(This is an except from the forthcoming WTF? curiously entertaining audio tour for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia)
This is a fascinating piece, created by Rebecca Baumann entitled “Automated Colour Field” and created in 2011. It’s all about seeing music. Read more…
(This is bonus content for the “46 Ways To Get Killed” audio tour at the American Museum of Natural History, now available from AmuseumGuides.com)
Jellyfish sting their prey using specialized venomous cells called nematocytes, which cover the surfaces of their tentacles. Contact can trigger hundreds of thousands, if not millions of the cells to build up pressure and burst, shooting out lances through which poison flows. Read more…
(This is bonus content for the Vampire Takeover of America audio tour, now available at AmuseumGuides.com)
Vampires don’t like alcohol. Some theorists have suggested they’re allergic to it (see Damian et al, Johns Hopkins study, 1947). There are no known cases of humans being bitten while drunk. Read more…
(This is bonus content for the Vampire Takeover of America audio tour, now available from AmuseumGuides.com)
The salon society of Paris during the latter years of the 19th century was as glorious and enriching as it was conniving and, in literal terms, cutthroat. Read more…
(This is bonus content for the upcoming Alien Artifacts audio tour)
The allegations that the Moon landings were a fraud began soon after the Apollo program ended, led by We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle, written and self-published by Bill Kaysing (who’d worked as head of publications for Rocketdyne, the subcontractor that built Saturn V rocket engines). Read more…
The technology of the 18th century was still very much human-powered, just as it had been since civilization began. The few mechanical devices the age possessed still relied on people to ensure they were powered, metered, adjusted, and maintained. Read more…
(This is bonus content for The Vampire Takeover of America audio tour for the Art Institute of Chicago, now available from AmuseumGuides.com)
American painter Grant Wood created his masterpiece American Gothic in 1930, after having chanced upon a small farmhouse in Iowa and deciding to paint “the kind of people I fancied should live in that house” (the woman is his sister, and the man is Wood’s dentist). He entered it in a contest at the Art Institute of Chicago, which awarded him a $300 prize even though the judges thought it was little more than a “comic valentine.”
Only that’s not what happened… Read more…
(This is bonus material for the Archaic Technology tour at the Art Institute of Chicago, available now from AmuseumGuides.com)
Sewing is one of the oldest of human activities, dating back to the discovery of needles in Stone Age dwellings, along with other tools crated from bone (and rock). Attaching two or more pieces of material together wasn’t just a technology applied to clothing, but also to shoemaking, sailmaking and, after time, upholstery and bookbinding. Societies from China to the Middle East were using needles and thread for decorative arts as early as 3,000 BCE. The technology remained unchanged for thousands of years, too. Read more…
(This is bonus material for the 46 Ways You Could Get Killed tour at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, available now from AmuseumGuides.com)
Squid are really strange creatures, in that they have no backbones and thus no skeletal structure to give their bodies form without the buffeting massage of sea water and its pressure. They are the largest invertebrates, and the Colossal Squid is the largest of the species. Also known as the Antarctic or Giant Squid, it can measure nearly 50 feet long; its eight arms and two tentacles are lined with suckers containing small teeth and sharp hooks. Its eyes are the largest in the entire animal kingdom. Read more…
(This is bonus material for the 46 Ways You Could Get Killed tour at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, available now from AmuseumGuides.com)
Whales have been threatening humanity since the Fifth Day of Creation, when a whale was the first creature God released into the newly-created waters. It was subsequently synonymous with leviathan, a huge creature with “a gaping mouth…terrible to behold” as a reminder to the sons of Adam to resist pride and temptation. Read more…