Prologue: The Mirror

The shiny floors of the Hall of North American Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History, normally echoing with the footfalls of fourteen thousand daily visitors, are quiet. In a glass case, fourteen feet by eight feet, a model bull elk—actual size, clad in actual elk skin—bugles to attract more females, even as three already in his harem graze on the chokecherry and aspen around an approximation of Trappers Lake in northwestern Colorado. The diorama is normally behind glass, but the glass is broken.

Bec Meah is here to fix it. Meah is a preparator, one of the trained fine artists—she’s a sculptor—who builds and maintains the museum’s exhibitions. She’s working with Stephen Quinn, dean of the museum’s preparators. He’ll retire in a few years after four decades in the Department of Exhibition. Quinn tells Meah about all the tricks the old preparators used on the dioramas in this hall, the oldest of which date to the 1940s: marble dust for snow. Motor oil as the dark, slick soil traversed by a wet animal. Static electricity on puffs of cotton to raise the fuzzy surface of a flower.

In the work space at the rear of the ­museum’s former power plant, a ray sculpted in clay sits between the two halves of the mold that has been created in its likeness. Juan C. Giraldo

Quinn asks Meah to look inside the bull’s mouth. She climbs a ladder, and when she looks down into its maw, frozen mid-bugle, she sees a small mirror. It picks up the lighting in the diorama, and—subtly—it glows. Meah thinks about the preparators who worked in the same cavernous workshop on the museum’s fifth floor that she does, and the calculations they must have made about the angle of the glass, and the position and intensity of the lights. They knew that without the mirror, the inside of the elk’s mouth would be pitch black, and that wouldn’t look real. The human visitors would see that it didn’t look real. And even if they didn’t quite know why it didn’t look real, something would be slightly off, and that would defeat the purpose for the museum-goers who trudged through Central Park in New York City and into this place two thousand miles from Trappers Lake, to look through this glass window into a world that existed before their own.

103 Days Until Opening

EARLY EXPERIMENTS IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF BRAINS

Brittany Janaszak arrives at the museum around 10 a.m. She’s on a team that has just begun work on a major exhibit called “Unseen Oceans.” The museum stages one or two new exhibitions each year, each of which explores the cutting-edge science on a specific subject, and the ocean is next. It will run for a year, then travel for up to a decade, educating people around the world.



The Exhibition Department has fourteen weeks to build “Unseen Oceans.”

Hannah Rawe finesses the clay fin joints on a large fish model. Juan C. Giraldo

The American Museum of Natural History was founded in 1869 and has the feel of a great library of antiquity. There are twenty-five buildings on its eighteen-acre campus on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The museum holds dinosaur fossils, Native American art, mummies, and the slice of a tree with rings dating back to 550 A.D. It contains a graduate school, a five-hundred-thousand-volume research library, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and a 34-million-object collection including, in the bowels of some storage room pungent with formaldehyde, in a metal tank the size of an aboveground pool, a giant squid.

On this morning, Janaszak negotiates a labyrinth of marble halls and grand staircases and comes to a freight elevator in the museum’s northwest corner, which she rides to the fifth floor. Its blue double doors open directly into the Exhibition workshop. The space used to be the museum’s coal-fired power plant, before New York had a power grid.

Objects from the collection are shoved in every corner. Death masks of numerous species hang on every wall—sometimes the preparators will pull one down to check the exact shape of the ridge above a baboon’s eyes, or the texture of a lizard’s scales. At some point the room was divided in two. The front space is for fine, quiet work, but Janaszak makes her way to the back, under the roar of an industrial fan. She skirts past the paint booth and stops in front of a fume hood, from which she retrieves two model brains.

Celeste Carballo chooses from a palette of fluorescent paints to create a unique glowing pattern on a model fish Juan C. Giraldo

“Unseen Oceans” is an exhibit about the fuzzy edges of our knowledge of the 70 percent of the planet covered by water. The exhibition will consist of eight main rooms, each focusing on the work of a scientist who uses innovative techniques to study his or her part of the ocean. It will start at the surface, and each room will take visitors deeper—closer to the ocean floor.

What Janaszak is working on is for the second room, about the topmost layer of water and the tiny creatures that float in it. Each model brain looks like a shriveled pituitary gland that has been pulled out through someone’s nose in a horror movie. They’re made of cotton painted with orangey-red acrylic paint. They are stuck through with pins and suspended in the mouths of Dixie cups, where they’ve been dripping clear resin, which Janaszak dipped them in to create a hard outer shell. At a workbench she uses pliers to remove the pins and sets the brains next to two halves of a waxy blue mold. It’s the mold for some kind of insectile creature. She explains that this thing she is making is clear, so she’ll cast it in clear resin, but its organs—like these bug brains—are colorful. They’ve got to go inside somehow.

“Do the specimens still glow when they’re dead?”

She considers the mold carefully. “I’m calling it a bug, but it isn’t a bug,” she says. It’s actually a kind of plankton. “I haven’t had my coffee yet.” The first thing preparators do when they start on a new exhibition is study all the science—if they’re building animals, it’s biology, anatomy, ecology, behavior. They experiment with building techniques, then move on to the actual build, all in consultation with the museum’s curators. At an art museum, the value of the work is subjective. At Natural History, even if a kid wipes her nose on it, a piece in an exhibition may be her first—or only—encounter with a distant corner of the natural world. The question every preparator confronts with every new build is: Can I be enough of a scientist to get this right, and enough of an artist to make sure people remember it?

Janaszak picks up the two halves of the mold and fits them together. She’s been thinking all morning about this business of suspending the brains inside the resin bodies. The question is whether the brains will float. If they bob even a little as the resin cures, they’ll leave tracks that will be visible under gallery lighting. She screws the mold together with one-inch bolts and holds it away from her. “I’ll probably drill a hole in the top somewhere,” she says, tilting it this way and that. “At the highest point. And I’ll orient it so that as I pour in the resin it’ll force the air out.” Maybe if she does that slowly enough, she can insert the brain during the pour and it’ll stay put.

87 days until opening

HOW TO ACCURATELY PAINT BIOFLUORESCENT SEA LIFE

John Sparks, the curator of “Unseen Oceans,” makes his rounds. He’s only in his early fifties, and yet he can tell long-ago stories about seeing his hand blow up like a balloon from the venom of a scorpion fish and getting rammed by a sixteen-foot shark in a personal submarine at seven hundred meters. He has a boyish face and an undimmed enthusiasm for fish. His particular expertise is fish that glow, and the third room of “Unseen Oceans” focuses on his work on biofluorescence—on fish that absorb and give off light.



Preparators are building two hundred fish of eighteen species, painting them in fluorescent paint to be lit with UV light. Sparks is up here constantly, examining the models for anatomical correctness. Now he’s meeting with Celeste Carballo, a painter, whose cubicle is a hoarder’s dream of fish photos and paints and the occasional musical instrument. She’s painting fish and needs to know if she has the colors right. And she has more questions: Do the insides of the mouths of diamond lizardfish fluoresce? What about the patterns on its ventral side? How about these eels? She’s painting several different species, and she depends on these answers to get them right. Then she asks an odd one. “Do the specimens still glow when they’re dead?”

Neon-painted fish atop photos of their real-life counterparts, for comparison. Juan C. Giraldo

Sparks thinks, a little amused. “For a while, yes,” he says. “The problem is, you can’t really tell how long. Because we put them in formalin and that tends to fluoresce as well. You look at it some years later, and it’s still brightly fluorescent. You can’t really tell. In the formalin it just stays, yes. But if you left the fish out in the sun, it would fade.”

Herein is the essence of the fifth floor’s work. In the hands of the scientists, the glowing fish go into specimen jars on shelves somewhere and continue to glow long after what would be natural. In Carballo’s hands, hunks of foam and resin that were never alive shine with the brilliance of what Sparks has found, for everyone to see.

His eyes alight on one of the fifth floor’s larger creations for this exhibit, a tasseled wobbegong, a five-foot-long bottom-­dwelling shark that looks to be made of rocks and coral and bearded with lichen. “I don’t envy who has to paint that thing!” he says.

Carballo chides him. “Actually, that’s the fun part of it, John.”

BASIC COPEPOD ANATOMY

The problem with the sapphirina, Bec Meah thinks, is that it’s too beautiful. It’s a copepod, a kind of tiny crustacean, maybe half a millimeter in size, with a pearlescent blue glowing shell. She’s carving one enlarged to two feet. She sits on the floor next to a Crock-Pot filled with gray-brown molding clay and the model, which she tends to with the looped end of a sculpting tool and a box knife, cutting grooves and smoothing seams with her thumb held so taut the tendons nearly vibrate.



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The sapphirina’s shell consists of individual panels, and this is not Meah’s first attempt to fit them together correctly. She’s surrounded by academic papers, but even scientists seem to be obsessed with the glow—she can’t find a paper that explains the basic anatomy. She thought maybe the shell was like a lobster’s tail, a bunch of adjacent plates, but when she asked a curator about it, the curator said no way. Then again, this curator’s expertise wasn’t copepods. It’s a funny thing that happens when the preparators build—they quickly find the limits of expertise. She takes a knife and gouges a hunk of clay loose, so deep she cuts into the blue foam core. She picks up a wooden spoon that’s resting on the Crock-Pot and dips it into the clay. In the heat of the pot it’s viscous and hand malleable. She applies a glop of it to the gouge. When it cools, she’ll carve. She’ll make the panels overlap, and ask again.

67 days until opening

THE INTERACTIVE TEAM

Interactive-exhibit developer Brett Peterson’s workstation, with a DIY arcade-game controller for testing a submarine video game. Juan C. Giraldo

Two floors down from the workshop is the work space of Exhibition Interactive Experiences, the other team that helps build exhibitions—anything that requires software. (A coterie of editors and graphic designers works with both Interactive and the fifth floor on the words and pictures that accompany their creations, such as placards and informational panels.) Its work space is bland, harshly lit, and strewn with plywood and circuit boards and sensors and joysticks and cameras. The team functions like a startup, and its space looks like the offices you keep before you close your Series A.



The team is very behind. An ebullient woman named Hélène Alonso leads the Interactive Experiences, but even she is subdued just now. They built more of the last exhibition than usual, which put them behind schedule, and holidays kept interrupting their work. “ ‘Oceans’ is going to be heavy metal for us, because it’s less time and a lot more pieces,” Alonso says. The team has a punch list of items it’s responsible for: a submarine-exploration video game, a life-size animated film of whales and sunfish and giant squid, a sandbox that becomes ocean and beach and bluffs in real time.

Peterson debugs/plays with the interactive conservation game. Juan C. Giraldo

The least formed and potentially most important idea—it’ll be in the exhibition’s last room before visitors are funneled to the gift shop—is a still-nascent notion of a fully immersive interactive display about conservation. (The team refers to an interactive display as simply an “interactive.”)

Alonso’s team is as tied to the science as the preparators are but unbound by constraints of clay and foam and fluorescent paint. Which means its challenge is a good old-fashioned ticking clock.

25 days until opening

HOW TO TEACH WILDLIFE CONSERVATION

Brett Peterson, an interactive-exhibit developer, has a lot of Xbox Kinects, the video-gaming device that allows people to control a game using body movements instead of a joystick-like controller. In his work area, there are Kinects everywhere. Peterson has one rigged up to the ceiling pointing straight down, alongside a projector oriented the same way. The Kinect maps ­every object in the room, and Peterson writes software that tells the projector to spit out images based on what the Kinect sees.



The lights are off. The projector is spraying the floor with a swirling mass of three-inch polygons. Fish. They skirt any large objects the Kinect has mapped. When Peterson walks into the room, the fish projections part to make way for him. The point here is about conservation and the effect of humans on fish populations: The fish on the floor will dodge the museum-goers. If too many people come through, the fish will be trampled and slowly disappear.

Preparators Jake Adams (left) and Kurt Freyer skewer fish models and secure them to a steel superstructure. Juan C. Giraldo

Peterson sits at the computer he’s using to debug the software, lights from the projector playing on his face. He’s working on an idea that came from Ariel Nevarez, the team’s technologist, who tends to fixate on finding the one mysterious thing that will change the way visitors think. This is the idea: If you hold out your arms and make a big circle—or, even better, stand together in a circle with a few other people, holding hands—the Kinect will see it, and inside the circle new fish will be born. You’ll create a marine preserve.

The parameter Peterson is adjusting is, essentially, the birth rate. It’s an odd idea, and the question is whether there’s a way to make it clear to visitors how the interactive works, without drawing too much attention to it, which would sacrifice a bit of the magic. So Peterson fiddles with the birth rate. If it’s low, the preserves regenerate the population slowly, maybe unnoticeably. But if it’s high—

"‘Oceans is going to be heavy metal for us, because it’s less time and a lot more pieces”

Alonso, from Interactive Experiences, jumps into the middle of the room and circles her arms. Fish explode into being. “Woooo!” she yells, swiveling like a machine-gun turret, spraying newborn fish in every direction.

“Hold on!” Peterson says, getting up from his desk. “I have to get some of these out. There’s a maximum amount you can have.” He starts stomping all over the ground.

It’s a start.

THE GALLERY INSTALLATION

Construction on the “Unseen Oceans” galleries has been going on for three weeks. The sixty-two-hundred-square-foot space has been divided into a series of circular rooms that will guide visitors deep underwater, and the contents of each room are slowly arriving. Bob Peterson (no relation to Brett), Alonso’s animator, has dropped by to see the 45-by-9-foot screen that will show his animation of life-size sea creatures. It requires a three-projector setup—something they’ve never tried before. The screen looks good, but the room, like most of the gallery space, is still a mess, scattered with empty vitrines and submarine parts and carts of tungsten track lighting that was swapped out for UV. Bob finds himself admiring the next room over, which centers on an expanding steel helix. Preparators attach fish to it. Some, cast in soft foam, are speared and bolted into place. Hard-resin models are glued to posts, and then mounted on the rail.

4 days until opening

TROUBLESHOOTING

Glimmering clear-resin models of a phronima (left) and a diatom in the exhibition gallery. Juan C. Giraldo

Brett Peterson is up on a ladder, and Nevarez, the technologist, is playing with sand. He’s rooting around in it, building mountains and digging valleys. Digging down, all the way down, in some cases, to the black tub that holds the sand of this part of the exhibit, the topography interactive.

Peterson is futzing with the settings on another Xbox Kinect. As Nevarez reshapes the mounds of sand, this Kinect reads the heights of the mounds, and its companion projector paints them with a landscape. Peterson and Nevarez have set a certain height as sea level. If Nevarez builds sand up a little higher than “sea level,” Peterson has programmed the projector to color it the light ocher of a beach. A little bit higher still, and it’s green grassy bluffs. In Nevarez’s valleys, Peterson makes the color of the water go from the turquoise of a lagoon to the inky blue of the deep sea. Except the network of Kinect and projector is not working quite right. The submarine video game is boring the kids testing it (and confusing adults), the fish in the conservation interactive are getting stuck behind things, and Bob’s still working on the high-resolution rendering of his animation—and now a problem that cameras have solved for years with mirrors is giving Peterson’s software trouble. This slight offset is wreaking havoc.

“Okay, look,” Peterson says. “So if I just do . . . scale this bit . . . that’s pretty close! On X! . . . yes or no . . . ?”

Nevarez surveys the sand splashed with color from the projector. “Yeah, it’s close on X,” he says.

“Woooo!” she yells, swiveling like a machine-gun turret, spraying newborn fish in every direction.

“Okay, so Y,” Peterson says.

“Hold!” Nevarez says. He sweeps his eyes across the tub. “That looks pretty good on Y.”

They try shifting the whole projection over slightly.

“Hmm,” Nevarez says. “Good everywhere except the center. It’s doing something weird.” He’s stumped.

As Peterson and Nevarez stare at the sandbox, three of the museum’s education staff walk up and start playing in it. They get it instantly—start building atolls and shaping seamounts. One of them looks up. “You’re going to get lots and lots of happy faces, I promise you.”

“All we want is happy faces,” Nevarez says, still half a mind somewhere else. “We got talked out of this, a lot.”

Nearby, an older man wearing an ID badge that says “Fossil Expert” mills around. A retiree, he’s been a volunteer at the museum since 2011. He’s walking the gallery to learn the material. “Kids know more now than we did,” he says. It’s the smartphones, the internet. There’s so much that is available now, so easily. But the fundamental appeal of the museum is the same, he says, even as over his shoulder Peterson is up on a ladder messing with a depth camera and Nevarez is playing in scientifically modified sand and they’re speaking in code about X adjustments and Y adjustments. “You don’t need interactive,” the man says. “They still press their faces to the glass.”

Opening

A mock-up of a sonar device. Juan C. Giraldo

The first room of “Unseen Oceans” is small, maybe eighty square feet, and the walls are the pallid blue of a cloudless day at the beach. A projector, suspended from the ceiling, shines a beach onto the floor—a looping video of surf crashing in and slowly receding. The kids who step into the room stop and stare, momentarily puzzled, at the wash on their feet. Then they begin their descent.

In the second room, Meah’s copepod hangs against the wall. Under the UV lighting, it radiates a kaleidoscopic palette of delicate colors, like an oyster turned inside out. In the center of the room, under glass that almost makes it feel like a real collected specimen, sits Janaszak’s plankton. A placard pictures the plankton, with its disgusting abdomen and terrifying, spindly legs, side-by-side with the alien from Alien. Did it inspire the monster? “What do you think?” parents ask, and their kids look back and forth between the pictures, mouths agape. The third room: 250 feet below the surface. The steel helix expands like a tornado from the middle of the room, covered in fluo­rescent fish. A fishnado. The models, which were flat in the streaming daylight of the fifth floor, look alive in the settled cool blue of the gallery. The fluorescent paints, charged by the UV, take on subtlety and nuance. A few models sit on tables at chest level for kids to see up close. They’re under glass so the kids don’t mangle them, not that they don’t try.

People filter into the fourth room, settle into seats in front of Bob Peterson’s massive screen, and jump when the giant squid clamps its beak onto the camera—then shriek when a humpback whale swoops in from offscreen and clamps the squid in its jaws. In the fifth room, smiling faces hover over the sandbox while kids create their own ocean floor.

By the sixth room it’s clear that something happens as people walk through the exhibition. Each room takes them deeper, but it also takes them farther—farther from the hustling city, from the concrete and asphalt, from the subway, the traffic. Farther from their classrooms and their Snapchat accounts. Farther from the news cycle. Each step they take deeper into the exhibit, they roam farther from the thing they’re actually immersed in, which kids may not even discern yet—the sea of unordered information that is modern life, deeper all the time.

In the culminating room a whole pack of children gambol around on hands and knees until they’ve trapped Brett Peterson’s fish in a seething ball, the way massive schools are rounded up by sharks. They pound the ground with open palms, erupt in cries and chants, trying to make the fish disappear. They have surrendered to the exhibition. For the conservation note that completes the descent, Alonso’s team has created a room that transforms children into sea creatures.

And here a man stands over the kids, someone’s uncle or dad or big brother. He’s got an exasperated look on his face, but a dawn smile is cracking on his lips. We all want to maintain a little bit of this inside ourselves, and while the world bombards us—plumps us up with so much that it hurts, so much that we harden ourselves and take no more in and in so doing become a little less curious, a little more cynical, and a lot less childlike—the museum does the opposite. It takes the unruly heap of facts scientists endlessly generate and shapes them into something you can walk through, that somehow shrinks the world of knowledge so it fits into the tiny skull-size space between our ears. The man has his phone out, and even as he says, as gruffly as he can, “Okay, okay, okay!” he snaps a picture so he can remember the scene. Then he says, “Let’s go.” The kids push themselves up to their feet and skitter out the door, out the maze of corridors, into the brilliant light of midday in New York. Taxis whiz past. A train rumbles under their city of islands.

This appears in the July/August 2018 issue. Want more Popular Mechanics? Get Instant Access!



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