The Silent Museum
Humankind, a retrospective
We are uncertain where or when the Silent Museum was a real world, physical place, if at all. Now, it is a globally present teaching and research resource for understanding pre CPE cultures and belief systems.
We are reasonably confident that the Silent Museum was started by a small group of curators, artists and writers just before the Catastrophic Patch Event (CPE), or similar moment of existential crisis.
These first curators felt compelled to work fast without fully understanding what they were doing. They had to catalogue and process vast amounts of material, so they relied heavily on AI and automated systems. They disappeared in a hurry too, leaving the front door open.
The Silent Museum is presently to be found at silentmuseum.org It is also, possibly, anabandoned but not inactive building, whereabouts unknown. The last known curator, called TX Broswell, also left fragments of writing and AV presentations, now known as the Broswell journals. Nothing is known of his whereabouts, except that he continues to post occasionally on the Silent Museum site.
The Silent Museum has now become a global presence among the remaining cultural institutions that are still functioning. New accessions continue to be displayed in the permanent collection.
Guide for artists :
how to gain accession to the permanent collection.
The Silent Museum has two goals :
To reach new audiences by being where most of them find their visual culture : In pictures and moving images. In short, on screens.
To give a home to significant objects in an age of fast cycle disposal. The Silent Museum grants accession codes to the permanent collection in two areas :
Arca box collection - a carefully codified and presented box archive of significant pre CPE objects.
circ0bscuro film fragments - image documentation of the human society who used the significant objects in the Arca box collection
How Does That Work?
One idea at a time. Anybody can propose anything.
Don’t get in touch unless you have a confirmed venue and a draft press release/marketing plan. Then we select the artists, the artist curate the work and and off we go. We need a minimum of three proactive people : Publicity and media. Venue, theme and curating. Event organiser, hanging and hospitality.
My basic premise is that artists groups will only work for as long as everybody is committed and engaged with a shared project. Off the peg solutions are hard to find - Academies, art societies, state funded arts events, pay to enter competitions or pay to show art fairs can be sketchy and very rarely pay their way.
I set up an informal group called #opensignapse and we met several times to support and promote. That group was really important in making the Shelf Lives event work as well as it did.