If I could live inside the Museum of Jurassic Technology, I would. David Wilson’s jewel-box project, housed in Culver City since the 90s, is a standby offbeat destination, a MacArthur-funded stalwart of Weird LA, a “modern day curiosity cabinet” (per its Atlas Obscura entry) which takes about 90 minutes to percolate through in its entirety, ending in a tea garden on the roof, complete with columbarium and populated with dozens of finches and doves.
This description hardly does it justice; as does pretty much every other description out there, even Laurence Weschler’s 1995 classic Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, being as it is nearly 30 years old and not inclusive of the many expansions of the museum since then.
Generally, I describe the museum as “a museum about museums” or “a work of art you can walk through” — and usually tack on “you either get it or you don’t.” It’s about a 50/50 split, as far as my own referrals go. One friend I’d instructed to go texted me dolefully, “I don’t think that was for me.” Another texted me with a picture of a tattoo she’d got of one of the exhibits mere hours after visiting for the first time ever. That about sums it up.
Wilson’s origin as a model-maker for science fiction films in the 70s and 80s provides the basis for the museum’s visual aesthetic: the delicacy of the dioramas, the infinite, esoteric detail to be found in the displays and their accompanying text. The fractal nature of the museum’s infinitely interesting contents is naturally part of the appeal, but for me the larger space and the feeling of moving through it is a major part of why I love it. Navigating its dark corners, sitting on plush benches and watching crackly slideshows about ambiguously real theories of memory and truth: it’s hard to tear myself away.
Growing up in Chicago, my mother, a lifelong theater connoisseur, toted me along to productions by local troupe Redmoon, which produced immersive family-friendly shows full of puppetry, mime, interactive sets, colors and shapes and sounds. Their elaborate Julie Taymor-esque environments included rope swings to play on, doors to open, rooms to explore. These shows, to me, were heaven. I’m not sure how they would hold up as an adult—regrettably I can’t find out, as Redmoon shuttered in 2016—but in any case they instilled in me a taste for a certain kind of elaborate theatrical environment.
The MJT is for the most part inanimate, its exhibits sans performers (unless you are lucky enough to emerge onto the rooftop garden when Mr. Wilson is performing, incognito, on his nyckleharpa). It is incumbent upon each visitor to craft their own narrative of what the museum is, and means.
Sleep No More, on the other hand, ups the ante. Somehow I was late to the game and only went for the first time to Punchdrunk’s long-running immersive Macbeth/Rebecca mashup in Manhattan this past fall, only a few months before its 2024 closing was announced. In retrospect that’s insane, given how much it is obviously up my alley, but on the other hand my tardiness probably saved me a LOT of money. Because I went once, and then subsequently spent an irresponsible amount on return visits as the hyperfixation gremlin in my brain began to awaken.
Sleep No More is much more elaborate, narratively-driven, and blatantly commercial than either Redmoon or the MJT, but it still is tremendously artful. Like the MJT, it can be fun for casual visitors, but is built upon a magisterial, Escherian structure of deep lore and intertextuality that only becomes apparent to its most devoted, the fans most willing to be patient and put in many hours observing its component parts.
There is nothing so transcendent as being literally inside your obsession. It goes beyond traditional practices of attentive audiencing and becomes a type of immersion which is precisely the opposite of our default mode of being stuck on the other side of the screen, only half-paying attention to the polished and forgettable Content before you.
That, I think, is the real jurassic technology: physical, mental, emotional presence. Unadulterated, uncompromised. And with Sleep No More there is the added element of the performers themselves, and the potential for narrative intimacy in a one-on-one, or 1:1—private scenes performed by one cast member for one member of the audience, usually involving physical contact.
For those with fantasist and escapist tendencies (like yours truly) it can be a shortcut to the druggy frisson of the self-insertion fantasy, the Mary Sue daydream of your teen self, of flying away on the TARDIS or visiting Middle Earth or otherwise becoming an inextricable part of your favorite story. A 1:1 in particular is like an instant jolt of delicious, dangerous delulu. Can he recognize me from last time, under the mask? Am I a character now too?
This line of thinking—don’t laugh now—has kind of made me understand, and sympathize with, Disney Adults and their ilk. I’m no different: I have my own happiest places on Earth. A TikTok of a goth girl at Universal being greeted and escorted by a craggy, handsome Dracula face character might have made me cringe before I became Sleep No More-pilled; after, it made me sigh in self-aware understanding. She’s living the dream.
I went for the first time on New Year's Eve and can't afford to go back - a tragedy, when something was so clearly Made For Me. I'm trying to treat it like a life lesson or something...but it hasn't stopped me from reading everything about it and literally dreaming about what it would be like to go back. But I guess you can never go back to Manderley.
Aw man I really want to visit this now..!