Mystery museum gives glimpse of another world

The typical museum is not up everyone's alley. For some, they conjure unpleasant memories of field trips past: Rusty, dusty trappings of an inaccessible time, the lullabies of the butter churning demonstration, or insufferable walks through hall after hall with no bench in sight.

Then there's the Musée Patamécanique (or the Museum of Patamechanics ), Bristol 's new, hidden exhibition curated by local patamechanic Neil Salley. Potential guests should be aware that this is no ordinary museum. One part installation to two parts performance piece, it is an exhibit meant to interact with the mind as well as the senses (including the sense of humor); piquing the imagination through sight, smell, sound and a little bit of science. What lies within its walls is a different kind of history; a whole new tale to tell.

Discovering the Musée

Getting to the museum isn't easy, and a reporter was sworn not to divulge the museum's exact location.

But once you're there it's a different world. According to Mr. Salley, much is up to the unique interpretation of each visitor. That's why the very location of the exhibit is kept secret — the interactive discovery begins with the journey there. Upon visiting the museum's website, www.museepata.org, visitors can dig through the labyrinthine archeology of the text, which introduces them to the various characters who have contributed to the collection, as well familiarizes visitors with the greater concept of patamechanics: a blurry fusion of the imagined and the real.

From there, visitors may set up a private tour to continue their journey in person.

Standing inside the cramped foyer of the museum is the animated curator, Mr. Salley, donning a bow tie and natty cap. Guests can sip cream sherry from a dainty glass as he inundates them with an explanation of what's to come, all ensconced in a background of "wonder cabinets": Glass cases filled with mummified butterflies and fish tails, diagrams of odd machines, and other surreal artifacts.

This is where visitors will learn of Patamechanics. The way Mr. Salley tells it, Patamechanics trace their origin hundreds of years back, when shipbuilders were able, thanks to technological innovations, to build bigger boats that could withstand harsher conditions and hold more supplies, enabling them to travel farther and for longer periods of time. Upon returning to Europe from faraway lands, the boats and the explorers they carried brought back with them all manner of "stuff," objects which proved their fantastic stories were a reality. Patamechanics are essentially that "stuff."

"They had fantastic stories about this world on the other side of the ocean. It was a myth [to Europeans], it was an imaginary place ... these objects sort of changed the equation of how people thought about their reality," said Mr. Salley.

The Collection

Moving on from the foyer and into the exhibit, visitors enter a dark, sweet-smelling otherworld filled with machines unlike the banal clocks and computers found in day to day life. At first, Mr. Salley's introductions are slow and singular: Visitors can ingest the information as it comes along, one piece at a time.

The clean, silvery lines of each machine coupled with spotlights separate each from the darkness around it. The spaces are varied: Some are home to complicated machines, some hold delicate holograms frozen inside bell jars.

Soon, the tenor changes, and Mr. Salley has gone from animated curator to a mad hatter, hopping about and interacting with the exhibits themselves as they seem to operate altogether at once, making the room itself one big, bustling machine, a giant bubble of frantic Patamechanics.

This, the curator says, is his favorite part: "My favorite part of Musée Patamécanique is that moment at the end of the tour when all the technology in Patamechanics Hall is singing, spinning, gurgling, and smelling. If the moment is just right, I lock arms with the visitor and we spin around together in a little dance to the music of these absurd machines."

The man behind the curtain

After working in advertising (you may have found his work scattered amongst brightly colored Saturday morning cartoons), Mr. Salley went back to school at RISD to pursue a master's in digital media. Musée Patamécanique is the product of much of that work, done between 2004 and 2006.

Artist in residence at the undisclosed Musée locale, Mr. Salley makes his home in Bristol with his wife, Engracia Rodrigues, whom he met and married at Linden Place (she was a docent, he on a tour), and their two children, Trés, 8, and Zeke, 6. In addition to his commercial work and his studies at RISD, the 41-year-old said he's been working on creative projects since his childhood, and curating and presenting around Rhode Island and Massachusetts since the early 1990s.

What's in store?

Curator Neil Salley has gone to great lengths to assemble his own "wonder cabinet" of strange machines, culled from patamechanics across the globe. Co-starring with Mr. Salley in this adventure are 10 otherworldly ... thingies.

The Cymatic Exciter

A chamber that makes a visual representation of the vibrations it causes in a petri dish of water.

The Resonance Chamber

Billed as a large-scale version of the Cymatic Exciter, this chamber requires a human participant: A volunteer from the audience must enter.

An Olfactory Lighthouse

The horn of a Unicorn causes scents to be distilled and distributed at random through pipes and into one's nostrils. Fragrances include pomegranate, Christmas tree, and sugar cookie, among others.

The Pointing Machine

A chirping bluebird that always looks straight ahead, no matter from which angle it is viewed.

Crank-O-Wank

Another participatory number: Someone must crank the wank to keep the room "running."

Earolin

Sounds abound from this chamber, which is fitted with five pipes playing the music resonating from a hologram within: A bow playing an ear like a violin.

A Syzygistic Oracle

A rotating platform with two statues, one which magnifies the letters in an alphabet soup being stirred by a whisk beneath it, the other which minimizes those same letters.

Re-enlivening chambers with bees

Beneath a shelf, preserved bees are attached to wires, which bring their images forth and into motion inside jars.

Singing Mixotricha Paradoxa

Singing, squiggly eyeballs inside tubes.

A Time Machine

A dizzying spectacle of a rotating wheel which "always spins in the direction of the future." Eerie eyeballs holograms pop in for a visit, too.

BY JENNIFER A. SALCIDO

jsalcido@eastbaynewspapers.com