resolution rendering of his animation—and
now a problem that cameras have solved for
years with mirrors is giving Peterson’s soft-
ware trouble. This slight ofset is wreaking
havoc.
“Okay, look,” Peterson says. “So if I just
do...scale this bit...that’s pretty close! On
X!...yes or no...?”
Nevarez surveys the sand splashed with
color from the projector. “Yeah, it’s close on
X,” he says.
“Okay, so Y,” Peterson says.
“Hold!” Nevarez says. He sweeps his eyes
across the tub. “That looks pretty good on Y.”
They try shifting the whole projection
over slightly.
“Hmm,” Nevarez says. “Good everywhere
except the center. It’s doing something
weird.” He’s stumped.
As Peterson and Nevarez stare at the
sandbox, three of the museum’s education
staff walk up and start playing in it. They
get it instantly—start building atolls and
shaping seamounts. One of them looks up.
“You’re going to get lots and lots of happy
faces, I promise you.”
“All we want is happy faces,” Nevarez
says, still half a mind somewhere else. “We
got talked out of this, a lot.”
Nearby, an older man wearing an ID
badge that says “Fossil Expert” mills
around. A retiree, he’s been a volunteer at
the museum since 2011. He’s walking the
gallery to learn the material. “Kids know
more now than we did,” he says. It’s the
smartphones, the internet. There’s so much
that is available now, so easily. But the fun-
damental appeal of the museum is the same,
he says, even as over his shoulder Peterson
is up on a ladder messing with a depth cam-
era and Nevarez is playing in scientiically
modiied sand and they’re speaking in code
about X adjustments and Y adjustments.
“You don’t need interactive,” the man says.
“They still press their faces to the glass.”
OPENING
The irst room of “Unseen Oceans” is small,
maybe eighty square feet, and the walls are
the pallid blue of a cloudless day at the beach.
A projector, suspended from the ceiling,
shines a beach onto the loor—a looping video
of surf crashing in and slowly receding. The
kids who step into the room stop and stare,
momentarily puzzled, at the wash on their
feet. Then they begin their descent.
In the second room, Meah’s copepod
see up close. They’re under glass so the kids
don’t mangle them, not that they don’t try.
People ilter into the fourth room, settle
into seats in front of Bob Peterson’s mas-
sive screen, and jump when the giant squid
clamps its beak onto the camera—then shriek
when a humpback wha le swoops in from of-
screen and clamps the squid in its jaws. In the
ifth room, smiling faces hover over the sand-
box while kids create their own ocean loor.
By the sixth room it’s clear that some-
thing happens as people walk through the
exhibition. Each room takes them deeper,
but it also takes them farther—farther from
the hustling city, from the concrete and
asphalt, from the subway, the traic. Farther
from their classrooms and their Snapchat
accounts. Farther from the news cycle. Each
step they take deeper into the exhibit, they
roam farther from the thing they’re actu-
ally immersed in, which kids may not even
discern yet—the sea of unordered informa-
tion that is modern life, deeper all the time.
In the culminating room a whole pack of
children gambol around on hands and knees
until they’ve trapped Brett Peterson’s ish
in a seething ball, the way massive schools
are rounded up by sharks. They pound the
ground with open palms, erupt in cries and
chants, trying to make the ish disappear.
They have surrendered to the exhibition.
For the conservation note that completes the
descent, Alonso’s team has created a room
that transforms children into sea creat ures.
And here a man stands over the kids,
someone’s uncle or dad or big brother. He’s got
an exasperated look on his face, but a dawn
smile is cracking on his lips. We all want to
maintain a little bit of this inside ourselves,
and while the world bombards us—plumps
us up with so much that it hurts, so much
that we harden ourselves and take no more in
and in so doing become a little less curious, a
little more cynical, and a lot less childlike—
the museum does the opposite. It takes the
unruly heap of facts scientists endlessly gen-
erate and shapes them into something you
can walk through, that somehow shrinks
the world of knowledge so it its into the tiny
skull-size space between our ears. The man
has his phone out, and even as he says, as
g r uly a s he can, “Okay, okay, okay!” he snaps
a picture so he can remember the scene. Then
he says, “Let’s go.” The kids push themselves
up to their feet and skitter out the door, out
the maze of corridors, into the brilliant light
of midday in New York. Taxis whiz past. A
train rumbles under their city of islands.hangs against the wall. Under the UV light-
ing, it radiates a kaleidoscopic palette of
delicate colors, like an oyster turned inside
out. In the center of the room, under glass
that almost makes it feel like a real collected
specimen, sits Janaszak’s plankton. A plac-
ard pictures the plankton, with its disgusting
abdomen and terrifying, spindly legs, side-
by-side with the alien from Alien. Did it
inspire the monster? “What do you think?”
parents ask, and their kids look back and
forth between the pictures, mouths agape.
The third room: 250 feet below the sur-
face. The steel helix expands like a tornado
from the middle of the room, covered in luo-
rescent ish. A ishnado. The models, which
were lat in the streaming daylight of the ifth
loor, look alive in the settled cool blue of the
gallery. The luorescent paints, charged by
the UV, take on subtlety and nuance. A few
models sit on tables at chest level for kids toTo p : Glimmering clear-resin models of a phronima
(left) and a diatom in the exhibition gallery.Above:
A mock-up of a sonar device. Opposite: Prepara-
tors Jake Adams (left) and Kurt Freyer skewer ish
models and secure them to a steel superstructure.JULY/AUGUST_201 77