Finding Your Way Around The Lost Museum

Imagine being able to enter the past, to visit P.T. Barnum's American Museum, one of the premier destinations in 19th-century New York. Imagine walking by the ever-revolving exhibitions, from the FeJee Mermaid (supposedly a mummified version of the real thing, but actually a constructed composite of a fish and a monkey) to the wax museum figure of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in a women's dress and bonnet, a sly acknowledgment of the rumors that he tried to escape from Union forces in drag. In your meanderings you see a poster advertising Zalumma Agra, the Circassian "Star of the East," supposedly among the most beautiful women on Earth, and a plaque that reads, "No Admittance for Females of Known Bad Character, or Other Improper Persons, so That Ladies and Families Will be Perfectly Safe, and No More Exposed to Evil Companions Than in Their Own Parlors."

Thanks to The Graduate Center's New Media Lab (which operates under the aegis of the Center for Media and Learning), Barnum's Museum--part zoo, part lecture hall, part freak show--is once again open for business, albeit in the virtual environs of the World WideWeb at http://web.gc.cuny.edu/ashp/lostmuseum/. "One hundred thirty-five years after the Museum burned down, there's still tremendous interest in it, as well as in Barnum's personality and in the way he mixed information and entertainment," says Joshua Brown, director of the Center for Media and Learning. "As a link between the public and the scholarly, the site will examine the role of Barnum and the Museum in the context of larger historical themes of the time." Indeed, Barnum's Museum, which attracted as many as 15,000 visitors a day, engaged its public in some of the most profound issues of the antebellum era: slavery, gender, biology, genetics, and popular culture itself. For the first time, the Museum drew in people of all classes--immigrants and native-born, working class and middle class, men and women, city residents and rural tourists--amid a burgeoning and splintering culture.

"It is the seminal institution of popular culture in the United States, and the issues he raised around presentation and trickery, illusion and reality, information and entertainment are themes that resonate with us today."

The Lab, which is co-directed by Associate Provost for Instruction Technology and External Programs Stephen Brier, Vice President for Research and Sponsored Programs Brian Schwartz, and Brown, was launched in 1997 to allow Graduate Center faculty and students to engage in new media research, software development, and Internet exploration for both the educational and commercial sectors. It recreated the Museum based on archival material as well as its own field research, using a 3-D software program called Softimage. The 3-D modeling was carried out by three graduate students researchers, Lee Ann Pomplas-Bruening (Art History), Fernando Azevedo (Art History), and Cristina Yunzal (Economics). "We had a limited number of engravings, lithographs, and photos of the exterior," says Brown, "so we took field trips to places like the South Street Seaport, which was adjacent to the Museum. There's an old hotel down there that hasn't been touched in a hundred years, and so it very much reflects Barnum's time and place. We took pictures of doorknobs and signs and wallpaper, and recreated those textures with the software, drawing them throughout the building." To recreate one of the Museum's most popular exhibits--the FeJee Mermaid--the Lab staff constructed the body with a wire frame, then worked on its texture by actually buying a fish and scanning in the scales. "When you print the mermaid out in high resolution it looks incredible," says Andrea Ades Vasquez, the Lab's managing director.

Like it or not, assert Brown and Vasquez, digital media is a new way for academics, scholars, and students to investigate their disciplines. The New Media Lab's mission, then, is to maintain that this new platform can be equally rigorous and contain intellectual challenges that aren't in the commercial realm. "We want to make sure that content plays an important role in this technology," says Brown, "that it's not just fetishistic bells and whistles." One of the goals of the site, therefore, is to attract students and teachers at the college and advanced high school levels through its richly built structure as well as its content.Users can move through the Museum's rooms, while a full archive provides background information about the exhibits' origins, how they were tied to events in their time, and what historians and other scholars thought about their significance and meaning. "Teachers could formulate their classroom assignments, units, or even semester-long projects around a certain theme, such as temperance and industrial morality movements," says Brown. Eventually the site will include a variety of investigative paths throughout the building for users who want to solve the mystery of who set fire to it. "The notion of the mystery is a way to encourage people to question evidence, which is important to historical inquiry. For example, one clue describes the FeeJee mermaid as 5 feet, another as 18 inches," says Vasquez. "Which one should you believe?" By re-discovering the past in The Lost Museum, the public will be asked to play historian--to examine the complexities that surround historical study, with its conflicting courses of scrutiny and multiple sources of evidence--and will surely learn something along the way.

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