The Museum of Jurassic Technology
Museums
9341 Venice Blvd
Culver City, CA 90232
The Museum of Jurassic Technology is like a 1980s museum experience in a Victorian morgue setting. It offers random oddities in a way that would predate the more showy and vulgar Ripley’s Believe It or Not type museums, according to their video manifesto. They want to focus more on the artifact that carries with it historical and social/cultural importance rather than on it being an oddity. They succeed in tiny parts. But as a whole, it was jumpy and had functional issues due to jurassic 1980s technology. Some examples:
- A few of their corded and fat beige telephones that you hear stories out of after pressing a button were broken.
- To my chagrin as a lover of really old photos, more than 2/3 of the daguerreotype photos that were supposed to light up did not light at all.
- The lighting was so inconsistent in general; it was as dim as a candle in some parts and brighter with other displays – in the same room.
- A few of the videos were out of order with signs posted.
They really should be playing that video manifesto on loop on a projector in the gift shop, rather than at a nondescript tiny television. It really explains what they were going for. They have some cool things on display in general. To sum it up: microscopic sculptures. I can kind of see how they were trying to go against the flow of museums today with a ‘museum based on a museum’ that would pre-date humanist and scientific thought and favor 1600s ‘magical’ thinking. They just don’t do that well at explaining it. It’s reasonably confusing and an idiosyncratic experience for people who are open-minded. My parents, for example, would hate this place.
3D Animation of Waves at the Museum of Jurassic Technology
Useful: 6 Funny: 1 Cool: 2
10/8/2017