Q. What is plastic, metal and glass – coloured black, white and brown – covered in hair – and made out of over 600,000 modular parts?
A. The Powerhouse Museum.
Saturday, 3 March 2012
Collections in the clouds – Mythical Beast
This was the unexpected answer to my attempt to work out what kind of animal the Powerhouse Museum collection would be if we could give it body parts. Doing a bit of an experiment I searched on the words ‘teeth’, ‘eyes’, ‘mouth’, ‘heart’ etc. in the collection database and then fed this into a word cloud generator. The interesting side from my perspective was that the Museum has a completely different way of interpreting the world. It does so through its objects and as a result the word ‘mouth’, which to most of us suggests the thing we pour coffee into every morning, in the Museum’s eyes is mostly related to the opening of a glass or pottery container – hence the prevelance of ‘earthenware’ in the cloud result below.
A bolt of lightning may have been favoured by Dr. Frankenstein, but the Powerhouse has taken a slower evolutionary path. After 130 years the beast is clearly Australian and lives in South Sydney. Although mainly of English descent, it appears to have a Chinese and Japanese background; although there much about it that is still unknown.
Made out of metal, plastic, paper and glass it is black, brown, and white in colour. Its body is also flecked with red and gold, all of which is covered in a thick matt of hair. It has one large eye, a tiny mouth and ears, and the heart is its primary organ. My son, aged 9, provided a rendition of the mythical beast which you can see below.
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