The Museum of Science and Industry's Mold-A-Rama machines
Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry has an unusual feature: injection-molded figurine vending machines. The museum is covered in them. Most of the biggest exhibits have their own custom figurine, and if you poke around, you can find a "Mold-A-Rama" which will dispense one for you, in around one minute, for $5 USD.
Make your own EXCLUSIVE PRODUCT... molded in COLORFUL PLASTIC in seconds!
These machines are really bizarre. They melt and cast low-density polyethylene beads, then spit out the warm, waxy, soft figurine into a box. You're supposed to hold them upside-down until they cool off, because "drips of plastic" may run off them. The whole time I held mine upside-down, I wondered: is this shit going to kill me?? Is this a good idea???
These mold machines appear at the Field natural history museum as well, and the Mold-A-Rama website contains a list of the seven total locations where you can find these machines, each with a list of all the models printable at that location. The MSI has 9 different models. They sell an extraordinary amount of non-machine Mold-A-Rama merch, and you can just buy the models off their website as well (which seems to defeat their purpose).
The MSI contains a whole exhibit about the history of the vending machine devices, which were invented in the 1960s and have a very distinct space-age, industry-loving vibe to them. All sorts of current and historic figurines are on display - it seems that they have periodically added new molds for new exhibits.
The exhibit about the Mold-A-Rama devices contains a lot of pretty conflicted text. I bet this exhibit predates the news from the last few years about how little plastic is really recycled in the US at all.
I also noticed the yawning rhetorical gap between the first paragraph and the second paragraph in this wall graphic. It's very common for rhetoric about societal and material harms in the US to be constructed in this way - for the "case in favor" and the "case against" to be juxtaposed without any connective material. This is particularly common in newspaper articles where the journalist has been culturally trained to present various facts without drawing any conclusions, in the optimistic hope that their audience will draw the obviously-correct conclusions themselves, without any guidance. It's a strategy of self-preservation - it avoids saying anything which might feel too opinionated to pass review by conservatives. You can say "Kamala Harris said X" and "Trump said Y" in back to back 'grafs, and avoid saying who is obviously correct, and cross your fingers in hope that the audience will guess the truth in the gap between these isles of fact.
In the MSI Mold-A-Rama exhibit, it was very funny to me to see the painful, obvious truth hovering in the gap between these two paragraphs: it is stupid to make "novelty" plastic shit for no reason. But so many billions of people on earth make, buy, and value dumb plastic shit that does nothing for them... including me, because I printed one of these dumb toys to see what the fuck it was like.
(Pointing and screaming, at myself:) Induced demand for LDPE!! I would never have created this Object if the museum had not put this bizarre, ancient vending machine in my way!!
So what do we say about that? Bringing up plastic bags at all was intensely funny to me, because there is a ton of really fascinating and interesting stuff to be said about disposable plastic objects-of-convenience-and-novelty in a science museum, particularly for kids. I saw plenty of science museum exhibits about conserving water as a kid... surely, an exhibit about plastics recycling would be the modern equivalent? Surely a modern museum exhibit about plastics should not be about their ease of use and utility for society, since this is now a truism proven by the physical reality of the world children live in. (The exhibit dwelled awfully long on 20th century enthusiasm for plastic, and even took time to talk about bakelite.) Shouldn't a modern science museum be about the challenges of developing cutting-edge plastic substitute materials, or about the conflicted role that plastics play in our society generally?
I am not a scientist or an engineer, but if I was designing a modern "science and industry" museum, I would expect to see a lot of cool exhibits about weird new materials, and shit like mass timber construction, and that biodegradable shit they make forks in cafeterias out of these days, and everything we are attempting to do with corn, or whatever. I am genuinely curious about that shit. I know little about it.
I am not sure that the MSI is ready to go there, though. The entire interior of the museum is covered in massive, ancient text pronouncements about science's utility to man, and to industry. In the room next to the Mold-A-Rama exhibit, we found the phrase:
Science discerns the laws of nature. Industry applies them to the needs of humankind.
... above a display box containing an Atari 2600.
The whole museum feels like a halfway-executed step away from an insanely industry-friendly vision of what a "science museum" should be. I got the sense that the museum's partnerships and supporters and historical interests were very industry-focused, and that the museum might be kind of stuck with a ton of these legacy-industry-centric exhibits for a very long time. There is a massive exhibit about farming machinery which was there when I was about 13-15 years old, too. I remember seeing its models of vegetables and its exhibit about fertilizer the last time I came here as a child.
There is a massive interactive coal museum exhibit which you can buy a tour ticket for. We did not get one. The installation is multiple stories tall and is a gigantic object in one of the two-story museum wings which you physically enter. Removing the coal mine exhibit would probably be as expensive as adding a new one.
I get the sense that when you install an exhibit like this in a science museum, you are stuck with its contents - and its rhetoric - for practically a generation.
Once you see that a museum like this is a project of rhetoric and indoctrination, it becomes a surreal, hilarious experience. You can genuinely enjoy the tactile and didactic functions of such a high-quality science museum while also thinking, right in the front of your mind: oh my god. The kids are so fucked. I grew up on this too and I, also, am so fucked. This dirty, life-sized fiberglass model of a cow I'm looking at was here when I was a child, and has been subjected to repeated milking by this "high tech" robotic milker arm for my entire adult life.
It would take tens of millions of dollars in research, design, fabrication, and installation to improve any of this... but the newer exhibits are also very much designed in partnership with industry. There was a balcony exhibit about wearable tech which was just a bunch of startup advertisements.
I don't know. Funny and weird as hell. The coolest thing in the museum is a gigantic (like, 10 foot wide) disc full of red sand which you can spin a zillion miles per hour. A visitor can control its speed using a gigantic wheel. I think it was supposed to teach me something about avalanches but I think it would also be cool to just put this in a weed cafe and let people go nuts with it.
If I had a kid I would probably be a complete maniac about this shit. I would be banning them from the MSI and taking them to the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium only. As an adult, I can enjoy its massive, tactile physics demonstrations, and its interactive learning experiences - undeniably some of the best I have ever seen - with two of my brains ticking and spitting steam at once. And surely this stuff didn't ruin me forever when I saw it as a child myself.
The problem is that I am 35, and I saw many of these exhibits as a child. They haven't changed since. What the fuck is up with that!!!