97. Richard Nixon Hoped to Never Say These Words about Apollo 11. In A New Exhibit, He Does.
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.
As the Apollo 11 astronauts hurtled towards the moon on July 18th, 1969, members of the Nixon administration realized they should probably make a contingency plan. If the astronauts didn’t make it – or, even more horrible, if they made it to the moon and crashed and had no way to get back to earth – Richard Nixon would have to address the nation. That haunting speech was written but fortunately was never delivered.
But you can go to the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City and watch Nixon somberly reciting those words. It looks like real historic footage, but it’s fake. Artists Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund used the text of the original address and media manipulation techniques like machine learning to create the synthetic Nixon for a film called In Event of Moon Disaster. It anchors an exhibit called Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen.
In this episode, Panetta and Burgund discuss how they created In Event of Moon Disaster as a way to highlight various misinformation techniques, the changing literacy of the general public towards media manipulation, and the effectiveness of misinformation in the museum medium.
Gallery Continues ⏭️
Nixon didn't have to deliver that speech in part because of flawless teamwork of people in a room in Houston, Texas: Mission Control. But until recently, that room was kind of a mess. After hosting Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and Shuttle missions through 1992, the room hosted retirement parties, movie screenings, and the crumbs that came with them.
A few years ago, Mission Control was carefully restored with a new visitor experience. The restoration project focused on accurately portraying how the area looked at key moments during the Apollo 11 mission, right down to the ashtrays and soda cans. In this episode, Sandra Tetley, Historic Preservation Officer at the Johnson Space Center, describes the ups and downs of restoring the Apollo Mission Control Center.
Archipelago at the Movies🍿Старики́–разбо́йники (Granddads-Robbers) (1972)
Today, we peek behind the Iron Curtain to watch our first museum heist movie from the Soviet Union.
It's called Granddads-Robbers or Старики́–разбо́йники. The titular granddads are friends: Nikolay is a detective who is being pushed out of his job because he hasn't solved a crime in two months. Valentin, who has just arrived from his own retirement party, comes up with the idea to commit the crime of the century just so that Nikolay can solve it in front of his boss. Committing the crime and then being the heroes that solve it seems like the perfect way to return to the relevance of their youth.
So they decide to steal a Rembrandt painting from the local museum.
But the granddads are too good—or at least too invisible to the rest of society due to their age and retirement. They successfully steal the painting, but nobody suspects that anything’s amiss.
It's a fascinating ride, with creepy dream sequences, some early museum heist tropes, and Soviet jokes. It looks, feels, and sounds unlike anything we've seen before, and your hosts have seen a lot of museum movies.