95. The Museum of Technology in Helsinki, Finland Knows Even the Most Futuristic Technology Will One Day Be History
Welcome to Museum Archipelago in Your Inbox, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Museum Archipelago, your audio guide to the rocky landscape of museums, is hosted by me, Ian Elsner.
In 1969, noticing that technological progress was changing their fields, heads of Finish industry came together to found a technology museum in Finland. Today, the Museum of Technology in Helsinki, housed in an old water purification plant, is the only general technological museum in the country.
But of course, technical progress didn’t stop changing, as service coordinator Maddie Hentunen notes, and it can be challenging for a museum to keep up.
In this episode recorded in Helsinki, Hentunen describes the museum’s philosophical stance on technology, how the museum balances industrial development with more open source design practices, and how the museum thinks about its own obsolescence.
Gallery Continues ⏭️
Like the Museum of Technology in Helsinki, Finland, the National Polytechnic Museum in Sofia, Bulgaria is its country's only technical museum. But instead of an old purification plant, the museum building's past life was another museum: a museum of Georgi Dimitrov, the first Bulgarian communist leader, and that history is never too far from the technology on display.
In this episode, museum curator Vassil Macaranov describes the balance of presenting both scientific concepts and the political contexts in which they were developed.
Archipelago at the Movies🍿Museo (2018)
When it opened in 1964, the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City needed to fill its new building with old things. That's the way Wilson, one of protagonists of Museo, an excellent Spanish-language film describes the government's initial rush to move Mesoamerican monoliths to the museum.
But these objects would be moved again. Following the same basic story of a real-life 1985 heist, Wilson and his friend Juan manage to pull off a daring break-in of the museum, escaping with Mexico's national treasures.
The film (trailer here) deals with many of the themes that we talk about on this show, and it might be our favorite museum movie we've watched.
Today on Archipelago at the Movies, we follow Wilson and Juan through museum vents, burial chambers, and their own guilt as we discuss 2018's Museo.