Homework?!
We don’t usually receive homework assignments from work1. Earlier this week, our CEO, Matt Mullenweg invited us to take a couple hours to go to a museum and then share our impressions. It was totally voluntary and I thought I’d accept the assignment and go visit a small museum in my city, The Hasmonean Heritage Museum.
I’m not sure what I was expecting from the visit. I enjoyed the interactivity in the exhibits and appreciated the more hands-on approach to the ancient artifacts that have been excavated over the decades. It was a good experience overall and I’m glad I went.
What stood out to me at the museum
I arrived at the museum shortly after it opened and I was the only person there, aside from one of the curators (at least, I think she is a curator). I basically had the whole place to myself. The curator explained some of the interactive exhibits to me and left me to explore with the help of an online audio guide.
The museum takes its name from the Hasmonean Dynasty (also referred to as the Maccabees who you may know from Hanukah stories) but it is really a fairly high level history of the ancient city of Modiin, the precursor to the modern city of Modiin Maccabim Reut where I now live.
The museum presents the story of Modiin from the time of the Hasmonean Family till the establishment of the modern city, all by way of instinctive and hands on programming. Visitors of the museum enjoy displays, entrance to a project room consisting of four fun activities, and a special effects movie ride that takes participants through time, from the Hasmoneans to the development of the modern city.
The museum is in the central heart of Modiin so as to connect the earlier city to the present city, and its commercial areas with its rich cultural venues.
Historical sources and sights of the area were the inspiration for the founding of the museum.
Most of the exhibits are very interactive and include replicas of pottery found in and around the city that you can reassemble and then have scanned to learn more about them, as well as a range of artifacts found in excavations around the city over the years.
I particularly like the main hall’s exhibit that displays a timeline of the area going back to around 11,500 BCE. This timeline has a set of screens and a sort of iron tray on rails that you can slide along the timeline. When you pause it at each time period, the screens on either side of a map of the modern city change to share historical information about the period and information about the artifacts in the display case. Points on the map of the modern city also light up to show you where the artifacts were found.
An adjoining hall contains a larger collection of artifacts that were excavated in and around the city, along with the pottery replicas I mentioned and a covered excavation site (or replica of one) that you can point lasers to to get them to light up and display information about them on screens around the excavation pit.
This hall also contains a fun sort of multiplayer game where you use arcade-style joysticks to move a digital magnifying glass over the a map of the modern city to locate stars that indicate what objects were found in those locations. You earn a token for each item you find and there are a couple joysticks around the table so you can play against other people.
The walls of this hall have display cases of various types of artifacts including some truly ancient glass, coins, and stone ossuaries.
The museum also hosts a really interesting exhibition by Nechama Levendel titled “Between the Visible and the Unseen” that uses used books to create a range of objects –
Nechama Levendel operates within this space. She works with used books — objects steeped in meaning and memory — and breaks them down into material layers that formulate a new visual language. In her hands, the covers, faded pages, fabrics, and glue residues are transformed into history-carrying raw materials. In a precise, patient, and intuitive process, she removes, pastes, conceals, and reveals. Action after action, layer by layer, the book loses its function as an agent of knowledge and is reimagined as a physical and mental object. “Time is my palette,” says Levendel, and indeed, time is present in her work not only as a theme but also as a material element, manifested in the creases, glue stains, faded colors, and the traces of touch.
The objects are placed around the museum and there are a few pieces in the “artifact hall” where they both blend in and stand apart as something very different and modern.
I ended my visit with a slightly cheesy 4D movie/ride (the seats move with the action) about a fictional search for oil to help bring the modern city of Modiin into being that touches on parts of the city’s and Jerusalem’s history. It was a fun movie and left me feeling a little more uplifted when I stepped back out on to the city centre boulevard.
- I am a Happiness Engineer on the WordPress.com escalated support team at Automattic ↩︎
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What do you think?