[BCMA] Artifact or Artifiction?

[Moderated BCMA subscriber listserv.]

If you are not already familiar with it, check out the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California. http://www.mjt.org/main2.html   

Many of this great little museum's exhibits cleverly challenge a visitor's personal concepts of credibility and the personal inner moment when credibility shifts to otherness or enlightenment.  "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder" is a fine book about the museum, but I would highly recommend going to the museum before reading the book in order to have a personal first hand experience.   However, in place of going there, visit the brilliant web site.  Most of the museum's texts plus elaborations are there.   For starters, look into:

"Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter" http://www.mjt.org/exhibits/delson/oblisci.html
or
"Tell the Bees.... Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition"
http://www.mjt.org/exhibits/bees/bees.html

MJT sets a high standard of what a museum can accomplish for its visitors.  After confronting the delightful MJT style of challenging artefact and artefiction, it is hard not to come away inspired by the greatness of human potential and the feeling of personal mental refreshment.

Cuyler Page
Curator, Maritime Museum of BC
Bastion Square, Victoria, BC
(250) 386-8588  ext.106
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