A love letter to the Exploratorium

Dear Exploratorium,
I love you. Ever since we met, I can’t stop thinking about you. I’ve flirted with other Science Museums before, but you are so much more…
Yours,
Marcos

I really can’t stop thinking about my trip to the Exploratorium in San Francisco last week. To be honest, when I planned to visit, I thought I would do a fly through. I was more concerned with a trip to the Walt Disney Family Museum (I was born in Orlando, Disney is in my DNA), and a late meeting at the Asian Art Museum with some colleagues, and thought I would zip through. Oh… I was wrong.

A little context: I worked in the science center field for 13 years before joining the Rubin Museum. The Exploratorium was always spoken about as if it was that awesome guy in high school who graduated two years before you got there, but everyone always talks about how cool he was, and his name is on every trophy. Well I have to say, the Exploratorium lived up to the hype.

Let me show you why:

Yes, this is a picture of me manifesting as a multi-armed Hindu deity…and was able to make this picture at the Exploratorium. I didn’t just make this photo on my first try. I experimented with an exhibit that I happened upon, and tried this out multiple times until I got the right shot. I saw two others adults playing with this exhibit, a rotating disk with a pinhole that delays a digital camera shot when you step on a lever, and patiently waited until they left to try this out.

I knew what I wanted to accomplish the moment I stepped in front of the camera, but only had two seconds to get the shot right. This required me to flail my arms a number of different times. The exhibit was under a set of stairs by the large visible exhibits workshop. At least five staff members from the workshop walked in front of me and acknowledged my flailing with a gentle smile. They left me alone to explore. There was no laughing, or strange looks- just a simple acknowledgment that “hey, that guy is trying to do something- I’m not going to interrupt.” I also didn’t want to talk “museums” for once. Normally I’m super chatty with museum staff and ask loads of insider questions- but I was not interested. I was interested in being a ten-armed Marcos Vishvarupa, a universal manifestation of me. I loved that I was in a science center, exploring my ability to be the art that I love.

So, thank you Exploratorium. Thank you for letting me understand and experiment with the world that exists around me.

I think what makes the Exploratorium different is that it doesn’t cram the idea of “science” down your throat. Science is always present, but understanding comes first. When you first walk in, there is a quote from Frank Oppenheimer, founder of the Exploratorium, that has really stuck with me:

The whole point of the Exploratorium is to make it possible for people to feel they can understand the world around them. I think a lot of people have given up without understanding, and if they’ve given up with the physical world around them, they’ve given up with the social and political world as well. If you stop trying to understand things, and things kept changing, I think we’d all be sunk.

So much of what the Rubin Museum is about is discovering change. Change inside and out. I’m happy that a science museum in San Francisco could remind me of this understanding.

And so, my dear Exploratorium…until we meet again, I’ll think of you often and fondly. You are my biggest museum crush.