Museum Assignment

For my museum assignment, I went to the Smithsonian’s Natural Museum of Natural History to check out their “Lights Out: Recovering Our Night Sky” exhibit. The curator for this exhibit is Kirk Johnson, the Sant Director of the National Museum of Natural History. The list of the sub-exhibits are: “History of Lighting and Light Pollution,” “The Dark Side of Light,” “Who Needs the Dark?,” “Experience the Night,” “Connecting with the Night Sky,” “Reclaiming the Night Sky,” “Embracing the Dark,” and “Measuring the Night’s Darkness.”

This exhibit mainly consists of images of different sources of light and the impacts of artificial light all around the world. Throughout this exhibit, the curator seem to use digital technology in order to give us more realistic depictions as to the effects of artificial light animals around the world. This might not seem immediately significant, however, throughout the exhibit, we learned how impacted photosensitive creatures are to our artificial lights sources and how that affects food, production patterns, climate patterns, and more. Even though digital technology was being used in order to showcase more realistic depictions, the more interactive exhibits were more hands-on. Overall, though, there are not that many interactive parts of the exhibit.

As for the historical interpretation of this exhibit, what it showcases is the impacts of our past actions on the environments, the climate, the other living beings around us, and us as a collective, and how moving forward, it is crucial that we change how we view our resources and how we use our resources. I think the curator hope the exhibition would showcase the interconnectedness of all the lights around the world and how humans everywhere are deeply affected by them.

The target audience seems as though it was people who would go to the museum. Families, college students, academics, overall, everyday people. I don’t think this project was as difficult to realize. I think that there was more space to build and create an exhibit because it was the Smithsonian.The purpose of the ‘Lights Out’ exhibit is to give people the opportunity to learn more about the stars and the cosmos and how effected we are by what happens to them.

Overall, this exhibit was amazing! I think it acheived it goal in showing us the interceonnectedness between our actions and our light sources and was just an overall beautiful and engaging exhibit.