Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
The OCEANS of W EST 79TH STREET
HOW SCIENTISTS, CRAFTSPEOPLE AND DIGITAL ENGINEERS CREATE AN EXHIBIT AT THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.
THE 576- SQUARE- METRE SPACE IS DIVIDED INTO CIRCULAR ROOMS, GUIDING VISITORS DEEPER UNDERWATER
PREFACE T HE MIRROR
The shiny floors of the Hall of North American Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History, normally echoing with the footfalls of 14 000 daily visitors, are quiet. In a glass case, 4,2 × 2,4 m, a model bull elk – actual size, clad in actual elk skin – bugles to attract more females, even as three already in his harem graze on the chokecherry and aspen around an approximation of Trappers Lake in northwestern Colorado. The diorama is normally behind a sheet of glass, but the glass is broken.
Bec Meah is here to fix it. Meah is a preparator, one of the trained fine artists – she’s a sculptor – who builds and maintains the museum’s exhibitions. She’s working with Stephen Quinn, dean of the museum’s preparators. He’ll retire in a few years after four decades in the department of exhibition. Quinn tells Meah about all the tricks the old preparators used on the dioramas in this hall, the oldest of which date to the 1940s: marble dust for snow. Motor oil as the dark, slick soil traversed by a wet animal. Static electricity on puffs of cotton to raise the fuzzy surface of a flower.
Quinn asks Meah to look inside the bull’s mouth. She climbs a ladder, and when she looks down into its maw, frozen mid-bugle, she sees a small mirror. It picks up the lighting in the diorama, and – subtly – it glows. Meah thinks about the preparators who worked in the same cavernous workshop on the museum’s fifth floor that she does, and the calculations they must have made about the angle of the glass, and the position and intensity of the lights. They knew that without the mirror, the inside of the elk’s mouth would be pitch black, and that wouldn’t look real. The human visitors would see that it didn’t look real. And even if they didn’t quite know why it didn’t look real, something would be slightly off, and that would defeat the purpose for the museumgoers who trudged through Central Park in New York and into this place 3 200 km from Trappers Lake, to look through this glass window into a world that existed before their own.
103 DAYS UNTIL OPENING
E ARLY E XPERIMENTS I N T HE CONSTRUCTION OF BRAINS Brittany Janaszak arrives at the museum around 10 am. She’s on a team that has just begun work on a major exhibit called ‘Unseen Oceans’. The museum stages one or two new exhibitions each year, each of which explores the cutting-edge science on a specific subject, and the ocean is next. It will run for a year, then travel for up to a decade, educating people around the world.
The Exhibition Department has fourteen weeks to build ‘Unseen Oceans’.
The American Museum of Natural History was founded in 1869 and has the distinct feel of a great library of antiquity. There are 25 buildings on its 7,28 ha campus on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The museum holds dinosaur fossils, Native American art, mummies, and a slice of a tree with rings dating back to 550 CE. It contains a graduate school, a 500 000-volume research library, Neil degrasse Tyson, and a 34-million-object collection, including (in the bowels of some storage room pungent with formaldehyde, in a metal tank the size of an above-ground pool) a giant squid.
On this morning, Janaszak negotiates a labyrinth of marble halls and grand staircases, and approaches a freight elevator in the museum’s northwest corner, which she rides to the fifth floor. Its blue double doors open directly into the exhibition workshop. The space used to be the museum’s coal-fired power plant before New York City had a power grid.
Objects from the collection are shoved in every corner. Death masks of numerous species hang on every wall – sometimes the preparators will pull one down to check the exact shape of the ridge above a baboon’s eyes, or the texture of a lizard’s scales. At some point, the room was divided in two.
The front space is for fine, quiet work, but Janaszak makes her way to the back, under the roar of an industrial fan. She skirts past the paint booth and stops in front of a fume hood, from which she retrieves two fairlylarge model brains.
‘Unseen Oceans’ is an exhibit about the fuzzy edges of our knowledge of the 70 per cent of the planet covered by water. The exhibition consists of eight main rooms, each focusing on the work of a scientist who uses innovative techniques to study his or her part of the ocean. It will start at the surface, and each room will take visitors deeper – closer to the ocean floor.
What Janaszak is working on is for the second room, about the topmost layer of water and the tiny creatures that float in it. Each model brain looks like a shrivelled pituitary gland that has been pulled out through someone’s nose in a horror movie. They’re made of cotton painted with orangeyred acrylic paint. They are stuck through with pins and suspended in the mouths of Dixie cups, where they’ve been dripping clear resin, which Janaszak dipped them in to create a hard outer shell. At a workbench she uses pliers to remove the pins and sets the brains next to two halves of a waxy blue mold. It’s the mold for some kind of insectile creature. She explains that this thing she is making is clear, so she’ll cast it in clear resin, but its organs – like these bug brains – are colourful. They’ve also got to go inside somehow.
She considers the mold carefully. ‘I’m calling it a bug, but it isn’t a bug,’ she says. It’s actually a kind of plankton. ‘I haven’t had my coffee yet.’ The first thing preparators do when they start on a new exhibition is study all the science – if they’re building animals, it’s biology, anatomy, ecology, behaviour. They experiment with building techniques, then move on to the actual build, all in consultation with the museum’s curators. At an art museum, the value of the work is subjective. At Natural History, even if a kid wipes her nose on it, a piece in an exhibition may be her first – or only – encounter with a distant corner of the natural world. The question every preparator confronts with every new build is: Can I be enough of a scientist to get this right, and enough of an artist to make sure people remember it?
Janaszak picks up the two halves of the mold and fits them together. She’s been thinking all morning about this business of suspending the brains inside the resin bodies. The question is whether the brains will float. If they bob even a little as the resin cures, they’ll leave tracks that will be visible under gallery lighting. She screws the mold together with one-inch bolts and holds it away from her. ‘I’ll probably drill a hole in the top somewhere,’ she says, tilting it this way and that. ‘At the highest point. And I’ll orient it so that as I pour in the resin it’ll force the air out.’ Maybe if she does that slowly enough, she can insert the brain during the pour and it’ll stay put.
87 DAYS UNTIL OPENING HOW TO ACCURATELY PAI NT BI OFLUORESCENT SE A L I FE
John Sparks, curator of ‘Unseen Oceans’, makes his rounds. He’s only in his early fifties, and yet he can tell long-ago stories about seeing his hand blow up like a balloon from the venom of a scorpion fish, and getting rammed by a 4.8 m shark in a personal submarine at 700 metres. He has a boyish face and an undimmed enthusiasm for fish. His particular expertise is fish that glow, and the third room of ‘Unseen Oceans’ focuses on his work on biofluorescence – on fish that absorb and give off light.
as a sandbox that becomes ocean, beach and bluffs in real time.
The least formed and potentially most important idea – it’ll be in the exhibition’s last room before visitors are funnelled to the gift shop – is a still-nascent notion of a fully immersive interactive display about conservation. (The team mostly refers to an interactive display as simply an ‘interactive’.)
Alonso’s team is as tied to the science as the preparators are but unbound by the constraints of clay, foam and fluorescent paint. Which means its challenge is a good old-fashioned ticking clock.
25 DAYS UNTIL OPENING HOW TO T E ACH WILDLIFE CONSERVATION
Brett Peterson, an interactive-exhibit developer, has a lot of Xbox Kinects, the video-gaming device that allows people to control a game using body movements instead of a joystick-like controller. In his work area, there are Kinects everywhere. Peterson has one rigged up to the ceiling pointing straight down, alongside a projector oriented the same way. The Kinect maps every object in the room, and Peterson writes software that tells the projector to spit out images based on what the Kinect actually sees.
The lights are off. The projector is spraying the floor with a swirling mass of 7.5 cm polygons. Fish. They skirt any large objects the Kinect has mapped, and when Peterson walks around the room, the fish projections part to make way for him.
The point here is about conservation and the effect of humans on fish populations: The fish on the floor will dodge the museumgoers. If too many people come through, the fish will be trampled and slowly disappear.
Peterson sits at the computer he’s using to debug the software, lights from the projector playing on his face. He’s working on an idea that came from Ariel Nevarez, the team’s technologist, who tends to fixate on finding the one mysterious thing that will change the way visitors think. This is the idea: If you hold out your arms and make a big circle – or, even better, stand together in a circle with a few other people, holding hands – the Kinect will see it, and inside the circle new fish will be born. You’ll create a marine preserve.
The parameter Peterson is adjusting is, essentially, the birth rate. It’s an odd idea, and the question is whether there’s a way to make it clear to visitors how the interactive works, without drawing too much attention to it, which would sacrifice a bit of the magic. So Peterson fiddles with the birth rate. If it’s low, the preserves regenerate the population slowly, maybe unnoticeably. But if it’s high…
Alonso, from interactive experiences, jumps into the middle of the room and circles her arms. Fish explode into being. ‘Woooo!’ she yells, swivelling like a machine-gun turret, spraying newborn fish in every direction.
‘Hold on!’ Peterson says, getting up from his desk. ‘I have to get some of these out. There’s a maximum amount you can have.’ He starts stomping all over the ground.
It’s a start.
T HE GALLERY I NSTALL ATI ON
Construction on the ‘Unseen Oceans’ galleries has been going on for about three weeks. The 576 m2 space has been divided into a series of circular rooms that will guide visitors deep underwater, and the contents of each room are slowly arriving. Bob Peterson (no relation to Brett), Alonso’s animator, has dropped by to see the 13,5 × 2,7 m screen that will show his animation of life-size sea creatures. It requires a three-projector set-up, which they’ve never tried before. The screen
looks good, but the room, like most of the gallery space, is still a mess, scattered with empty vitrines and submarine parts, and carts of tungsten track lighting that was swapped out for UV. Bob finds himself admiring the next room over, which centres on an expanding steel helix. Preparators attach fish to it. Some, cast in soft foam, are speared and bolted into place. Hard-resin models are glued to posts, and then mounted on the rail.
4 DAYS UNTIL OPENING TROUBLE SHOOTING
Brett Peterson is up on a ladder, and Nevarez, the technologist, is playing with sand. He’s rooting around in it, building mountains and digging valleys. Digging down, all the way down, in some cases, to the black tub that holds the sand of this part of the exhibit, the topography interactive.
Peterson is futzing with the settings on another Xbox Kinect. As Nevarez reshapes the mounds of sand, this Kinect reads the heights of the mounds, and its companion projector paints them with a landscape. Peterson and Nevarez have set a certain height as sea level. If Nevarez builds sand up a little higher than sea level, Peterson has programmed the projector to colour it the light ochre of a beach. A little bit higher still, and it’s green grassy bluffs. In Nevarez’s valleys, Peterson makes the colour of the water go from the turquoise of a lagoon to the inky blue of the deep sea.
Except, the network of Kinect and projector is not working quite right. The submarine video game is boring the kids testing it (and confusing adults), the fish in the conservation interactive are getting stuck behind things, and Bob’s still working on the high-resolution rendering of his animation – and now a problem that cameras
have solved for years with mirrors is giving Peterson’s software trouble. This slight offset is wreaking havoc.
‘Okay, look,’ Peterson says. ‘So, if I just do … scale this bit … that’s pretty close! On X … yes or no?’
Nevarez surveys the sand splashed with colour from the projector. ‘Yeah, it’s close on X,’ he says. ‘Okay, so Y,’ Peterson says. ‘Hold!’ Nevarez says. He sweeps his eyes across the tub. “That looks pretty good on Y.’
They try shifting the whole projection set-up over slightly.
‘Hmm,’ Nevarez says. ‘Good everywhere except the centre… It’s doing something weird.’ He’s stumped.
As Peterson and Nevarez stare at the sandbox, three of the museum’s education staff walk up and start playing in it. They get it instantly – start building atolls and shaping seamounts. One of them looks up. ‘You’re going to get lots and lots of happy faces, I promise you.’
‘All we want is happy faces,’ Nevarez says, still half a mind somewhere else. ‘We got talked out of this, a lot.’
Nearby, an older man wearing an ID badge that says ‘Fossil Expert’ mills around. He’s a retiree, and has been a volunteer here at the museum since 2011. He’s walking the gallery to learn the material. ‘Kids know more now than we did,’ he says. It’s the smartphones, the internet. There’s so much that is available now, so easily. But the fundamental appeal of the museum is the same, he says, even as over his shoulder Peterson is up on a ladder messing with a depth camera and Nevarez is playing in scientifically modified sand, and they’re speaking in code about X adjustments and Y adjustments. ‘You don’t need interactive,’ the man says. ‘They still press their faces to the glass.’
OPENING
The first room of ‘Unseen Oceans’ is small, maybe 24 m2, and the walls are the pallid blue of a cloudless day at the beach. A projector, suspended from the ceiling, shines a beach on to the floor – a looping video of surf crashing in and slowly receding. The kids who step into the room stop and stare, momentarily puzzled, at the wash on their feet. Then they begin their descent.
In the second room, Meah’s copepod hangs up against the wall. Under the UV lighting, it radiates a kaleidoscopic palette of delicate colours, like an oyster turned inside out. In the centre of the room, under glass that almost makes it feel like a real collected specimen, sits Janaszak’s plankton. An adjacent placard pictures the plankton, with its disgusting abdomen and terrifying, spindly legs, side-by-side with the alien from Alien. Did it inspire the monster? ‘What do you think?’ parents ask, and their kids look back and forth between the two pictures, mouths agape.
The third room: 75 m below the surface. The steel helix expands like a tornado from the middle of the room, covered in brightly coloured fish. Fishnado. The models, which were flat in the streaming daylight of the fifth floor, look alive in the settled cool blue of the gallery. The fluorescent paints, charged by the UV, take on subtlety and nuance. A few Top: Glimmering clear-resin models of a Phronima ( left) and a diatom in the exhibition gallery. Above: A mock-up of a sonar device. Opposite: Preparator Jake Adams skewers fish models and secures them to the steel superstructure of Fishnado. models sit on tables at chest level for kids to see up close. They’re under glass so the kids don’t mangle them, not that they don’t pretty much always try.
People filter into the fourth room, settle in to seats in front of Bob Peterson’s massive screen, and jump when the giant squid clamps its beak on to the camera – then shriek when a humpback whale swoops in from off-screen and clamps the squid in its jaws. In the fifth room, smiling faces hover over the sandbox while kids create their own ocean floor.
By the sixth room, it’s clear that something happens as people walk through the exhibition. Each room takes them deeper, but it also takes them farther – farther from the hustling city, from the concrete and the asphalt, from the subway, the traffic. Farther from their classrooms and their Snapchat accounts. Farther from the news cycle. Each step they take deeper into the exhibit, they roam farther from the thing they’re actually immersed in, which the kids may not even discern yet – the sea of erratic information that is modern life, deeper all the time.
In the culminating room, a whole pack of children gambol around on hands and knees until they’ve trapped Brett Peterson’s fish in a seething ball, the way massive schools are rounded up by sharks. They pound the ground with open palms, erupt in cries and chants, trying to make the fish disappear. They have surrendered to the exhibition. For the conservation note that completes the descent, Alonso’s team has created a room that transforms kids into sea creatures.
And here a man stands over the children, someone’s uncle or dad or big brother. He’s got an exasperated look on his face, but a dawning smile is cracking on his lips. We all want to maintain a little bit of this inside ourselves, and while the world bombards us – plumps us up with so much that it hurts, so much that we harden ourselves and take no more in, and in so doing become a little less curious, a little more cynical, and a lot less childlike – the museum does quite the opposite. It takes the unruly heap of facts scientists endlessly generate, and shapes them into something you can walk through, shrinking the world of knowledge so it fits into the tiny skull-size space between our ears. The man has his phone out, and even as he says, as gruffly as he can, ‘Okay, okay, okay!’ he quickly snaps a picture so he can remember the scene. Then he says to the group, ‘Let’s go.’
The kids push themselves up to their feet and skitter out the door, out the maze of corridors, into the brilliant light of midday in New York City. Taxis whiz past. A train rumbles under their city of islands.