{"id":5597,"date":"2018-02-17T08:00:04","date_gmt":"2018-02-17T08:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/?p=5597"},"modified":"2023-07-12T21:54:00","modified_gmt":"2023-07-12T21:54:00","slug":"museum-of-jurassic-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/misc\/museum-of-jurassic-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"Museum of Jurassic Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/mrericsir\/40266777702\/in\/dateposted-public\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/farm5.staticflickr.com\/4724\/40266777702_d840d6f36c.jpg\" alt=\"Museum of Jurassic Technology\"\/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Over the past few years I&#8217;ve told pretty much anyone who&#8217;ll listen about my fascination with the type of real life interactive adventures from the likes of Nonchanance, including their Jejune Institute, Elsewhere Public Works, The Latitude, etc. <sup>[citation NOT needed]<\/sup> and every now and then someone responds by telling me about this oddball thing in LA County called the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Museum_of_Jurassic_Technology\">Museum of Jurassic Technology.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">From <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/misc\/venice-california\/\">Venice<\/a> I took a reasonably fast 30 minute bus ride (good thing I&#8217;d ordered and pre-loaded my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.taptogo.net\/\">TAP Card<\/a> in advance) down Venice Boulevard to this strange museum in Culver City.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After buying your ticket &#8212; technically it&#8217;s a donation &#8212; there&#8217;s no prescribed order to the museum, but if you enter the exhibit area and make an immediate left there&#8217;s a TV screen which shows a video at the press of a button explaining what you&#8217;re about to see&#8230; sort of. It starts off in a long-winded explanation of the history of museums, then finally hones in on the (fictional) history of the Museum of Jurassic Technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s worth noting here the word &#8220;Jurassic&#8221; is intentionally nonsensical; once you get past this the meanings of the exhibits start to fall into place. Nothing here is at it seems, and furthermore it&#8217;s all a series of stories that <em>parody<\/em> the very concept of a museum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I don&#8217;t want to spoil too much because it&#8217;s sort of against the rules (no photos are allowed) but I&#8217;ll describe some of my favorite exhibits in my own words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>A pair of western scientists explore a &#8220;savage&#8221; people&#8217;s demonic experiences only to find the phenomenon is the result of a species of unusual bats.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>A room full of paintings of dogs pays tribute to each dog in the Soviet space program.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>An exhibit of early 20th century motor homes inexplicably compares them to Noah&#8217;s Ark and the Garden of Eden.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>An ordinary stairway features dioramas of staircases.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>A series of &#8220;cat&#8217;s cradle&#8221; string manipulations is treated as a major exhibit across two rooms with interactive exhibits.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This &#8220;museum&#8221; originally opened in the late 1980&#8217;s and has expanded since then according to one repeat visitor I spoke with. Some of the exhibits were not operational during my visit, though despite spending over an hour and a half I didn&#8217;t see or hear everything before it closed for the night. While I usually ignore museum gift shops, I wound up buying a book detailing the museum&#8217;s exhibits because it was just that good.<br>&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>My recommendation<\/strong>: If you&#8217;ve ever read this blog you&#8217;re probably the target audience for people who enjoy subtly bizarre humor. This is the museum for people like us &#8212; by all means pay it a visit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the past few years I&#8217;ve told pretty much anyone who&#8217;ll listen about my fascination with the type of real life interactive adventures from the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","slim_seo":{"title":"Museum of Jurassic Technology - MrEricSir.com","description":"Over the past few years I've told pretty much anyone who'll listen about my fascination with the type of real life interactive adventures from the likes of Nonc"},"autoblue_enabled":true,"autoblue_custom_message":"","autoblue_shares":[],"autoblue_post_url":"","autoblue_publish_document":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1253,15,1250,1252,1251,222],"class_list":["post-5597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc","tag-culver-city","tag-humor","tag-los-angeles","tag-museum-of-jurassic-technology","tag-museums","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5597"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9928,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5597\/revisions\/9928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}