LE MUSEUM OF JURASSIC TECHNOLOGY

The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, California is both a real physical museum and an on-line site "dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic". This museum houses "primitive" technologies, relics, artifacts, and biographical surveys of inventors of technologies and research from the Lower Jurassic. An emphasis is placed on unusual or curious technologies or histories. For example, present exhibitions include: Megolaponera Foetens / The Stink Ant of the Cameroon, the story of an ant colony which succumbs to a neurological infection causing it to grow a large spike on it’s skull.

The oeuvres and lives presented in this museum are juxtaposed with eccentric narratives taking the visitor on a fantastical and literally unbelievable scientific and sociological journey. The viewer later realizes, after reading bizzare biographies combined with anecdote-driven research and surveying puzzling artifacts, that the museum is, in fact, entirely contrived and fictional. The MJT Web museum is complete with a "history", "membership drive", "collection" and "gift shop" which are as operational and "real" as any museum. MJT functions as a critique of the relationship between knowledge and research, objectivity and scientific "truth", and our desire to understand history thorough narrative. It is located somewhere between a parody of museum viewer’s expectations and an alternative installation intervention into museum practices.

Valérie Lamontagne