Last weekend I went with my family to the London Science Museum. In some ways I wish I hadn’t.
Don’t get me wrong; the museum district in London is one of the greatest assets the city has, and time and again throughout my life I have wandered through their various halls and exhibits and marvelled at the profusion of STUFF looted from distant places and times. I still feel this way when I step through the arched magnificence of the Natural History Museum and even on the rare occasions that I’ve ventured into the V&A, but on this visit I felt something was missing.
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| Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sciencemuseum/3751098099/in/photostream |
But what of that future? In the late 80s my world was rocked when interactive computer simulations appeared at the museum. “What? I get to specify the size, fuel-weight and payload of a rocket, then watch it plough into the earth in stick-form? In only several dozen button-clicks and a moderately short loading sequence? The future is now!” Word spread, attendances boomed and interactivity became the order of the day. Walk into nearly any large museum now and you will find yourself surrounded by screens and buttons and things that go beep or whoosh or flash. The small child of my youth marvels at the magic cameras that project your thermal image onto a screen or displays that let you view a small patch of cityscape in 360 degrees by turning the screen around.
The small child of today though? They couldn’t give a toss.
The problem is that technology caught up again. What self-respecting nine year-old is going to get excited about mashing a barely-responsive touch-screen that tells you a series of facts about plastics when they spend their week at schools with digital projectors and interactive whiteboards and have now, in their free time, had to put away their Wii or Kinect in order to do so? It’s like dragging a ninja across town to see a display of Woolworths disguises and Nerf weaponry.
Not even trying. – it’s the little things that take the shine off
When my family went to the Science Museum last weekend, do you know what held my nine year-old sister’s attention longer than anything else and elicited her only “Wow!”s? The displays of gradually-decaying waxworks in the near-deserted rooms upstairs, charting the gradual evolution of medical technology. Computers and touch-screens she sees every day, but slightly unnerving papier maché surgeons hovering over Victorian dentists’ chairs are a genuine novelty. “You mean someone actually made these? But there are loads of them! That would have taken ages!” For the children of today, the technology of the past is the real wizardry.
All well and good, you might say. But what, again, of the future?
Feeling a creeping sense of despair rising through me, I consulted the museum map on a quest to restore my faith and to inspire in my sister some of the watery-eyed optimism that I had felt so long ago. But where was it? Where was the look forward to what might be? Was it altogether absent; replaced by another gift-shop or corporate installation? No, wait! There! Far off in the corner of the map, right at the back of the top floor, was an apologetic-looking little room marked “In Future”. Leaving my sister & step-sister behind with my dad to queue for the Red Arrows 360 Degree Flight Experience machine (£9 a ticket and a half-hour queue for a 3-minute ride that they later described as “Alright.”), I set off at a literal run in search of the future I had feared lost in the rush to the present.
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| Image: sciencemuseum.org.uk |
Off past the Red Arrows I flew, then through the History of Flight (the suspended planes of which still have the power to awe me) and… oh.
Um, up a small ramp, around a corner, up another short ramp, through an inconspicuous door, around the IMAX, along a dark, notably-deserted, corridor and finally around one more corner to what must be the most remote part of the Science Museum; only ventured into by the most intrepid, the most determined and those who’ve got lost after going to the toilet at the IMAX. Still, the starry-eyed child in me was guessing the whole way at the sorts of futuristic delights that would await us when I at last reached my destination. “I wonder how they’ve managed to fit all the giant robots and space-TVs into such a small room? Probably with a teleporter or a shrink-ray or something,” it babbled…
This is what greeted my eye. This.
From what I could gather it was a machine for entering personal messages; possibly to be displayed on that funky ring that hangs over the main hall displaying rapidly moving text that nobody can read. I couldn’t gather much from it, however, because it was broken. Apart from that, and another the same at the other end of the room, “In Future” was largely an empty room. There was nothing interesting on the walls, floors or ceiling; no partitions or cases; just three large, tilted, circular tables onto which had been projected some sort of Wheel of Fortune game (the same at all three tables) in which participants spin a wheel to find out when they’ll die depending on various randomly-assigned socio-economic and lifestyle factors. Rather like a flattened-out table-top fruit-machine at which several people can stand, simultaneously being bored without any hope of cash at the end of their mindless virtual button-bashing.
But perhaps this is what the future holds.
Perhaps when museum’s curators and planners went to the greatest minds available and asked how best to represent the future that may someday greet us, they were met with the response: “Well, we’re all probably going end up in artificially-lit, windowless rooms, bashing buttons on tables while we wait to find out which aspect of our lifestyle is likely to kill us first. Oh, and you’ll probably be able to send short messages to be displayed on a big hoop or something.”
Do you feel lucky? Or just horribly, horribly sad...
It’s a cop-out though, isn’t it; no matter how apt. It’s like when zoos have a sign pointing to a room containing “The Most Dangerous Animal On The Planet” and you walk in to find out that all it contains is a mirror. “Ah, yes I see. It’s funny because it’s true." Lazy, cheap and depressing, but true.
When I trudged back to meet up with my family a short time later they asked me to show them the pictures that I have now posted above. “What’s that?” remarked my distinctly underwhelmed step-sister, “A game show?” I was suddenly reminded of Don’t Scare The Hare: a gameshow that recently raised a ripple of rubber-necking interest when it appeared like a floating car in the river of TV, before disappearing with barely more than a few apologetic bubbles.
In the show Jason Bradbury (off the Gadget Show), with narration from Sue Perkins (off lots of nice things), guides families through a number of vermin-themed variety gameshow tasks in order to avoid traumatising the eponymous 4-foot tall remote-controlled robotic hare. Does it need to be robotic? Does this add anything to the show other than the ability of the co-host to rotate its ears? No. It’s like Twiki from Buck Rodgers: theoretically a nod (and a cheekily raised eyebrow) to the everpresence of technology but in practice simply superfluous and irritating.
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| Image: mirror.co.uk |
It's all fun and games until someone turns out to be really, really irritating.
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| Image: http://www.imglego.co.cc |
So what do we take from this? That, once again, and in the week that the USA officially pulls out of manned space-flight, it is clear that ours is a generation that can’t be bothered with the future any more? That, like the vaguely-interactive table-top games I found at In Future, we’re jaded enough to know that most of us are doomed to spend our lives standing around repeatedly jabbing the same buttons until the future arrives anyway, according to whatever pre-programmed course or chaotically-assigned sequence it’s running down? Or does it just mean that it’s only fair for a museum, even a Science Museum, to be largely devoted to the past? Perhaps what I was really looking for all along was some kind of Future-House, in which eyes and minds might be dazzled by the wonders of human ingenuity.
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| Image: Getty Images |
Poor Science Museum; it’s not your fault the future overtook you. You're a brilliant museum and I love you. But for now it looks like if I want to see the future and hold it in my hands I know what I need to do: I’m going to get a copy of New Scientist and read it in a mobile phone shop.
So it goes.
