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Horniman Museum Natural History Bioblitz
The Horniman Museum and Gardens is currently carrying out a review of its Natural History collection. Inspired by outdoor ‘Bioblitz’ events, the project aims to review specimens from the collection in a series of short, concentrated bursts, with the help of expert reviewers.
With over 250,000 taxidermy, osteological and fluid-preserved specimens, mostly in storage, the team have got their work cut out!
The hope is that by learning more about what they have in the collection, the museum can make better decisions about how to use it, what to celebrate and what to share with the world.
Visit the museum website to find out more about the project, check out its blog, or read a fantastic blog post from Project Coordinator (and my colleague), Russell Dornan, to hear about the ‘blitzes’ that have already taken place.
You can see many more wonderful photos from the Bioblitzes on Flickr, and keep up to date with the project by following @HornimanReviews on Twitter.
Photos by Russell Dornan
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Marina Abramović, “Rhythm 0,” 1974
Marina Abramović is best known for her performance pieces, in which she tries to explore what is possible for an artist to do in the name of art. Her best known piece was the recent “The Artist Is Present,” in which she sat motionless for 736.5 hours over the course of three months, inviting visitors to sit opposite her and make eye contact for as long as they wanted. So many people began spontaneously crying across from her that blogs and Facebook groups were set up for those people.
Her bravest piece, however, is my favorite. This piece was primarily a trust exercise, in which she told viewers she would not move for six hours no matter what they did to her. She placed 72 objects one could use in pleasing or destructive ways, ranging from flowers and a feather boa to a knife and a loaded pistol, on a table near her and invited the viewers to use them on her however they wanted.
Initially, Abramović said, viewers were peaceful and timid, but it escalated to violence quickly. “The experience I learned was that … if you leave decision to the public, you can be killed… I felt really violated: they cut my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the public. Everyone ran away, escaping an actual confrontation.”
This piece revealed something terrible about humanity, similar to what Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment or Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Experiment, both of which also proved how readily people will harm one another under unusual circumstances.
This performance showed just how easy it is to dehumanize a person who doesn’t fight back, and is particularly powerful because it defies what we think we know about ourselves. I’m certain the no one reading this believes the people around him/her capable of doing such things to another human being, but this performance proves otherwise.
(via dinosaurhorrorshow)
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Skulls from the permanent collection; figuring out my new camera. I’ve been too shy to post any of the videos I’ve been practicing shooting. Filming yourself is very different than having someone else behind the camera helping to direct.
Check out the impacted premolar of the deer, third image down. It unsuccessfully lost the deciduous tooth; instead of falling out, it became wedged against the premolar behind it, and the adult tooth failed to adequately erupt. This caused the large abscess and bone loss of the second premolar.
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Has your line of work altered the way you think about or your attitude towards pets?
Yes — especially concerning purebred animals, or any type of pet which has been selectively bred in order to highlight superficial aesthetic traits for our own selfish enjoyments. Evolution is an incredibly long process when occurring naturally, yet we have forcefully pushed the morphological transformation of a few of these breeds without giving any consideration to the health problems associated with these choices.
Take the pug: it looks entirely different today than it did a short 300 years ago. That’s because we have been breeding them to accentuate their wrinkly faces, floppy ears, and most significantly their characteristic squished faces. The ‘squished face’ means that the pug has an extremely high cranial index, a ratio calculated by the maximum width of the head x 100 / maximum length. Dogs with extremely high or extremely low cranial indexes are subject to corresponding health problems. Pugs, with their extreme brachycephalic index, have an incredibly difficult time regulating their body temperature because of the lack of surface area in their mouth allowing for enough space to evaporate adequate amounts of moisture in order to cool down while they pant, meaning they are prone to overheating. They also have exaggerated ocular orbitals which give them their soulful baby eyes, but that also means their eyes are at eminent risk of popping directly out of the sockets if they sustain any amount of trauma to their heads. Throw into this equation the fact that we’ve shortened their legs and exaggerated their stature to give them a stocky build, and it means they have an even more challenging time getting enough exercise so many become terribly obese.
We see this snorting, panting, grunting little creatures as ‘adorable’, but I think it’s kind of sadistic and cruel in a way. I don’t put the blame on the dog, nor the people who adopt these creatures from shelters to give them good lives — after all, the dog didn’t choose to be this way, we did. I hope with some education about these topics humans can begin to curb their excessive need to continuously dominate over nature.
Sources:
1. William Hogarth, The Painter and his Pug, 1745.
2. Pug from about 1885.
3. Pug from the Pug Dog Page.
4. List of dogs with variable cephalic indexes. -
good book. will review when done. (prediction: 5/5)
Next on my list of books to read. After I’m done with Life of Pi.
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(via Twitter / erik_kwakkel: Wow, 1500 followers: thank …)
Ink cat pawprints in a 15th c. book. I was just wondering today if calligraphers of the past had problems with cats walking across wet ink and ruining things.
so cats have been assholes for even longer than I thought
(via lostinhistory)
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via museumnerd This could be quite interesting. I put this into Austrian google and it offered me: 
From Museumsandstuff.org“Museums are there for the masses”, “Museums are cathedrals for the modern era” and “Why are museums important?” Can anyone offer any other languages?
(Source: museumnerd)
Museums & Things
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Also expect galleries, archives, libraries and other related awesome stuff. Also dinosaurs.
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