows, I found myself drawn to an unfamiliar corner of the Library. There, amidst shelves of crumbling manuscripts and the smell of ancient parchment, stood a collection of strange devices, relics from an age long past. They were artifacts of such peculiar design that even the Curators, those wizened keepers of knowledge, seemed hesitant to touch them.

I approached a particularly curious contraption, its form both alien and familiar. It was an intricate assembly of gears and switches, its surface marred by the patina of countless ages. As I examined it, a voice broke the sacred silence of the Library.

"Greetings, I am Mitch," it said, as though from the shadows themselves. I turned to see a man, his eyes bright with an almost childlike wonder, yet his demeanor spoke of one well-versed in the arcane secrets of these machines. "If you do not know me, I am one of the folk that helps Master Samuel maintain this collection. He is ever occupied with his own studies, and there is much to be done."

Mitch moved with a fluid grace, his hands caressing the aged metal of the devices as if they were dear friends. "One of my tasks," he continued, "is to breathe life back into these relics, to make them more than just dusty memorials to a forgotten past. These displays are not mere curios; they are works of art, functioning and alive, ready to teach us the secrets they hold."

He gestured to a cabinet filled with an array of instruments. "I have recently affixed new labels to these displays, but they are more than just descriptions. They are keys to understanding. This is not merely a display of artifacts; it is an interactive journey through history. You can press buttons and witness the miracles of a time long gone."

Mitch’s enthusiasm was infectious, a spark in the dim gloom of the Library. He led me to another display, one filled with more devices, each more enigmatic than the last. "This is another of our projects, ever improving, ever evolving. You may recall the 25-line private automatic exchange we restored, adding a dial that allows you to activate different lights and sounds, bringing the whole mechanism to life."

His words were incantations, summoning images of ancient operators and the silent hum of forgotten technology. He reached for a set of peculiar devices on a nearby shelf. "These, for instance, are Doll's eye indicators, or eyeball indicators. Their true name, I believe, has been lost to the ravages of time, but their function remains. They are electromechanical marvels, used in the old manual telephone exchanges."

He demonstrated the mechanism, his hands moving deftly as he explained. "When one of these flops down, it signals the operator that someone is calling. The operator would then connect the call, speaking to the person on the other end. It is a dance of electricity and motion, a symphony of clicks and clacks."

Mitch’s eyes shone with the light of the New Sun as he described his plans for the indicators. "What if we wire them so that when one activates, it triggers the next, creating a cascade of motion and sound? The mechanical delay between each activation would create a mesmerizing sequence, a tribute to the ingenuity of our ancestors."

He set to work, his fingers weaving the threads of the past into a tapestry of the present. As he finished the final connection, he stood back, a smile playing on his lips. "Moment of truth," he murmured, and with a flick of a switch, the display came to life.

The indicators moved in perfect harmony, each one activating the next in a graceful dance. The sound of their movement filled the Library, a whisper from the past that echoed through the halls. Mitch watched with a satisfied smile, his pride evident. "There is much to learn from these ancient machines," he said, his voice filled with reverence. "They are more than just relics; they are lessons in innovation and creativity."

As I stood in that dimly lit hall, surrounded by the artifacts of a bygone era, I felt a profound connection to the past. These relics, brought to life by Mitch’s skill and passion, were a testament to the enduring spirit of humanity. They were reminders that even in the face of the New Sun, the past could still illuminate the path forward.

In that moment, I understood that the Library was not just a repository of knowledge, but a living, breathing entity, ever evolving, ever teaching. And in the quiet hum of those ancient machines, I heard the whispers of the ages, a symphony of innovation and discovery that would echo through the corridors of time.

[techtuv]

This Gangster Car From 1932 Has Bulletproof Glass and Portholes for Tommy Guns

In cities like Chicago, Al Capone and Bugs Moran in the 1920s and 1930s, gangsters went to great lengths to protect themselves from rival gangs and law enforcement, often resorting to extreme measures to stay one step ahead. This 1932 Cadillac is proof of that and is on display at the Historic Automobile Touring Museum in Roscoe, Illinois.

[itshuiz-blog]

toe

[gender-trash]

I would be very interested in hearing the museum design rant

by popular demand: Guy That Took One (1) Museum Studies Class Focused On Science Museums Rants About Art Museums. thank u for coming please have a seat

so. background. the concept of the "science museum" grew out of 1) the wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities), also known as "hey check out all this weird cool shit i have", and 2) academic collections of natural history specimens (usually taxidermied) -- pre-photography these were super important for biological research (see also). early science museums usually grew out of university collections or bequests of some guy's Weird Shit Collection or both, and were focused on utility to researchers rather than educational value to the layperson (picture a room just, full of taxidermy birds with little labels on them and not a lot of curation outside that). eventually i guess they figured they could make more on admission by aiming for a mass audience? or maybe it was the cultural influence of all the world's fairs and shit (many of which also caused science museums to exist), which were aimed at a mass audience. or maybe it was because the research function became much more divorced from the museum function over time. i dunno. ANYWAY, science and technology museums nowadays have basically zero research function; the exhibits are designed more or less solely for educating the layperson (and very frequently the layperson is assumed to be a child, which does honestly irritate me, as an adult who likes to go to science museums). the collections are still there in case someone does need some DNA from one of the preserved bird skins, but items from the collections that are exhibited typically exist in service of the exhibit's conceptual message, rather than the other way around.

meanwhile at art museums they kind of haven't moved on from the "here is my pile of weird shit" paradigm, except it's "here is my pile of Fine Art". as far as i can tell, the thing that curators (and donors!) care about above all is The Collection. what artists are represented in The Collection? rich fucks derive personal prestige from donating their shit to The Collection. in big art museums usually something like 3-5% of the collection is ever on exhibit -- and sometimes they rotate stuff from the vault in and out, but let's be real, only a fraction of an art museum's square footage is temporary exhibits. they're not going to take the scream off display when it's like the only reason anyone who's not a giant nerd ever visits the norwegian national museum of art. most of the stuff in the vault just sits in the vault forever. like -- art museum curators, my dudes, do you think the general public gives a SINGLE FUCK what's in The Collection that isn't on display? no!! but i guarantee you it will never occur, ever, to an art museum curator that they could print-to-scale high-res images of artworks that are NOT in The Collection in order to contextualize the art in an exhibit, because items that are not in The Collection functionally do not exist to them. (and of course there's the deaccessioning discourse -- tumblr collectively has some level of awareness that repatriation is A Whole Kettle of Worms but even just garden-variety selling off parts of The Collection is a huge hairy fucking deal. check out deaccessioning and its discontents; it's a banger read if you're into This Kind Of Thing.)

with the contents of The Collection foregrounded like this, what you wind up with is art museum exhibits where the exhibit's message is kind of downstream of what shit you've got in the collection. often the message is just "here is some art from [century] [location]", or, if someone felt like doing a little exhibit design one fine morning, "here is some art from [century] [location] which is interesting for [reason]". the displays are SOOOOO bad by science museum standards -- if you're lucky you get a little explanatory placard in tiny font relating the art to an art movement or to its historical context or to the artist's career. if you're unlucky you get artist name, date, and medium. fucker most of the people who visit your museum know Jack Shit about art history why are you doing them dirty like this

(if you don't get it you're just not Cultured enough. fuck you, we're the art museum!)

i think i've talked about this before on this blog but the best-exhibited art exhibit i've ever been to was actually at the boston museum of science, in this traveling leonardo da vinci exhibit where they'd done a bunch of historical reconstructions of inventions out of his notebooks, and that was the main Thing, but also they had a whole little exhibit devoted to the mona lisa. obviously they didn't even have the real fucking mona lisa, but they went into a lot of detail on like -- here's some X-ray and UV photos of it, and here's how art experts interpret them. here's a (photo of a) contemporary study of the finished painting, which we've cleaned the yellowed varnish off of, so you can see what the colors looked like before the varnish yellowed. here's why we can't clean the varnish off the actual painting (da vinci used multiple varnish layers and thinned paints to translucency with varnish to create the illusion of depth, which means we now can't remove the yellowed varnish without stripping paint).

even if you don't go into that level of depth about every painting (and how could you? there absolutely wouldn't be space), you could at least talk a little about, like, pigment availability -- pigment availability is an INCREDIBLY useful lens for looking at historical paintings and, unbelievably, never once have i seen an art museum exhibit discuss it (and i've been to a lot of art museums). you know how medieval european religious paintings often have funky skin tones? THEY HADN'T INVENTED CADMIUM PIGMENTS YET. for red pigments you had like... red ochre (a muted earth-based pigment, like all ochres and umbers), vermilion (ESPENSIVE), alizarin crimson (aka madder -- this is one of my favorite reds, but it's cool-toned and NOT good for mixing most skintones), carmine/cochineal (ALSO ESPENSIVE, and purple-ish so you wouldn't want to use it for skintones anyway), red lead/minium (cheaper than vermilion), indian red/various other iron oxide reds, and apparently fucking realgar? sure. whatever. what the hell was i talking about.

oh yeah -- anyway, i'd kill for an art exhibit that's just, like, one or two oil paintings from each century for six centuries, with sample palettes of the pigments they used. but no! if an art museum curator has to put in any level of effort beyond writing up a little placard and maybe a room-level text block, they'll literally keel over and die. dude, every piece of art was made in a material context for a social purpose! it's completely deranged to divorce it from its material context and only mention the social purpose insofar as it matters to art history the field. for god's sake half the time the placard doesn't even tell you if the thing was a commission or not. there's a lot to be said about edo period woodblock prints and mass culture driven by the growing merchant class! the met has a fuckton of edo period prints; they could get a hell of an exhibit out of that!

or, tying back to an earlier thread -- the detroit institute of arts has got a solid like eight picasso paintings. when i went, they were kind of just... hanging out in a room. fuck it, let's make this an exhibit! picasso's an artist who pretty famously had Periods, right? why don't you group the paintings by period, and if you've only got one or two (or even zero!) from a particular period, pad it out with some decent life-size prints so i can compare them and get a better sense for the overarching similarities? and then arrange them all in a timeline, with little summaries of what each Period was ~about~? that'd teach me a hell of a lot more about picasso -- but you'd have to admit you don't have Every Cool Painting Ever in The Collection, which is illegalé.

also thinking about the mit museum temporary exhibit i saw briefly (sorry, i was only there for like 10 minutes because i arrived early for a meeting and didn't get a chance to go through it super thoroughly) of a bunch of ship technical drawings from the Hart nautical collection. if you handed this shit to an art museum curator they'd just stick it on the wall and tell you to stand around and look at it until you Understood. so anyway the mit museum had this enormous room-sized diorama of various hull shapes and how they sat in the water and their benefits and drawbacks, placed below the relevant technical drawings.

tbh i think the main problem is that art museum people and science museum people are completely different sets of people, trained in completely different curatorial traditions. it would not occur to an art museum curator to do anything like this because they're probably from the ~art world~ -- maybe they have experience working at an art gallery, or working as an art buyer for a rich collector, neither of which is in any way pedagogical. nobody thinks an exhibit of historical clothing should work like a clothing store but it's fine when it's art, i guess?

also the experience of going to an art museum is pretty user-hostile, i have to say. there's never enough benches, and if you want a backrest, fuck you. fuck you if going up stairs is painful; use our shitty elevator in the corner that we begrudgingly have for wheelchair accessibility, if you can find it. fuck you if you can't see very well, and need to be closer to the art. fuck you if you need to hydrate or eat food regularly; go to our stupid little overpriced cafeteria, and fuck you if we don't actually sell any food you can eat. (obviously you don't want someone accidentally spilling a smoothie on the art, but there's no reason you couldn't provide little Safe For Eating Rooms where people could just duck in and monch a protein bar, except that then you couldn't sell them a $30 salad at the cafe.) fuck you if you're overwhelmed by noise in echoing rooms with hard surfaces and a lot of people in them. fuck you if you are TOO SHORT and so our overhead illumination generates BRIGHT REFLECTIONS ON THE SHINY VARNISH. we're the art museum! we don't give a shit!!!