The next case study, or concept, or social structure we will look at, is the idea of science. So just like there is faith, right? Yeah. There is belief, and then there is knowledge, and scientific knowledge. But scientific knowledge has its institutions. That's universities but it's also in this case, museums. And one of my favorite examples, if not the best example that I know of in terms of the Museum of Science as an artwork is, David & Diane Wilson, Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA. And when they started this place in the 1980s, they started in an almost derelict building, they bought it for almost nothing. And David Wilson basically had studied science, but then he went to study film at Collarts. And he was like, he tried to make films, but then he realized, "I've been making all these films about science museums, I really want to have a museum.". I didn't know this. Yeah. "So why don't I just start a museum?" So he started this museum and you know last year, like 30,000 people come through this museum now. I do, every year. Yeah. I go there religiously. And the displays are so well done that the stuff is absurd sometimes, but it's so well done that you really want to believe in the signs of it. Yeah. The name says it all. And the explanation it tells like it's dedicated to the concept of the medium Jurassic. The whole aesthetic of how science shares its messages, is what's you know, it's a museum about museums. And something I love about it too is that if you actually go back even to the history of art museums, art and science were merged together. They were part of these institutions that housed, like what we call cabinets of curiosity. Right? Absolutely. And so that's what Wilson is after in this institution. Yeah. And it's funny because our two examples actually literally live next door to each other, in Culver City, Los Angeles. So if you go to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the more stark iteration is next door and they're called the Center for Land Use Interpretation. And this organization, studied by a man named Matthew Coolidge, basically studies the uses of the American landscape. And specifically American landscape. And under the auspices of this kind of dry studies of the uses of land, which in fact is all inspired by Robert Smithson, the artist who did all this land art stuff on the 60s, 70's, they are interested in shedding everyday phenomena from the history of film sets in Los Angeles, to the study of artificial caves in America, to the study of what is worth sight seeing in America. So under the kind of use of studying the world, they actually become a kind of cultural lens to understand the world we're in. And they're amazing. And you know before we were talking about the powerful. And whether there are artists among the powerful. What do you think data is? is Walt Disney an artist? Or is Disney corporation an artist? Yeah, it's a good question. The reason I ask is because we're moving into the section of, which is our last section in this module, of what some people call intentional communities. Or the whole idea of our living space, our entire community, our social mesh, as the social structure. Like the places where we live, where we share hallways, but also where we go shopping, where we eat. Our everyday life happens in communities, right? Yeah. And so, Disney actually started as one of the, to many people, most radical, intentional communities. Although intentional communities tends to be used only for radical experiments, meaning on the left, progressives. But for Disney it was celebration. This is that they founded, where basically it was modeled after all of the ideals of the Disney family, the Disney structure, right next to Disney World. And it's still running and more and more people have moved to celebration. So we have everything from that type of spectrum to Drop City, the kind of an outgrowth that organized by student. Drop City, between the 60s and the 70s, was an active community with all these geodesic domes inspired Buckminster Fuller, where these artists from the University of Kansas but also from Colorado Boulder, started. They wanted to make a community as an artwork. So their houses were made of discarded metal from cars, but in these domes. They were all inspired by Black Mountain College, that's also another radical experiment in living. So we can go from the range from the corporate version of the community, to the experimental artistic avant-garde version, to the grassroots farmer communities like like Zapatista Autonomous villages, right? Well one point say, "The State will not listen to us, we have our own methods of farming, our own methods of elections etc, and we have tried consistently for the state to recognize them. But, instead, we are giving up." So, not only did they put on ski mask, but they created what they call autonomous communities, and they meant it. Autonomous meant, we do not obey to the state. Yeah. Because the state will not obey its citizens. You know, just to say, I don't know if you know, I grew up in a commune. No. I did. For four years. But the world is getting harder. Does it still exist, many communes? It doesn't exist. And I've always, I've a hankering for this kind of working because you know, all of our references will be 60s and 70s. But you don't have a lot of artistic references in the contemporary era as much. And escaping out of the neo-liberal model, seems to be tougher. And I think Zapatismo is certainly a huge inspiration for this. Well, this is not the topic of our module now, but we'll definitely cover it in other sections of our MOOC. You're right in that, many on the one hand we could grow nostalgic for these models of alternative communities in the 50s and 60s, even into the 70s, although a lot of, we have to remember, a lot of them went quite dark in the 70s. And as perhaps as an ending example, even if it leaves us on a very low note, we should bring up the Jonestown massacre. Don't drink the cool aid. You know where that expression comes from? Yeah. Jones, the leader of Jonestown, this really radical, actually quite left this religious community, their leader went mad and convinced all these people. It was hundreds of people who committed suicide. One of the two largest collective suicides in human history happened in Jonestown. But wait, we cannot end on a low note. Okay. Because I always think people go to a dark place when they think of these communes and stuff. It's true, it's true. Yeah. And I think it's important to say historically, there's been a lot of good that have come out of these things too. Because I was talking to a curator friend of mine, Rashida Bumbry, who is saying, "If you look at a lot of the black radical separatist communities, a lot of amazing hip hop stars and radical's have come out of that history.". Well, even many of the things that we take for granted in our standard way of living now, would have been they came from these radical movements. How the family is organized, it wasn't only feminism and the gay movement these kind of what we would think of as homogeneous, structured, social movements, it was actually the entire radical living. People who just decided to live differently. They half of the time didn't even know why, but we've taken what was best of their experiments, and put it into our everyday life.
