I think I’ve always had an impulse to create some kind of “cabinet of curiosities”. As a child, it was hard for me to bypass an interesting rock, or a crusty old coin, or the perfect shaped stick. As I’ve grown older, it’s still hard for me to bypass objects that capture my imagination. The objects have changed, though, to things that carry history, or lore, or mystery. Objects, even ordinary ones, carry something with them. Seeing an object with a sense of history feels like a connection, even if just a little bit, to human experience in another place or time.
The dream is to open a small museum with a collection of fantastical objects that seem to have slipped through the cracks between different realities and somehow made their way into our own. The museum would not be an ordinary display space. It would be a gently immersive environment in which visitors would feel as though they were stepping into an out-of-time antiques shop. Visitors could explore the collection to discover the stories each item might have and the worlds the items might be connected to, or encounter familiar objects from shared fictional worlds.
But this doesn’t have much practical or economic value. And, in many ways, that’s why I think a project like this is important.
At this time in history, creative work feels under constant threat of being displaced by “generative” AI tools. The works of human minds are mined for parts and frankensteined together to produce an on-demand, “cheap” proxy of human output. These “generative” AI products are not generated so much as assembled.
Meanwhile, human imagination can make (or weave, or sketch, or illustrate, or paint, or sculpt, or stitch, or describe, or code, or build, or portray, or orchestrate, or create in so many unique ways) new worlds when given the opportunity to do so. We draw inspiration from the work of others, and then build upon, reimagine, subvert, juxtapose, or by other means combine with our own individual expression and past experience to generate something unique and personal. “Generate” in the truer sense of the word: to bring into being, and to do so by way of relationship with other humans.
Art takes effort, insight, time, and love. And as long as resources are channeled to the easy, careless, fast, and transactional products of AI in the name of profit, resources for human art may very well dwindle. Especially so for human art that does not contribute to someone’s ROI.
So, that’s the dream: a little museum that, in its own weird way, celebrates the expanse of human imagination. It’s a moon shot idea in stubborn defense of human creativity and interconnectivity. And it’s quite possibly not possible. But for now, I’ll start with what I can do: make objects that might someday be part of this weird little museum’s collection.