Special LEGO exhibition at Grand Rapids Public Museum in 2020

 

The giant LEGO honey bee suspended overhead in the foyer of the Grand Rapids Public Museum is a vivid example of the wondrous sculptures and dioramas created for display in the special exhibition starting in fall 2020. This video clip starts with the scale model of the hosting museum itself, adjacent to the (LEGO) Grand River, made from more than 4,000 pieces of the colorful plastic building materials. Then the camera turns to show the larger-than-life bee above.

Seeing both the miniature LEGO museum in its plexiglass case and the honey bee brings to mind several thoughts: the creative impulse to make such things, the faint whiff of irony that the honey bee representation is made from the petroleum product that modern life depends on but which also has led to habitat degradation and destruction that accelerates loss of bee populations, the nature of public engagement and awareness, including the role that museums play for sparking interest in the natural world and forming relationships between humans and all the other creatures sharing the planet. Not everyone coming to the museum will pay the separate admission to the LEGO exhibition, but for those who do browse the sculptures and dioramas, the intricacy of the models and creativeness of the makers will make an impression. But it is an open question with unclear answers to know whether new curiosity will arise, new respect will develop for non-human creatures and their habitats, and by extension an increase in awareness for the consequence of personal consumption assumptions and expectations will occur.

While the pandemic rages in Michigan the museum controls the number of visitors by online (or telephone) reservation of admission tickets and member passes accepted each day. In this video clip some of the visitors queued at the admission desk show their face masks. Perhaps this heightened microbe consciousness from the sustained health mandates from the Michigan health department will contribute slightly to greater public curiosity of the natural world, scientific tools and logic, and renewed respect for facts supported by data instead of 'gut feeling' or the hubris of bald claims made in loud, politically motivated performances that Donal J. Trump incarnates.

 An album of G.R.P.M. photos and video clips can be seen at https://www.flickr.com/photos/anthroview/albums/72157717510759343

Getting to know whales by museum engagement

 At the Grand Rapids Public Museum in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan there is an impressive display of a mature Finn whale killed around 1900 and later donated by the private owner near Jackson, Michigan to the museum, where it is suspended about 35 or 40 feet above the main floor hallway. In the past year or two a large video display (twin monitors about 10 feet apart and mounted in portrait orientation to accommodate visiting groups) has been added.

 

The animated scene shows a mature Finn whale swimming along with accompanying text (and voice) in both English and Spanish on a continuous playback loop, first one language loop and then the other. It would be interesting to document the bi-lingualization of the permanent exhibitions here: how the decision came about, how visitor native-language was surveyed, how the content was edited (native speaker or team of speakers? online machine translation? Castilian Spanish or one of the varieties of the Western Hemisphere?)

Some of the facts on the screen concern daily diet of krill, organ size (tongue of 18 feet, heart, brain, and so on). This video clip shows part of the recording in Spanish when biological facts are given. The animation illustrates each organ singled out by showing the steady beat of the whale's tail, but instead of the skin view or the skeleton view in motion, now we see the organs specified in the description, all the while moving as if in motion.

The large video screens are mounted low enough for 5-year olds to approach the display before looking overhead to the ceiling where the skeleton hangs. For the generations accustomed to video animation, this kind of window into knowledge, spectacle, and curiosity is normal and natural and desirable. But for people over the age of 35 or 40 it still seems a little futuristic to find a multimedia production of such high quality outside of a movie theater. 

No matter if the digital presentation seems normal or seems futuristic, though, it does seem to attract passing visitors to pause long enough to figure out what is being described. Then they either drift to the next visual hook, or settle in, prepared for the full course of what is being told. In the end, some visitors satisfy a small appetite for marine biology and others expand their appetite. What was little known, rarely experienced, or not even wondered about across the wide oceans' leviathans now has come alive, if only for a short while under the shadow of the overhead whale. Through such things as museums, stories from people in one's world or those seen on TV and online, little by little the relationship and knowledge of life on Earth grows. Of course, the exact character of the human to non-human relationship changes across history as technology makes possible wider and deeper experiences, and then there is variation according to language/culture (worldview, livelihood traditions, and so on), too. Meantime the encroaching human life endangers the habitat for all other forms of life. So there is more frequent intersection of human and wild things, some of which are endangered or one step away from extinction.