A Vague Idea

One of the gifts that will be available in the Museum of Modern culture is the Radio 4 box - celebrating the station famed for it's intellectual rigour and innate whimsy. This simple cardboard 'four' has two little speakers and some controls. It is loaded with every episode of in our time and I'm sorry I haven't a clue, to show the range the channel had. 

Unfortunately Otto hadn't time to fabricate one yet, but let me photograph his orignal sketch. "It seemed an excellent way to express the station", he told me, "an expression of a specific sound in a single artefact. It seems strangely counter cultural in the iPod age - luddite even. However, the technology inside has to be infinitely complex to create an object so simple, especicially when compared to our last such audio comparator, the CD or vinyal record."

Otto has also considered adding a discovered digital object as a 'bonus track' - It was created by long time Radio 4 enthusiast Russell Davies. However, Otto would like to also attempt a hard house remix of it before inclusion.

I think it will work better with a stronger design, but the ants look fun.

But what does Otto hope to achieve by trying to archive this horde of ephemera. I ask him if he doesn't feel like the opposite of King Canute - desperately trying to hold the tide towards him, as it slips through his fingers. "It isn't like that", he depletes in the modular accent of expensively taught business english.

So I got the box of stephen hawking's google searches from the Museum of Modern Culture in Berlin. If it looks a bit amateurish, that's because it is. The plain card boxes come from a famous large European flat packed furniture store. The museum's curator simply labels up what he can find and stores them. The museum is four rooms that makes the entirety of the first floor of otto schmidt's bauhaus inspired town house.

The MMC was established in 2010, as a place to store some of the most precious and transient knowledge that has floated from the depths of the internet before it is sucked out to sea by the rip tide of time.

I wanted to share the box from prof hawking, as it is a bit like the box of sound I made earlier. Although a box full of ten months of web searches is about half the size! I got a few objects from the curator Otto Schmidt, which I will post periodically.