An £11.50 ticket bought online on the train en-route grants me access to the Natural History Museums new 'Life in the Dark' exhibition. Upon entering I find it to be, unshockingly, dark. Real tree trunks are propped up in the dim area to give a midnight woodland feel. Each area has a theme - woodland, sky, ocean etc.
Things I learnt:
Cooler temperatures of the night carry soundwaves more slowly and lower to the ground so they can be heard from further away. Hence why nocturnal animals who see perfectly well are nonetheless endowed with sense for sounds and vibrations I suppose. It is the most prominent medium.
The distinctive heart-shaped face of barn owls help to direct the sound towards their ears (one ofwhich is higher than the other to help pinpoint the direction fromwhich the sound is coming)
Dung beetles follow the path of the milky way as a navigational aid.
Worringly, man-made light pollution is increasing by 2% globally each year, resulting in shorter and lighter nights. This not only disrupts the hunting habits of nocturnal wildlife, but is also reported to have invited usual diurnal predators such as the Peregrine Falcon to exploit the lighter conditions of night in order to extend their hunting hours - putting nocturnal creatures not only at risk from another predator, but diminishing the nocturnal food supply.
Did you know there are cave-dwelling crocodiles?? Experts think they made their way into the caves about 3000 years ago. And apparently the prolific bat droppings (guano) of the caves turn their scales orange.
Only around 5% of the ocean has been explored. The top 200 meters is known as the sunlight zone, the from 200m to 1000meters it is known as the twilight zone (do-do-do-do...!) between 1000m to 4000m the sun disappears in the area known as the midnight zone. From 4000m to 6000m is the abyssal plains, and from there on the ocean trenches. We just dont know what comes at that point (yaaaay, Nessie!!)
The very best part for me was the final area devoted to bioluminesence. It was a dark with with a spectacular ceiling of a multitude of slowly alternating lights to signify bioluminesence. I always wondered how the heck lighting ones self up like Vegas could be considered camoflage, but apparently many fish have it on their bellies in order to blend with the lighter waters above, disguising themselves from preditors below.
Only a few select marine animals can see the colours red or yellow, so some have the additional benefit of being able to communicate to potential mates of their own kind without attracting unwanted attention from other species.
I have already spent many hours in the Natural History Museum, so head immediately to my next venue upon exiting the exhibition. It is the 'Something Inbetween' installation at the Wellcome Collection in Euston - A museum with a more avant-garde variety of exhibitions. It is entirely feasible that I am just not smart enough to enjoy them to their fullest, but many of them I have considered too arty to truly be informative. I enjoy them nonetheless - It is a quirky, mold-breaking little place, and not a bad way to spend an afternoon.
There are a number of exhibitions forming the 'Something Inbetween' installation. All of them modest in size and content, but together forming a broad range of topics. The first was 'Sire', which is a series of photos of cows saddled with a range of sculptures weaved together from artificial insemination straws, each depicting an individual characteristic being bred out of cattle for our own convenience (ie, 'Horns')
The Sensorium Tests and At the Threshold exhibition focuses upon a neurological condition called 'Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia' where a person who observes another person touching something can experience that touch for themselves. This exhibit consists of 2 videos. One is of a female undergoing test conditions in-which her cheeks are tapped lightly in a random pattern and she has to tell the person what cheek she felt the tap on. I waited for a few minutes for the punchline to present itself. Occasionally she got distracted as she looked at some painting of trees, and some dude in the next room listened to an apparently unrelated audio, but I struggled to put the pieces together in a way that formed any kind of sensical plot, so I left. The next room appeared to be partway through a movie about a something disconcerting relationship between a boy and an older woman who I would assume to be his mother if it were not for the underlying sense of sexual tension between them. He touched stuff. She felt it. She seemed to like it. It was weird. I left.
Alien Sex Club I thought might at least hold my attention in an amusingly vulgar sci-fi kind of way, but it was in fact an exhibition on the changing and increasingly more positive cultural perspective of HIV since current day medicine makes it a much more manageable condition. It was a very colourful exhbition, arranged as best it could be in such a small space to be something of a maze. The art was a collection of cartoon vulgarity, juvenile both in artistic competence and humour as the words 'Prostate Palace' sung out repeatedly in the background. I got the impression that the artist was the kind of gay who rather aggressively inflicted his sexual preference upon the world as a weapon.
It was very colourful. I did like the colour.
'Under' explores the world of Free-diving, or diving without an air supply. This is a talent I find very impressive, but I question how much of an art/psychological exhibition can truly be made of it. It consisted of a single room with three screens - a screen to each wall - all depicting a different short video on the artist performing a freedive and underwater stunts. They were filmed in real-time and it is impressive how long the woman was able to hold her breathe. If I die early and come back as a man, I will be looking her up.
Thus concludes the Something Inbetween exhibition. Upstairs there is another new exhbition on 'Teeth'. Might as well pop in.
It covered the various means of dental resolutions throughout history. Some mystical (ie, charm amulets and animal teeth worn in the hopes that they will absorb the toothache) some early science (ie, toothpaste being a solid block put together by pharmacists consisting of an abrasive - usually brick dust - and other such ingredients) and some downright nasty (ie, the waterloo battlefield was stripped bare of dead officers teeth in ???how many minutes due to the popularity and need for human teeth during that era.
To round it all off I hole up in the nearest coffee shop where I understand free wi-fi to be one of the basic payoffs for the exhorbidently expensive cake and demoralisingly confusing hot beverage menu to type all this nonsense up. Because once I go home, todays projects get forgotten and I ultimately end up with yet another notebook I dare not throw away just in case there is a slither of importance in it.
My £99 shockproof, waterproof (basically ME-proof) Asus looks like a kids play-computer next to all the Mac's in here, but after all the years I spent watching laptop owners punching away at the keys in coffee houses and thinking 'Twat', I guess it is only right for the worm to have turned, given the opportunity.
Done.
Post.
Cake!!
No comments:
Post a Comment