The Museum of Jurassic Technology does not feature any objects from the Jurassic period, nor does it showcase anything technological, unless you consider a 17th-century ornate, glass-structured magnetic oracle meant to channel messages from the heavens via magnets as something technological. Don’t worry. I read the placard on it and I still don’t get how it works either.
In fact, every exhibit at Culver City’s Museum of Jurassic Technology confused me. With early 20th-century china plates and lacy children’s bed clothes displayed in coffin-shaped glass cases alongside models of trailer-park homes and a gallery of letters sent to the Mount Wilson Observatory from both religious fanatics and scientists about their thoughts on outer space, no single display of odd curios contributes to an understanding of the museum’s overall goals and purposes.
What I came to realize by the end of my visit, though, was that perhaps the museum is not meant to be fully understood but rather simply experienced in all of its odd glory.
From the street, one cannot see inside the museum. A porcelain Grecian-style fountain attached to the wall trickles water next to a wall-length metal door. A sign next to the door welcomes visitors and encourages them to “use the buzzer” for entrance. However, my roommate Becca and I merely pushed our way through, expecting to at least see some dinosaur fossils ““ this was a “Jurassic” museum, right?
Little did we know, the closest thing to the Jurassic period we would find was a scaled-down model of Noah’s Ark. Welcome to Wonderland.
According to a long and mostly incomprehensible introduction video at the front of the museum, the museum 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 to the scientific method.” Uh, sure.
I tried seeing how “the scientific method” functioned in the context of the museum, but Becca and I simply followed the winding, dark labyrinth of the museum’s corners and corridors, finding objects such as a European mole skeleton and a detailed fruit-stone carving of the Crucifixion as well as a display case from the 18th century of now-extinct moths.
My favorite of the museum’s small corner exhibits was one featuring a plastic model of Madeleine cookies and tea with air vents that visitors could press to smell the cookies and tea. Becca aptly described the “treats” as smelling like old man.
Larger isolated rooms and exhibits proved positively eerie. As we attempted to read the placards of various curios in the museum’s dim lighting, we heard opera music streaming in from a small, dark room.
Around the corner, we saw only a green-tinted portrait of a woman suspended in front of an illuminated white dress in a display case. Becca and I looked at each other and only found the strength to cross the creepy threshold while holding hands.
The room was completely dark but for an additional couple of display cases beneath the glowing dress with old opera sheet music, opera glasses, gloves, fans and a brief biography of a 19th-century opera singer named Madelena Delani.
The deeper we moved through the museum, the stranger the exhibits became.
A room devoted to the work of Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit scholar interested in “magnetism, musicology, astronomy, archaeology and linguistics,” features a striking display of a giant bell wheel he designed that sounds like a thousand wind chimes synchronized together.
A row of microscopes that viewers can look into provides a view of micromosaics created by Henry Dalton, an early 19th-century English naturalist, out of the individual scales from butterfly wings prepared on glass microscope slides.
Becca and I were also fascinated by a room devoted to English superstitions.
For example, one superstition is that if a child sucks on a salted animal tooth, his or her adult teeth will grow to look like that of the animal’s. Another one is that if a person shares a bowl of milk with his or her dog, it will cure his or her fever. Also, sprinkling the urine of the oldest woman in the family over the family’s pets and the other family members is supposed to bring good luck. No wonder people in industrial English cities smelled bad.
Upstairs, one can find a tranquil tea room that may not have waiters but has a giant pot of water from which visitors can serve themselves.
Also, a movie theater screening scenes of Soviet space travel accompanies a gallery of oil-painted portraits of Soviet Space Program dogs. An almost completely hidden gallery locked off by a glass door with “Fairly Safely Venture” written on the outside includes two giant rooms of displays of a “logic alphabet” and different forms of knotting string tricks, like Cat’s Cradle.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology proved a strange, overwhelming experience of the oddest of all oddities.
It could have been natural history, it could have been science or it could have been straight-up history. I’m not sure it really matters. Visiting was akin to falling down the metaphorical rabbit hole into a world of curios and knowledge completely removed from the outside world.
If you want to fall down the rabbit hole, e-mail Cohn at jcohn@media.ucla.edu.