#the museum of Jurassic Technology

[drathanasius]

The illustrious @drbarty 's marvelous parable The Doctor And The Dragon has been given its proper pride of place in my sanctum sanctorum.

[obliscence]

[dionysus-complex]

the inaccessibility of different parts of this city makes me sad too because before I moved here I was living in rural Arizona and the thought of having an entire metropolis at my fingertips was very enchanting. but if you're not in one of a few specific neighborhoods LA really feels like a small town in some ways - like due to the difficulty of getting anywhere here my actual day-to-day life is mostly confined to the same 5 places within about a ~4 mile radius of my apartment, and yes I can go see concerts if I'm willing to drive an hour and pay for parking but when I lived in rural AZ I also could go see concerts if I was willing to drive 90 minutes to Phoenix and pay less for parking than I would in LA

[daimonios]

mfw obliscence and theories of forgetting and the problem of matter

[cobaltsoulsearcher]

Isn’t this cool?

[loneberry]

Photo 1: David Wilson with a dove that was paralyzed after suffering from pigeon protozoal encephalitis :( Rest assured the sweet creature is well taken care of by MJT friends.

Photo 2: Lisitsa the wise-eyed dog also depicted in a mural in the “Fauna of Mirrors: A Catadioptric Bestiary” exhibit. She was a stray found on the LA River who likes to sing whenever David plays Eastern European music on his accordion.

Whatever happens to me and my life, I am so grateful I found the Museum of Jurassic Technology, that exalted temple to wonder that is unlike any place in the world, a place that happens to be tuned to the exact frequency of my soul. I knew it the first time I stepped into the place, into that other world, that other time, the time of enchantment, of imagination—how lucky one is to find one’s soul mirror in one’s lifetime! When Eva and David gave me a sneak peek of the exhibit they’re working on I asked about the Arabic text on the wall. “It’s an Ibn ‘Arabi quote. He is the main inspiration for the new exhibit.” I gush about my love of Ibn ‘Arabi and David is surprised to discover we’ve fallen down the same rabbit holes. So many things I love are found at the MJT: obscure world music, natural history, slow cinema, mysticism, diatoms, the potency of childhood fancies, mad and obsessive figures, flowers, candles, weird instruments, animals/bestiaries, the wondrous dimensions of science, the deepest mysteries of nature, coincidence. Even the books in the bookstore are idiosyncratic titles that I happened to also be into, like Harmonies of Heaven and Earth: Mysticism in Music from Antiquity to the Avant-Garde or a book about sunflowers.

I’m gonna miss the museum while I’m away.

[cassadyzaneart]

🌱June 2023 🌱

a chaotic month but it’s ended on a high note!

salamander sticker by @nepeteaa, bottom left postcard by leigh ellexson, upper right print by lily brielle

[mummer]

okay hi if by any random chance any of you have out of the box recommendations for stuff to do/see in LA let me know right now immediately and if you don’t never speak to me again

[johnesimpson]

Singing in the Second Month, Voices in the Cold

Jim Harrison, Hazrat Inayat Khan, and a rumination on maybe hearing too well: 'Singing in the Second Month, Voices in the Cold'

[Image: a dust devil waltzing across the surface of Mars, as captured by the HIRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. You can listen to the sound of a dust devil sweeping over the Perseverance surface rover and read more details about it here; you can read more about sound in the Martian atmosphere, in general, here, at the source.] I’ve pulled a couple of quotations from whiskey river…

[luannudell]

THE EYE OF THE STORM: VERMEER IN BOSNIA

THE EYE OF THE STORM: VERMEER IN BOSNIA

This article was originally posted on my Radio Userland blog on Sunday, October 2, 2005.  This summer, I created a special “artist’s table” for our local coffee house, Prime Roast. The owners, John and Judy Rogers (who also happen to be our good friends!) commissioned artists who were also regular customers to create “art coffee tables”. When the final table is completed, there will be a grand…

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from the Associated Press (AP):

More than 80 years ago, a beautiful butterfly called Xerces Blue that once fluttered among San Francisco’s coastal dunes went extinct as stately homes, museums and parks ate up its habitat, marking the first butterfly species in the United States to disappear due to human development.

But thanks to years of research and modern technology a close relative of the shimmery iridescent butterfly species has been reintroduced to the dunes in Presidio National Park in San Francisco. Dozens of Silvery Blue butterflies — the closest living relatives of the Xerces Blue — were released in the restored habitat last week, officials said Monday.

Scientists with San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences utilized the Academy’s genetic sequencing capabilities and analyzed Xerces Blue specimens in their vast collection to confirm a group of Silvery Blues in Monterey County, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of San Francisco, could successfully fill the ecological gap left by the Xerces Blue.

“This isn’t a Jurassic Park-style de-extinction project, but it will have a major impact,” said Durrell Kapan, a senior research fellow and the lead Academy researcher on the project. “The Silvery Blue will act as an ecological ‘stand-in’ for the Xerces Blue, performing the same ecosystem functions as both a pollinator and a critical member of the food web.”

[ifuckinglovedinosaurssomuchjesus]

On the subject of Dinosaur Documentaries...

So Life On Our Planet dropped a few days ago, another installment of this seeming boom of these kind of shows since Prehistoric Planet last year, and it got me thinking about this whole little niche genre.

The very first "Paleodoc" was released in 1922, made by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History to educate museum goers on how the fossils they saw were collected and prepared. This began the format I like to call the "Talking Heads" Paleodoc which is mainly in the form of interviews or narration over actual footage of Paleontologists at work with the occasional "Live" Dinosaur for visual aid. These are by far the most common form of dinosaur documentary you'll find, even today, mainly because they're cheap to produce and fit in the general style of most science documentaries.

For many decades throughout the 20th century, Paleodocs were pretty rare. They would pop up time to time, and with the sudden influx of attention they got after Jurassic Park, we got some really good ones. Yet they were all the same Talking Head types. What really changed the game was the good ol Magnum Opus of the field: Walking With Dinosaurs.

WWD pioneered the second type of Paleodoc I believe to exist, which are the "In Their World" Paleodocs. These are different in the fact they focus almost entirely on the live visual aids, with the human presence being limited to narration or brief pauses for context. They're meant to simulate the modern nature documentary, like Planet Earth, that focus more on showcasing animal behavior with state of the art filming techniques than being a source of in-depth science.

The success of WWD cannot be overstated, and I have to say I do find the In Their World format a lot more engaging and easier to connect with. They portray the wonder of prehistory spectacularly, letting audiences get emotionally connected in the animal characters the story creates, even if this has lead to criticisms of anthropomorphism. These programs also almost always use real footage of modern day earth for their prehistoric creatures to roam on, which I'm sure is very sad for the people who want to see their favorite dead plants on screen.

The Walking With... series would expand into sequels and spin-offs and Nigel Marven, and other companies like Discovery would jump on the bandwagon and release their own takes on the concept, but by the mid 2010s the format had basically died out. We'd get one or In Their World style doc every few years until we just didn't get anything. Outside of the occasional TV special that reused When Dinosaurs Roamed America footage, it was empty.

It took until Disney's Live Action remake of The Lion King of all things for that pendulum to start swinging again. Seeing those expressionless CGI cats got Jon Favreau thinking about how he could use this technology and the talented people behind it to make something really cool, and we got Prehistoric Planet.

And, in a repeat of Walking With Dinosaurs, we're seeing more of these In Their World type shows. The original guys behind WWD are even making a comeback with their own series, Surviving Earth. Plus even more little hints and rumors of massive incoming projects from overexcited paleontologists trying not to break their embargo.

It looks like the 2020s will be another resurgence in these types of spectacle Paleodocs, and while a good ol Talking Head will always be there, I can't help but get excited for these animated spectacles and all the weird and wonderful ways they flash those visual aids across our TV screens.

[monologuerhead]

Radiohead public library

The idea of the archive is a romantic one: in the age of information technology who can resist the pull of a centralized archive? Not any who has ever followed a trail of hyperlinks through the channels and nooks of Wikipedia. I find myself pulled into the romance of the archive drawn by the hint of knowledge that is just out of reach. The archive is just one way to make sense of the themes that have dominated the 20th century onwards*; cycles of repression, isolation, and capital make themselves clear almost immediately with any sort of sifting into the history of information technology (which is tied inextricably to the history of the archive), but in ways that are difficult to categorize and quantify.

This interest lead me to look into the radiohead public library. In its thoroughness (and their rare willingness to include an archive of their own websites, in the memory hole!) I have been pleasantly surprised to find a reflection of the original memex proposed by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 essay “As We May Think”, a labyrinth of articles linked by the paths of those who have read them before, and open to further linkages as the reader proceeds on. The memex could be seen as the prototype for any website stitched together by hyperlinks, a la wikipedia or the encyclopedia britannica, or more obscurely certain sections of the museum of jurassic technology’s website, and it is through the memex’s associative potential that a nonlinear (even networked) model of the world can be studied for its array of information, displayed for casual consideration, or even used to hypnotize the pursuant into a fictionalized version of events (for example, I still have yet to figure out how close to consensus reality the history of the museum of jurassic tech that is featured on its website. Clicking through the site itself is a trippy experience).

The mind fills the gaps between dream imagery with narrative and the cuts between movie scenes with implication— could the same be true for the spaces between hyperlinks, or even the silence between one tiktok video and the next? What is the meaning that links one thing to another? The Dewey Decimal System incorporates within its classification incredible bias against marginalized groups (thankfully, bias that is, albeit slowly, being addressed) simply in the way that information in the form of published books is sorted into one group or another. Through this sorting information of a slippery kind is introduced into the unwary unconscious. A connection between ‘x marginalized group’ and ‘abnormal psychology’ (DDC 301(dot)4157), has been made in the mind of the pursuant irrationally, and without any supported evidence, anecdotes, or even necessarily logic.

This is an important distinction between these hyperlinked archives and the Borgesian ‘total archive’ introduced in the short story The Library of Babel. The Library of Babel simply presents information at its rawest and most indigestible- disregarding all meaning, all truth, and all direction, the pages of its books contain more or less entire nonsense unless one is willing to use the website to find a specific hex that will repeat to you the phrase that you have asked for. Sure, it contains the summation of all human knowledge (within the english alphabet), but only at infinitesimal odds does one stumble upon meaning within its halls. It is perhaps better (or at least more sensical) if the map is smaller than the territory.

I wonder if in the present day the algorithm is at odds with the old system of hyperlinks. The algorithm approaches with a seemingly benign offer of information and media— arranged on a plate you hardly have to make the connections yourself. It’s far more coherent than the Babelian library, but its system of organization is just as dense and nonsensical (at least to the user, I have no idea what’s going on in the back end. Ping pong tables and swanky apartments in Brooklyn?). The threat within the algorithm is that the connections themselves are unstable and irrational, based and reinforced on the patterns that people already move within, but also directing their movement towards undemocratically controllable goals (I was about to simply say uncontrollable goals, but I realized that yes, there are people behind the algorithm directing it to hit certain metrics of responses or views or emotions or whatever). Being irrational, they’re difficult to rationalize, understand, and either follow further, outside of any given algorithm, or deprogram from the pursuant themself. I’m reminded of Burrough’s cut-up technique that he uses for The Soft Machine and the kind of magical terrorism that he inflicts upon his least favorite cafe. Information will resolve into meaning and meaning will condense into (re)action whether consciously or unconsciously. Even the space within paragraphs, even sentences, requires a willingness to find associative potential.

And so here I am back to my romantic archive, (let’s pretend wikipedia) where I can pretend to see within the spaces between a kind of orderly, genteel meaning, where I the pursuant can follow my own heart down the isles, tracing my own steps in a trail of purple hyperlinks. Or if I’m in the depths of the past twenty-five years of archived radiohead websites, I can find a surreal landscape where I can only partially direct my path through lyrics and images both familiar and unfamiliar; things that pertain to the year that the site was archived and things that did not reappear until much, much later (burn the witch). Still, despite all its surrealism, meaning surfaces like the white whale, and the ship goes down with its hunt.

Anyway, I wrote this all on a whim. I like to pretend to be 45 years old. I like radiohead.

*I’d be very open to extending this date further back but unfortunately I haven’t found a whole lot of material that goes further than that— or maybe I’m just not that interested in anything much older

[hollowtones]

would bibi's species lay eggs like a kiwi or like a quil? they are a silly little bird and i think it would be funny to have a disproportionate egg to their body

This reminds me: I went to the Museum of Jurassic Technology when I was in LA recently. Extremely cool and very funny establishment. I want to go back some day. They have an enclosed roof garden where you can get tea and ginger snaps and there's a lot of birds that live there. Some very curious pigeons came VERY close and they are so damn round and white ball kind of bird. Bibi's never meant to be a specific kind of bird, but it still made me laugh to remember "some birds are just like this, huh!"

Anyways, Bibi lays gigabite-sized files of garbage data. Good work, Bibi.

[extinctionstories]

What do you think of companies like colossal, who are working to bring back the mammoth and thylacine, among others? I’m on their email newsletter list because I’m fascinated and feel the need to keep up with their progress but will it ever actually happen? I’m not convinced. Hopeful, but not convinced

Thanks for the ask! I hope you don’t mind if I ramble a bit, haha; as with all extinction stories, this is something that I have a lot of feelings about.

For as long as I can remember, the various Mammoth People have been making announcements like clockwork that we “will have a live mammoth within ten years!” The first time I heard it was, oh, about twenty-five years ago.

Back then, the plan was to clone directly from permafrost tissue; my understanding is that now the strategy has shifted to gene-editing an elephant to make it into a mammoth. I’ve also heard similar ideas thrown around about trying to make a thylacine out of a numbat or Tasmanian devil, or a Dodo from a Nicobar pigeon. At that point, I have to wonder what the point of it all is?

Professedly, we want to bring these animals back in order to heal the wounds we have left in the web of life. To have them step back into their places, as though they had never left. But how could a genetically-modified numbat or elephant ever fill such bespoke shoes? Even if we were capable of it, how would we even begin to “program” the instincts and behaviors of animals of which we know so little?

Do we, instead, simply want the satisfaction of seeing a lost animal standing in front of us (or at least, something that looks like one)? Anyone who loves extinct species is familiar with the hunger for photos, videos, sound recordings—anything, to see them. Will we be happy if science can present us with the living, breathing equivalent of a museum’s goose-feathered imitation Dodo? A Disneyland sort of creature, like Franklin Dove’s unicorns, with no natural place outside of some big budget exhibition?

(Has the existence of rebred Tarpans and Heck Cattle soothed the ache we feel when we look at cave paintings of ancient horses and bulls?)

Personally, I would jump at the chance to see an extinct animal be alive again, in any form or capacity. Even just seeing a realistic CGI reconstruction of a passenger pigeon flock, or a Steller’s sea cow, would absolutely thrill me. Selfishly, I can admit that I do just want to see them—to have that lost experience of knowing what it was like to look at these lost creatures. As long as I feel that way, I can’t judge de-extinction efforts too harshly.

The fact is, though, that DNA is much more fragile and complicated that anyone could have guessed during the first heady days of Jurassic Park.

When Celia, the last living bucardo died, the effort to clone her was already in progress. The team had so many factors on their side: tissue samples collected while Celia was still alive; an ideal proxy species to carry the cloned offspring; a thorough understanding of the biology and reproductive mechanisms of goats. It was as close to an ideal situation as could be hoped for. Nearly 300 embryos were created; a single one survived to term. That clone died minutes after birth, due to a malformation of her lungs, giving the bucardo the rare distinction of being the only animal to go extinct twice.

And that’s not even getting into the problems presented by the theoretical cloning of egg-laying animals (which also represent the majority of extinct species).

Technology progresses in ways we could never imagine. One day, I’m sure the things that these groups promise will be possible, and more; we’ll discover the cure for cancer, and the cure for regret. For the time being, though, de-extinction is a self-indulgent distraction. It’s attention-getting clickbait, at the expense of animals that are still here to save—a plan to raise the crumbling hulk of the Titanic, while ignoring a thousand other ships sinking around us without a lifeline.

I know some of the companies involved do state that they intend to use their discoveries and funding to benefit extant endangered species, but I don’t think it undoes the damage that is done every time a website runs a headline like, “This Company Is Bringing Back the Dodo by 2030!”. It all erodes the gravity of extinction in a way that greatly concerns me. The more times a person sees de-extinction presented as a simple, achievable matter, the closer they will come to the conclusion that, well, extinction isn’t forever. And if the loss of a species can be so easily reversed, then why should anyone be overly concerned about its prevention?

[transgenderer]

The Museum of Jurassic Technology at 9341 Venice Boulevard in the Palms district of Los Angeles, California, was founded by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson in 1988.[1][2] It calls itself "an educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic",[3] the relevance of the term "Lower Jurassic" to the museum's collections being left uncertain and unexplained.[4]Museum of Jurassic Technology, 9341 Venice Boulevard, Los Angeles, served by the Culver City, California, post officeRotten Luck: Decaying Dice of Ricky JayFairly Safely Venture: String Figures and their Venerable Collectors

The museum's collection includes a mixture of artistic, scientific, ethnographic, and historic items, as well as some unclassifiable exhibits; the diversity evokes the cabinets of curiosities that were the 16th-century predecessors of modern natural-history museums. The factual claims of many of the museum's exhibits strain credibility, provoking an array of interpretations.

The museum contains an unusual collection of exhibits and objects with varying and uncertain degrees of authenticity. The New York Times critic Edward Rothstein described it as a "museum about museums", "where the persistent question is: what kind of place is this?"[4] Smithsonian magazine called it "a witty, self-conscious homage to private museums of yore . . . when natural history was only barely charted by science, and museums were closer to Renaissance cabinets of curiosity."[2] In a similar vein, The Economist said the museum "captures a time chronicled in Richard Holmes's recent book The Age of Wonder, when science mingled with poetry in its pursuit of answers to life's mysterious questions."[7]

Lawrence Weschler's 1995 book, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, And Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, attempts to explain the mystery of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Weschler deeply explores the museum through conversations with its founder, David Wilson, and through outside research on several exhibitions. His investigations into the history of certain exhibits led to varying results of authenticity; some exhibits seem to have been created by Wilson's imagination while other exhibits might be suitable for display in a natural history museum. The Museum of Jurassic Technology at its heart, according to Wilson, is "a museum interested in presenting phenomena that other natural history museums are unwilling to present."[8]

The museum's introductory slideshow recounts that "In its original sense, the term, 'museum' meant 'a spot dedicated to the Muses, a place where man's mind could attain a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs'". In this spirit, the dimly lit atmosphere, wood and glass vitrines, and labyrinthine floorplan lead visitors through an eclectic range of exhibits on art, natural history, history of science, philosophy, and anthropology, with a special focus on the history of museums and the variety of paths to knowledge. The museum attracts approximately 25,000 visitors per year.[9]

fuck this is awesome? is it possible this is the coolest museum in LA? or am i just high. does this suck?