Display Completion

Scraping the colour off the beaks and eyes of the ducks.

Ready to go.

Rubber Ducks

During a Pacific storm on January 10, 1992, three 40-foot containers holding 29,000 Friendly Floatees plastic bath toys from a Chinese factory were washed off a ship. Two-thirds of the ducks floated south and landed three months later on the shores of Indonesia, Australia, and South America. The remaining 10,000 ducks headed north to Alaska and then completed a full circle back near Japan, caught up in the North Pacific Gyre current as the so called Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Many of the ducks then entered the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia and were trapped in the Arctic ice. They moved through the ice at a rate of one mile per day, and in 2000 they were sighted in the North Atlantic. The movement of the ducks had been monitored by American oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer. Bleached by sun and seawater, the ducks and beavers had faded to white, but the turtles and frogs had kept their original colours.

Between July and December 2003, The First Years Inc. offered a $100 US savings bond reward to anybody who recovered a Floatee in New England, Canada or Iceland. More of the toys were recovered in 2004 than in any of the preceding three years. However, still more of these toys were predicted to have headed eastward past Greenland and make landfall on the southwestern shores of the United Kingdom in 2007.

I find this story fascinating and it gave me the idea to bleach my rubber ducks. I tried bleaching them and the colour didn't come off, so I have decided that I will go ahead and display them in water however I will put some bleach into the water so that the colour might fade eventually as it would do from the sun and seasalt if they had been found at sea.

[story relating to photo]

New Objects

I roamed the shops and scoured my room looking for objects that would fit and these some of the things i found. 

Marc Quinn

'Quinn’s oeuvre displays a preoccupation with the mutability of the body and the dualisms that define human life: spiritual and physical, surface and depth, cerebral and sexual. Using an uncompromising array of materials, from ice and blood to glass, marble or lead, Quinn develops these paradoxes into experimental, conceptual works that are mostly figurative in form.'

These pieces show flowers frozen cryogenically. Flowers that would never grow together or grow in this way. It's unnatural nature.

Sara De Bondt, ET typeface

Sara De Bondt is a london based graphic designer who created a font called 'FuturaET' for the Barbican art gallery and their Martian Museum of  Terrestrial Art show. I'm going to use this font for the labels of my display and below is the mushroom one. It says the name of the species of the mushroom in latin above and then in english and then at the bottom, circa 2012.

Language

Over time there have been several fictional languages designed for games, films and novels etc. Some are made based on the sound (Simlish - the language of the people in the game The Sims) without having set grammar or written alphabet whereas others are fully created such as 'Klingonese', the language devised for the movie Star Trek.

I am going to be making an advert, which is promoting a new display or collection at a post apocalyptic museum, and therefore you could ask, how do we even know that the alien species use written language; what if they use telepathy? If they did have a written language would it bare any resemblance to our language? Would symbols be gone because they have no meaning anymore? In short, just how much of our language and mindset will be gone and how similar will the new species be to us?

For my first attempt, I have used a font called Marlett which is made up of a lot of user interface icons off've windows. Whilst these would have no meaning to the species because they wouldn't even know what computers are it is possible that they could come across something from our past that may make them think these shapes were part of our language.

S&F

Adverts for the Museum of Natural History, Stuttgart, Germany. Designed by SCHOLZ & FRIENDS, GERMANY, Berlin.

Pickling in Ethanol

After some more research I have found out that for me to preserve plants or fruit I would need an ethanol/water solution which is what is generally used these days rather than the formaldehyde solution used in the past by the likes of Damien Hirst. 

I have decided that there is not enough time nor is it feesable for me to get and work with these chemicals and so I must pursue a way to make my exhibit appear real however just using water or something else.

http://www.botany.unimelb.edu.au/herbarium/files/MakeHerbSpec.pdf

more experiments

The liquid in the mushroom cup has gone completely red, and I like how the mushrooms looks in the water however an eggshell is more realistic as you could ask how a fresh mushroom would survive if human kind doesn't?

Labelling

Typically, displays within museums, rooms in the museum and even whole museums have labels to describe what the viewers are seeing and why. Natural history type displays usually contain a latin name for the species being displayed. You could argue that post apocalypse, a new species wouldn't have any idea of the english language never mind the latin for the items they find, however I think that labelling my displays with both will make it more believable and make it obvious that whats being shown is part of a futuristic museum. On the other hand, the lack of label could demonstrate the complete lack of knowledge about the 21st century that the new inhabitants of Earth have.

Latin for what I have experimented with so far:

• Apple - Malus domestic
• Cyclamen - Cycalmen Pseudibericum
• Mushroom - Agaricus Bisporus
• Chicken - Gallus galls domestics
• Egg - Ovum

Also, objects are dated according to when they are estimated to have been created. I will therefore date my works with an 'approximation' of when the new species believe they came from. For example, circe 2010. Again, you could ask how they would even know what year it was at their time. 

(Above, the first known display label, circa 530BC)

Mütter Museum

This medical museum is located in Pensylvania and contains 'a collection of medical oddities, anatomical and pathological specimens, wax models, and antique medical equipment'. Photographs of the various exhibits show what to us is weird, alien and shocking. What if post apocalyptic museums displayed normal human bodies or even plants or fruit and they were wondered at in the same way?

Experiments

Slice of Apple in Boiling Water
= Goes brown and a little soft from the heat, floats

Slice of Apple in cold water
= floats, day 1 remains the same

Cyclamen Leaf in cold water
= leaf floats with stem below, day 1 remains the same

Cyclamen flower in water, in freezer
=

Large flat mushroom in cold water
= floats, water turns red at the bottom, day 1 remains the same

5% formaldehyde solution

Damien Hursts well known work 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in The Mind of Someone Living' is like a large scale version of what I want to do. Where Hurst used Formaldehyde solution for the preservation of his shark however due to the dangers to health it can cause I will not be experimenting with it. (pictured above also is the guppy version of Hursts work created by him for the Reflex Art Gallery Miniature Museum)
Instead I shall experiment with various ways of displaying fruits, vegetables, flowers and leaves, and decide which looks most like an alien museum display.

Incompatible with Life

Lena Herzog photographed the "Lost Souls", unborn foetuses and newborns who's muations meant they didn't survive and were preserved at the Narrenturm, Austria.

http://www.lenaherzog.com/press/incompatible-life

What if i presented specimens in a similar way except they weren't deformed or alien, they were just everyday things? 

Initial Thoughts

Introduction