The Lost Museum

I just stumbled on the Lost Museum web site which is about the American Museum that Phineas Taylor Barnum opened in New York in 1841. Until 1865 when it burned, it offered everything from stuffed animals, wax figures, voyeuristic exhibits and strange documents.

What is interesting is that they (the American Social History Project) created a 3D model of the museum and you can explore it through an interactive interface that lets you pan, zoom and connect to the archives. It has a somewhat 1990s feel as if created by Voyager in Quicktime VR. There is a very good reflective essay by Joshua Brown, “History and the Web, From the Illustrated Newspaper to Cyberspace: Visual Technologies and Interaction in the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries” where he talks about that period when new media designers were trying to emulate Myst,

Emulating 3-D games such as Myst and Doom, The Lost Museum took users on a seamless, self-contained narrative journey, preserving (as best as we could given the technical limitations of online technology) an illusion of visiting another place in another time. On the other hand, The Lost Museum transcended commercial 3-D explorations’ vapid content while also rejecting the fragmentation of data-bases and the derivative hybridity or scrapbook orientation of most multi-media.

That was our intention. We quickly learned, however, that we had fallen into a pattern that is seemingly intrinsic to the spatial interactive game approach. Instead of expanding the historical imagination of users and promoting their active inquiry, we had actually limited the choices open to them, in particular curtailing their ability to make informational linkages and to draw their own conclusions. In short, the narrative outcomes were preordained, confirming only the predominance of designers over users—as demonstrated by ‘test’ audiences of teachers and students who gleefully clicked on different 3-D exhibits but professed utter bewilderment about the significance of what they found. (On the coercive power of the multi-media designer, see Cubitt 2000, pp. 167–168.)

None the less, I find the virtual space compelling, if only because it too is of its time. Every museum is both about something and an exhibit itself of the concerns of its age. Just as the American Museum was in its eclectic entertainment a work of the 19th century, so the Lost Museum is also one of the best of a particular type of experiment.