Sunday, November 1st, 2009
MUSEUM OF JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY
BY SAM POLCER
IT ISN’T EASY TO GAIN A FIRM GRASP ON CULVER CITY, LOS Angeles’ offbeat Museum of Jurassic Technology (www.mjt.org) or its raison d’être. Even its name is confounding: The Jurassic Era took place thousands of years before any kind of technology was invented. But, as administrative director Alexis Claire Hyman points out, such paradoxes, and the leaps of faith necessary to appreciate them, may actually be the point.
“A lot of the exhibits here leave a lot to interpretation,” she says. “They allow people to think and understand for themselves. Some people don’t know what to make of it and are more concerned with whether they’re being tricked or manipulated, rather than taking what they can from the exhibits.”
The museum is a sprawling series of galleries containing a wide variety of collections, many of which blur the line between science and art. There’s “No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again: Letters to Mount Wilson Observatory, 1915-1935,” which displays letters written to astronomers, according to the museum, “by individuals who felt, often with a great degree of earnestness, that they were in possession of understandings or information that should be shared with the astronomers.”
There’s the room containing the “Micromosaics of Henry Dalton,” which has museumgoers peer through microscopes at colorful designs made out of the scales of butterfly wings. Another gallery presents “Rotten Luck: The Decaying Dice of Ricky Jay,” which illustrates the unusual way that dice made out of cellulose nitrate, the first commercially successful synthetic plastic, decompose. Dimly lit corridors connect the galleries—and on the top floor, a woman will you serve you tea, if you so choose. If David Lynch were to open a museum, it’d probably be a lot like this one.
Still, there is a method to this madness: the incongruity of the exhibits is perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the early days of museums as public institutions, when they were, as Hyman says, “unbounded by divisions of art, science and natural history.” And what may seem at first like a completely haphazard assortment of galleries does in fact have an underlying theme.
“There is a thread that runs through the museum of the kinds of knowledge and kinds of technologies that somehow didn’t make it, or marginalized, endangered, vulgarized and rejected ways of thinking,” Hyman says. “It provides an alternative perspective on the way we understand nature and our own human potential to create and build upon the world we’re born into.”
The one exhibit that serves as the perfect representative for this odd and fascinating place is also Hyman’s current favorite.
“It’s called ‘Purification by Sublimation,’ and it was one of the first exhibits in the museum,” she says. “It basically just presents the scientific phenomenon of sublimation. Certain chemicals under certain conditions of pressure and temperature can go directly from the solid state to a vapor state, without passing through liquid, which really defies the most elementary understanding of how materials work. The idea that the solid things around you can vaporize is something that resonates in a really powerful way. I really like that exhibit for its poetry.”
You probably read about sublimation in a middle school science textbook and forgot all about it—but when it’s explained near a display devoted to the strange life cycle of the Cameroon stink ant, it certainly becomes harder to take its existence, along with many other bizarre aspects of the world we live in, for granted.
