Museum of Extinct Experiences: A Creative Exploration

A Collection of Things That Cannot Be Displayed

I asked Claude for some unusual ideas for blog posts. The ‘Museum of Extinct Things’ was one suggestion that appealed to me. Here is the prompt:

The Museum of Extinct Things – write short exhibit labels, the kind you’d find on a museum information card, for things that no longer exist or never existed. “The last letter written by hand.” “The smell of a bookshop that has been gone for forty years.” “Silence before recorded sound.” Melancholy micro-fiction in an unusual format.

Here is what Claude gave me…

A Collection of Things That Cannot Be Displayed

Exhibit 1 The Pause Before Someone Answered the Phone Anticipatory. Analogue. Pre-caller display.

This exhibit cannot be displayed because it existed entirely in the body. The phone rang. You did not know who it was. In the half-second before you picked up, your life arranged itself into possibilities, good news, bad news, someone you hoped for, someone you dreaded. Every call contained, briefly, every call. Caller display ended this in the late 1990s and the pause collapsed into certainty. What was lost was not the not-knowing itself but the particular aliveness of it. The case is empty. The feeling was the exhibit.

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Exhibit 2 Silence Before Recorded Sound Atmospheric. Pre-1877.

This exhibit cannot be displayed. What you are experiencing now is not silence, it contains the distant compression of traffic, the hum of the building’s ventilation, the sound your own blood makes when everything else stops. True silence, the kind that existed before Edison pressed a needle into tin foil and pulled sound back out of it, has not been available since. We have included an empty case as a placeholder. Please do not tap the glass.

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Exhibit 3 The Smell of a Bookshop That Has Been Gone For Forty Years Volatile organic compounds, memory, dust. Circa 1984.

Composed of ageing paper, slowly oxidising adhesive, the slight damp of a building that backed onto a canal, and something underneath that was neither of those things. Three people in the city still carry this smell in long-term memory, located somewhere behind the nose and slightly to the left of language. When they die, this exhibit will be permanently deaccessioned. Visiting hours are limited.

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Exhibit 4 A Conversation That Was Never Recorded Spoken word. Date unknown.

Two people, believed to be in their thirties, sat at a table in a kitchen in an unidentified city and talked for four hours. They solved nothing and decided nothing. One of them said something that made the other laugh so suddenly that tea came out of their nose. By the following Thursday neither could remember what it was. This exhibit exists only in the slight warmth that sometimes rises, unprovoked, in the chest of one survivor when they pass a certain kind of window in afternoon light.

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Exhibit 5 The Last Few Minutes of Not Knowing Experiential. Irretrievable.

This exhibit cannot be displayed. It occurred in the minutes between an event happening and you being told about it. A result. A diagnosis. A decision made in a room you weren’t in. While you walked home, bought milk, argued mildly about something trivial, the thing already existed, fully formed, waiting. You were happy, or ordinarily unhappy, in a way that would shortly become impossible. This state has been largely eliminated by the mobile phone. We have not found a way to exhibit the last moments of not knowing. We are not sure we should.

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Exhibit 6 The Gap Between Channels Static. Analogue signal. Pre-digital.

Not the programmes themselves, which have been archived. The gap between them. The grey hiss of late-night television after the last broadcast, the test card with the girl and the clown, the sense that the world had officially stopped for the evening and would resume in the morning. Children who fell asleep in front of it reported dreams of unusual clarity. The connection has not been established. The static is gone. The dreams went with it.

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Exhibit 7 A Queue Without Phones Human patience. Pre-2007.

Forty-three people standing in a line outside a post office on a Tuesday morning in November. None of them have anywhere to put their eyes except the back of the next person’s head, the sky, the middle distance. Several are thinking about things they will never tell anyone. One is composing a sentence she will use six months later in an argument that will change her life. The queue moves forward. Nobody documents it. It simply happens, and is over, and is entirely gone.

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Exhibit 8 The Sound of Someone Else’s Radio Through a Wall Domestic. Indeterminate date.

Tinny, warm, slightly muffled. Always a song you half-knew. The person on the other side of the wall is unknown to you, a neighbour, a stranger in a hotel, someone in the flat above. They are going about their evening. The song suggests they are happy, or at least that happiness is somewhere in the building. You are not lonely, exactly. But you notice the music. This exhibit has been reported missing from cities since approximately 2015. No recovery is expected.

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Exhibit 9 The Particular Boredom of a Sunday Afternoon in 1987 Experiential. Not reproducible.

Thick, slow, slightly golden. The shops were shut. There was nothing on television until five. The garden offered nothing new. You had read everything readable. Time did not pass so much as accumulate, pooling in the corners of rooms. Children raised in this environment developed an internal resource that has since been identified but cannot be named. It is not patience exactly. It is something that patience grew out of. The conditions required to produce it no longer exist.

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Exhibit 10 The Moment Just Before You Remembered Cognitive. Universal. Now rare.

The thing you were trying to think of was on the tip of your tongue. You stopped. You looked at the middle distance. You let your mind go slightly unfocused, the way you’d been taught by nobody, the way everyone somehow knew to do. And in the space you created, it arrived. This exhibit is endangered rather than extinct, it requires, as a precondition, approximately forty uninterrupted seconds of not reaching for a phone. Visitors are encouraged to attempt this in the lobby. Most cannot manage it. The curators understand.

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Over To You

What items might you include in this museum? Share your thoughts in the comments below.