Museum of Jurassic Technology

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The Museum of Jurassic Technology

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is a museum located at 9341 Venice Boulevard, in the Palms district of Los Angeles, California, USA. It has a Culver City address (zip code 90232). It was founded by David and Diana Wilson in 1989. A small branch of the museum is located inside the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum in Hagen, Germany.

1 Overview
2 Quotations
3 Trivia
4 See also
5 External links
6 References

[edit] Overview

The museum claims to have a "specialized repository of relics and artifacts from the Lower Jurassic, with an emphasis on those that demonstrate unusual or curious technological qualities." This explains the museum's name and also suggests its puzzling nature, since the Lower Jurassic ended over 150 million years before the appearance of hominoids and in particular before anything that could be called technology. See geologic time scale.

Magnified photo of a carving of Pope John Paul II in the eye of a needle

Magnified photo of flowers made from individual butterfly wing scales

Its catalog includes a mixture of artistic, scientific exhibits that evokes the cabinets of curiosities that were the 18th century predecessors of modern natural history museums. The museum was the subject of a book by Lawrence Weschler in 1995 entitled Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, and the museum's founder David Hildebrand Wilson received a MacArthur Foundation grant in 2003. The museum claims to attract around 6,000 visitors per year. In 2004, a 35-minute documentary about the museum was produced entitled Inhaling the Spore; this film is available on DVD in the museum's gift shop.

Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder portrays the museum, and David Hildebrand Wilson's role as curator, as a work of conceptual art. The exhibits are shown to be riddled with factual errors and peculiar attributions. However, many of the exhibits that, initially, seem to Mr. Weschler to be entirely fabricated turn out to have a factual basis. He sees the museum as a commentary on the authoritarian character of most public museums and upon the trust that patrons place in those authorities. The museum is a reminder of such historical periods as the beginning of the Renaissance and the turn of the 20th century, times when increased world travel and rapid scientific progress resulted in artifacts that blurred the boundaries between what was considered possible and impossible.

The museum has its own vibrant publication program that produces leaflets and books about museum exhibits. These publications include The Eye of the Needle: The Unique World of Microminiatures of Hagop Sandaldjian, by art critic and curator Ralph Rugoff and Bernard Maston, Donald R. Griffith and the Deprong Mori of the Tripsicum Plateau, which purports to describe the discovery of a bat that can fly through solid objects using X-rays instead of sound waves as a navigational tool. Many of these books are published in conjunction with the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information.

The museum maintains a number of permanent exhibits including:

An exhibit on household myths of years past (for example, if a child holds a dying creature in his or her hands, that person will develop a tremor in their hands as an adult).
A collection devoted to trailer park culture, entitled "Garden of Eden On Wheels".
A collection of micro-miniature sculptures and paintings, such as a sculpture of Pope John Paul II carved from a single human hair and placed within the eye of a needle.
Microscopic collages depicting flowers and other objects, made entirely from individual butterfly wing scales.
A collection of stereographic photographs.
A small room dedicated to unusual letters and theories received by the Mount Wilson Observatory circa 1915–1935. (Collected in the book No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again: Letters to Mt. Wilson Observatory, 1915-1935 ISBN 0-9647215-0-3)

The museum giftshop sells booklets devoted to all these exhibits.

In 2005, the museum was expanded with the addition of a tea room and a small theater for presenting special video productions.

[edit] Quotations

"… The public museum as understood today, is a collection of specimens and other objects of interest to the scholar, the man of science as well as the more casual visitor, arranged and displayed in accordance with the scientific method. 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.' " — Museum of Jurassic Technology, Introduction & Background, p.2

"Confusion can be a very creative state of mind; in fact, confusion can act as a vehicle to open people's minds. The hard shell of certainty can be shattered…" — David Wilson in an interview with author Lawrence Weschler, originally aired on NPR, October 27, 2001.

"The rarest and most precious knowledge is not that which is imposed, but rather, that which is absorbed, inhaled almost, from the ephemeral substance of the world in which we are contained." - from the Charter of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information.