Station Eleven - Museum Project

welcome to Coucourse C

In Station Eleven, Clark began The Museum of Civilization because he wanted to preserve the memory of what came Before. His goal with The Museum of Civilization was to preserve civilization, and he put the artifacts in context--that is, he explained their role in life Before.

Once you start looking for them, museums are everywhere. Some are the ones we usually think of: the L.A. County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; the Art Institute in Chicago; the Louvre in Paris; and more. Others are smaller or less traditional, and some are downright strange:

• the Potato Museum in Blackfoot, Idaho
• the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico
• the Condom Museum in Nonthaburi, Thailand
• the Bunny Museum in Pasadena, California
• the Salabh International Toilet Mueum in New Delhi, India
• the Museum of Clean in Pocatello, Idaho.
• the National Mustard Museum in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin
• the Burlingame Museum of Pez Memorabilia just outside of San Francisco
• Leila's Hair Museum in Independence, Missouri
• The Thing Museum in Dragoon, Arizona

And there are hundreds more. People of all types create and maintain museums which express and exhibit their interests. I have been to many, but my favorite is The Museum of Jurassic Technology on Venice Blvd. in Culver City, CA (I will mention it again, and possibly again).

museum project: the most straightforward? perhaps; the easiest? maybe; the most steps? absolutely

Start your own museum.

You don't actually have to lease a property, collect items and display them; this will be a virtual museum. But you need to plan the museum which will preserve and display some set of artifacts that represent some aspect of civilization.

Choose the topic for your museum. Do you love old tin toy trucks? Musical instruments? Dolls? Stuffed animals? Tractors? Noodles? Nail polish? Regional Guatamalan cooking? Tabletop bar games (such as Skittles and mini-shuffleboard)? It can be anything. To make this project interesting, you should choose something you have a genuine interest in, an interest you want to share. It should also (in some way) represent "Civilization"--what Clark admires in the objects in his Severn City museum.

Aside from that, you may find that the term "museum" has a lot of latitude. Is a collection of wax replicas of famous human beings a "museum"? Is the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland a museum? Is a library a museum? Is Graceland a museum? These may be questions you need to consider, depending on what you choose to exhibit.

can I really do anything? no; there are restrictions :(

IMPORTANT: be absolutely sure you read this section carefully, or you will waste a whole lot of time and get very frustrated

some parameters

• You are not a billionaire; you might raise a little money to sponsor a special exhibit (Kodak might lend you some old cameras, for example), but you cannot afford Van Goghs or Ferrarris or Cray computers. You are limited to $150,000, and unless you are very creative (keeping the museum very small, being the main workhorse, about 1/3 of that will go to your operating expenses (leasing the space, paying staff, keeping inventory for extras such as a gift shop or an on-site cafe, utilities, and so on. So, effectively, you have about $100,000 for your entire collection and exhibit design, no more; that will not buy a lot of expensive things.. Yes, you can do other creative things such as getting temporary loans of special exhibits, but that would require you to do a lot of extra work (if you do figure in such an exhibit, be sure to recognize those sponsors/contributors in your final project :)

• You do not have a "luxe" space like the Getty Center or the Science Center in Exposition Park. Your maximum floor space is 1,500 square feet, about the size of a modest two-bedroom, two-bathroom house. Imagine you have commercial space of about 1,500 square feet in Harbor City or San Pedro or Wilmington. At about $19/square foot for an annual lease, this means you would be paying $30,000-40,000 just for the space annually, so you want to get visitors and sponsors. You can fit quite a lot into 1,500 square feet if you organize it cleverly, but it is not a huge space. The size of your collection has to fit inside it.

• NOTE: feel free to have an even smaller space (maybe you lease the back room of a fabric warehouse to showcase a Museum of Thimbles; again, be clever about it).

how this actuallly helps you

Remember that one part of this project will be the research you do as you develop your exhibits. This research will show up as a (graded) four-to-eight-page research paper. If you had a museum of Sports, your research paper would have to be at least 200 pages because the topic is impossibly huge. If you did a museum of Marvel Entertainment or Disney or computers, your research paper would likewise be at least 200 pages because the topics are impossibly huge. Besides, the Disney Corporation is not going to let you use their name; they have their own parks, stores, museums (they also own Marvel).

So compare these two options:

• A Museum of Baseball: Absolutely NOT! Why not? 1) it has already been done (visit Cooperstown, New York); 2) it is huge; 3) you do not have the money to buy the exhibits, and you do not have the space to show the exhibits; 4) a research paper on all of Baseball would be 400 pages at least, and you do not want to write a 400-page research paper for this class.

• A Museum of Baseball Fan Appreciation Day Giveaways: Absolutely YES! Why? 1) it is a unique, quirky collection (fans could look at a bobble head from the defunct Wrigley Field and a foam finger from Candlestick Park); 2) it is made up of items that could be bought, gathered, donated easily; 3) it could be shown in your 1,500-squre-foot space (each area could be a miniature recreation of a stadium, perhaps); 4) it demands you do some unusual research (and learn something), but it is something you can present in a four-to-eight-page research paper. You should also be able to purchase quite a few examples to fill up your museum with your $100,000 acquisition budget.

Here are two more options for comparison:

• A Museum of Computers: NO! You know why.

• A Museum of Pre-Electric Computing Machines: YES! You would have an abacus, a slide rule, several other mechanical (pre-electricity) computing machines. Not only would these be unusual and interesting (it's not a ho-hum viist to the Dell website), but they would also fit with the novel (the electricity has been knocked out), and would showcase the sort of human effort and innovation that Clark values in the objects in his Museum of Civilization.

Here are two more:

• A Museum of Disney: OF COURSE NOT! Not only will nobody visit this (they would go to Disneyland or just view the information already all over the Web), but you can't get rights to this information, can't afford the artifacts, can't house it all, don't want to do a 300-page research paper.

• A Museum of Disney Theme Park Giveaways: YES! Disney theme parks have given away special tickets, cards, keychains, mugs, etc. to commemorate special occasions over the years. These are relatively small and often available on eBay. You could get the commemorative ticket and pin from Donald Duck's 50th Birthday Party (1984...yes, my wife and I were there), for example. There are loads of tradeable Olympics-style pins; there are the Disneyland Diamond Days Sweepstakes Prizes (a diamond Mickey Mouse hat!). Even if you looked at the international parks, this would be a relatively manageable research topic, and collectors WOULD visit such a museum.

Here are a final two (yes, I am giving you a lot of examples, but it is important that you get this):

• A Museum of Cars: *sigh* NO! First, the topic itself would require you to write a several-hundred-page research paper; you would never fit even a relatively small collection into your space; cars are quite expensive. Even if you narrowed it to foreign cars (too big, too common) or to sports cars (too big, too common) or to just classic cars of the 19th century (too many, too expensive), this would not work.

• A Museum of MatchBox cars: YES! There are actually quite a lot of these, but they are small, and you could actually limit the collection if you focused just on the earlier die-cast cars/trucks that came in the little match boxes before 1968 (why 1968? That's when Hot Wheels launched and took over the miniature car market). Now some of these could actually be pretty expensive, but you could have many representative selections from various releases (look it up if you are curious), and you could easily find images of others that could be displayed. A special room with a 1968 exhibit comparing MatchBox and Hot Wheels seems like a must here.

So to summarize what those examples THAT WORK all have in common--

• they are made up of small things, very specialized things, limited things
• they are not proprietary (you can not do Disney animated movies because you cannot get a license to do Disney)
• they are not impossibly huge (you cannot do make-up in general because it is a completely-unfocused, huge topic with no clear point), and a research paper on make-up in general would HAVE TO BE hundreds of pages long You can do beer bottle caps (they fit in your space, are reasonably inexpensive, have an interesting history you can research, are specialized and unusual. You might also do one facet of make-up (like the history of lipstick in the U.S. with a special exhibit on "killer lipstick") because that has a focus and an interesting special exhibit that you could do your research paper on.

another very important consideration

How will you get people to come (drive across town, pay for parking, possibly pay admission) when they could just stay home and surf for information on pre-electric computers or toy cars on the internet? How do you compete with Westworld, Game of Thrones, and Netflix.

you need to differentiate your museum; otherwise, nobody would come to it

If there is nothing unique or special about your museum, or if the museum is just "stuff" that is simple to find in books, on the internet, on television, then people would not make the effort to visit. So a museum devoted to the music of the B-52's would not draw crowds; people can play those tunes on their phones; they can watch YouTube videos of "Rock Lobster" and "Planet Claire" without leaving the house. If you managed to have all of the actual props and costumes from those videos, then maybe you could do something with them. Hmmm...

Lets' look at another YES / NO pair:

• A museum of The Evil Dead II (NO!); it would not draw anyone becuase people would prefer to sit at home and watch the movie rather than drive, pay for parking, look at a few exhibits (maybe text and still pictures).

  There are also no "things"; it's a movie, so this is really a movie theater, not a museum.

• But what if it were an interactive You Are in The Evil Dead II Museum? (YES!) Visitors would go through exhibits and THEN appear in a green screen studio to re-enact scenes from the movie which they could take home (for a price) on DVD's. That would be pretty unique. Your research might focus on Raimi's movie and how he set up

  clever special FX, props, sets, etc.

  There would also be "things" here (props, backdrops, sets, and even the business end of a film set for visitors to look at, touch, etc.)

and museums are businesses, so how will you make money?

Well, in that "You are in The Evil Dead II Museum" could you sell DVD's to the groups you filmed acting out the movie? That's revenue, money, profit! Your museum will stay open.

A museum devoted to the special regional cooking of different areas of Chile could sell cookbooks, host weekly cooking demonstrations using traditional cooking implements, host cooking classes rotating dishes from different regions on a regular basis, and so on.

This is a practical consideration; think about logical ways to monetize this as a business, or the doors will close soon.

some special notes on research and web-based projects

As I mentioned above, my all-time favorite museum is nearby in Culver City, David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology. In 1995 Lawrence Weschler wrote Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder; it was a runner-up for a Pullitzer Prize. The book is, essentially, in two sections: the first part is an incredible look at the history of museums, what constitutes a museum, and so on; the second part looks sepcifically at The Museum of Jurassic Technology. Weschler commented that his favorite review was from a Paris magazine which commented that they were pretty sure this museum did not really exist. Well, it does, and I strongly recommend some of you visit it, and I equally-strongly recommend you use Weschler's book as a resource for researching museums.

To get a sense of the what-in-the-world-is-this inventiveness, and to give you a sense of what a Web version of a museum might look like (I hope this encourages a few of you to put your projects on the Web), here is the Museum of Jurassic Technology site.

Another site that might give you some ideas about turning this into a Web-based project was created by my daughter for a 102 (I believe it was called English 2) class she took. The theme/focus of her class was Los Angeles, and one of the final project options was to create a Website that somehow uniquely characterized Los Angeles. She chose to do a sort of museum of people with oddly-singular dreams that make up Los Angeles; she used a simple (and free) WordPress blogsite for her project: The Book of the Grotesque. Note that she even has an MLA-format Works Cited page :)

what you will turn in (and how)

As was noted in the pinkinsh sidebar box near the top, this project will be done in steps; there are four of them. Each step has a separate due date (see Class Schedule page). The first step requires you to go have some fun (yes, fun is required :)

1. visit a museum

If you skip this step, you will lose the points for the Museum Proof assignment, but you will also not be able to choose this topic. You will be limied to the other topic option--the Sequel.

It doesen't matter what museum you go do. As I keep saying, I love MJT in Culver City, but there are likely several small museums near you, and there are huge places like The Getty, The Natural History Museum and Science Museum in Exposition Park (where the Rams will play until 2019), The Page Museum and LACMA up on the Miracle Mile, and so on.

Get some ideas; pick up brochures and floorplan maps; chat with a docent or curator if you are bold; ask about setting up a museum, selecting exhibits, funding--whatever. Tour the exhibits and get some idea about inter-activity, informational placques, even things like lighting, cafeteria food, gift shop stuff.

Why not take a friend?

To satisfy this step and get credit for it, you can take a photo of and e-mail the image of the ticket (if there is one), or, better still, take a selfie of yourself in front of or somewhere inside the museum.

2. museum Project Proposal

Before you spend a great deal of time on the research, the invention, the writing, you will need to get a Project Proposal approved by me. Be sure you check the due date on the Class Schedule.

THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT: I will not accept your research paper or your final project if you have not had the Project Proposal approved. Then things roll down hill in a very unfortunate way--you will not get a score for this 200-point paper; you will not pass the class.

The proposal itself is not hard, but it does require you to have considered your options, to have thoroughly read and understood the project choices. The (short) proposal will be typed in MLA format. There will be more detailed information coming up soon on the Station Eleven Proposal Assignment page.

Simple enough. Also, there are samples on Canvas.

3. the Research Paper

The research paper will be due a couple of weeks prior to the Final Project (due date is on the Class Schedule). It is absolutely required and is worth up to 100 points.

Reminder: if you did not yet do Step 1: Visit a Museum, or Step 2: Museum Project Proposal (see above), then you need to do that now :) I will not accept the Research Paper before both are done/approved.

The paper must be in MLA format and will be about four-to-eight pages (with an additional page being he Works Cited page). You should have at least four sources, but you will probably have more. YOU MUST HAVE AT LEAST ONE BOOK SOURCE (but use more if possible); they tend to be more detailed and more credible.

Your sources should focus on the subject one special exhibit (part of your larger museum collection). There will be more detailed information coming up soon on the Station Eleven Research Paper Assignment page.

You can view samples on Canvas.

4. the Final Project

Your final project will include an overview of your museum (a floor plan is absolutely required) including a list of key artifacts in different sections of the museum, and a guided tour. This is worth 100 points.

It's hard to give you a specific page count. Your project will likely have several sections, and a lot depends on the medium (paper, PowerPoint, web) you use. You should have lots of pictures of "things" in your museum, and you will want accompanying text with the images (like a sign with information by an exhibit in an actual museum). With so many images, this could be pretty long. There will be more detailed information coming up soon on the Station Eleven Final Project Assignment page.

Look for samples of each stage of this project in the Files section on Canvas.