During college, I worked for a summer at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, an eccentric, and poignantly beautiful, victorian-style domestic museum housed in a storefront on Venice in Culver City, California.
Over the years since, I’ve kept in touch with David Wilson, The Museum’s founder and auteur, visiting whenever I’m in LA. One of the many perks of maintaining this relationship (beyond Wilson’s constantly surprising depths of personal warmth and technical knowledge) has been exposure to the international network of ‘outsider’ institutions to which The Museum belongs: from its neighbor, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, to St. Petersburg’s Freud Dream Museum.
Today, I made my first pilgrimage to The Museum in more than a year and wasn’t nearly disappointed on this count. While taking me on a tour of the now nearly complete exhibit of Innuit and 19th century folk string art for which I helped The Museum acquire some funding, David showed me the materials for an attached temporary display of puzzles and toys for children on loan from the Institute for Figuring.
So, what, exactly, is the Institute for Figuring? David described it as “great” and “having to do with math”. Knowing the exquisite caliber of David’s taste in museums, I found this vague description tantalizing and committed to find out more.
According to their website:
The Institute For Figuring is an educational organization dedicated to enhancing the public understanding of figures and figuring techniques.
The Institute’s interests are twofold: the manifestation of figures in the world around us and the figurative technologies that humans have developed through the ages. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding, the tiling patterns of Islamic mosaics and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring.
I don’t know how clear this makes things, but, linguistically at least, we are definitely in MJT territory — elusive as to specifics, but clearly contained within that fascinating zone where the cold-eyed scientific swoons into the arms of the personal and poetic.
The relationship only seems closer when you realize that The Institute is itinerant (as The Museum was in its beginnings) and features, on its website, exhibits with titles such as Lithium Legs and Apocalyptic Photons, Philosophical Toys (the show making an appearance at the MJT), and, my personal favorite,
Crocheting the Hyperbolic Plane. Further, the website features a graphic (pictured at the top of this post) depicting “the location of the Institute for Figuring on the Mandelbrot Set”, which is highly reminiscent of the famous allegorically crashed microscope in The Museum’s front hall.
If you are at all interested in math, its history, and/or museological whimsy and/or nineteenth century science and live in New York or LA (seemingly the only places The Institute’s work is currently available for viewing), I would love to hear some firsthand reports from its existing events and exhibitions. To facilitate, here are The Institute’s calendar of events and its schedule of exhibitions.
Tagged: museum, jurassic, technology, David Wilson, LA, Institute, Figuring, math
I am so glad David Wilson is still hard at work making the observed world a bit less transparent.
I notice the Institute is just a bit over toward the “Imaginary” axis (at a spot of “relative reality”, mathematically speaking). I am curious what the veridical topology of recursive “truthiness” might imply in empirical practice (i.e., I think Wilson and Stephen Colbert might have more in common than first meets the eye).