Today we visited Shanghai Museum of Science and Technology in Pudong, a huge, monumental building with overtones of Mussolini as Chris notes, an ambitions again of the architecture of airports: cavernous, diminishing human form, light-filled. The first exhibit we saw before passing through the turnstiles was a touring exhibition of penguins and other arctic animals. The products of taxidermy, they looked tatty and moth-eaten, past their best even in their after-life so it was a strange greeting.

Through the turnstile was a screen offering information on the museum at the present moment, statistics about how many visitors were in the museum and how the museum gauged the flow (few people = smooth on this morning). The first exhibit we entered was about robots and computers and the first exhibit was a row of three robots ‘dancing’ in pre-programmed unison. Children and parents were watching and taking photographs at this display, remarkable for the likeness of robot movement and human bodily gesture. On the wall was a description of robots as the natural extension of puppets: puppets were animated things that appeared to take on a life of their own. One might deduce from this and Chris’s comments about China reclaiming its own narratives of development, that this was a national re-telling of robots as part of a ‘long tradition’ in China. There were other robots that you could play games with, again machines poised to mimic human movement (a long neck with a downward ‘head/face that is moved from side to side and up ad down in response to the moves made by the human opponent). On the wall here were descriptions of the history of robots and the ethical concerns in human-robot relations (a writer had proposed rules that defined a robot-human contract).

Also in this exhibit was a game about computer processing and the dispersal and re-assembling of information, set out in the form of a game. Many children were playing this. We played a game of assembling an animal description and, if we assembled an existing animal, it strolled across a large screen. In the centre of the second room was a tree of TV and computer monitors. None of them ‘worked’ and so were rather unexciting compared to other exhibits, but they were all dated and showed an evolution of screen technologies at least in terms of differently shaped objects.

The following room was concerned with ecology, and was lit by ambient orange and yellow and green lights. The wall displays described the effects of pollution on flora and fauna, animals and human populations. A small semi-circular tableaux with a moving painted (animated at times) background, and in the foreground three mannequins who each came to life to tell the story of different moments in the polluting and clean-up of the Souzhou river (a peasant, a worker from the 1980s, a contemporary specialist in a suit with ‘clean’ engineering skills to offer).

Outside of this display was a number of circular glass tanks packed with gold fish and other kinds, also some stuffed birds that had become extinct in the Shanghai region. The incongruousness of the stuffed birds (like the penguins and seals) next to the high-tech displays was notable. The museum had a subliminal question running through it about different forms of life, or even what counts as life, a question raised by a futuristic relation to technology. All kinds of possibilities were packed into this space: people, robots, computers, stuffed animals (dead things), animated mannequins, animated pictures, live fish.

The last section we spent time in was about conceptual ideas and bodily experiences of energy: currents, balancing and weight in movement, energy created by cycling shown graphically as enough to run various appliances. Perception and energy were also addressed in certain displays. This room was fun and the few visitors there were all engaged in doing things, notably with attendants on standby to assist. I was impressed by the mostly sophisticated way that games displayed complex concepts. Not many of the displays seemed gratuitously ‘interactive’ for the sake of engaging the attention of the young.

Janet Harbord

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