I held off on this one for a long time because no one wants to be 'that guy'.
I don't know if you guys know this, but I'm kind of close to the powers that be here at Veneer Magazine, I don't want to brag but I'm just saying...anyway, just so you know ok...
Anyway, I didn't really like the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
What I mean is that, let's be honest, I liked it just fine. It was an excellent way to spend an afternoon: I was very entertained. But let's just be serious: I felt like the whole place was an exercise in questionable faith with a Tom Waits aesthetic. I had the Tom Waits phase in high school and if you're going to come at me with "At least it makes you, y'know, think...whether it's showing you stuff in good faith, or if ANY museum is showing you stuff in, y'know, good faith.." stuff: please. I didn't want to have to say this: I was born "thinking". I'm not really that turned on by seeing something that "at least makes me think about it".
I can eat a pizza and when I eat it I think about it.
My girlfriend just does not like to eat cheese, result: I have been "at least thinking about" pizza for days. The grass is always greener, know what I mean? (We had delicious lamb roast yesterday and I'm talking about pizza - am I some kind of beast?)
Anyway, the pizza museum in LA was closed and I went to this technology place. And for the most part, encountering an institution that played so freely but consistently with display conventions and the like was a joy, but it was when I got to a display on a beautiful but (as presented to us) entirely opaque system for doing symbolic logic (a subject loaded with sadness and regret for me) with building blocks and hand-signals that I really lost the track.
It's like they were showing me this system as if it were a joke, or just something nice to look at: like a Design School thesis show. Or worse, like jackasses who laugh about the way we used to make and use knowledge but who can't find anything funny about the way we do it now. Like somehow what was shown was there because at one point, someone had erroneously connected it to the outside world, and instead of wondering at the possibility that opened, we were to laugh at the gap between it and the world we know. It was obscene and sad. At it's worst it felt like Cabinet Magazine fascinationism with a McSweeny's sense of 'the quirky'. It felt like a cool smart person that every time you meet them you want to punch them in the face. It was hard to get so worked up when you were looking at dioramas of streamlined trailers or a theory of memory based on cones, but when they took it to symbolic logic made into physical holdable forms I went nuts. Encountering beautiful material presented in such a straightforwardly ugly, base and uncaring way made me nearly vomit. Listen assholes: MY EYES ARE UP HERE!