Center for PostNatural History

A wonderful little museum with a collection that has traveled to Germany, the Netherlands, and beyond. If you have an interest in transgenics, GMOs, etc, you should definitely pop in and check it out. Great stuff!

My girlfriend teases me that my geek cred is poor. (I’m not much for superhero movies or sci fi or tech stuff.) But I do like science and art, and this wee museum sits in the nexus of both. And as museums go, it’s more than a bit weird, situated here on the main drag in Garfield of all places.
If you have more than a passing interest in genetically engineered life forms, you’ll probably see stuff in here that you already know about. But what makes this place extra special is that it’s not just an offshoot of a standard natural history museum. While some of its material could be legitimately set in any credible science museum, the curator here has a day job at the School of *Art* at Carnegie Mellon, so he’s not your run of the mill paleontologist. When I visited, the temporary exhibition was called «The Cold Coast Archive: Future Artifacts from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault», which examines the «meaning and function of the world’s largest and most well-​protected collection of agricultural diversity» by looking «beyond the vault as metaphor; to it’s future utility, using media and objects to evoke the imagined collapse of agriculture informed by investigations of existing contingency infrastructure.»
And it’s here on Penn Avenue. Free admission. How cool is that?

The Center for PostNatural History incites critical thought on how human initiatives have manipulated biological history, and thus raises important questions about approaching the future. Fascinating exhibits allow the observer to view genetic modification in a straight forward neutral climate. They’ve done an excellent job making organisms which at first glance look unremarkable (like a mosquito), visually, and more importantly, intellectually engaging. At times, one may feel disgusted by misguided actions of geneticists and at other junctures you might just be in awe by the wonder and beauty of the work of the human race. We are mad scientists. We are artists. And our desires have an eerie disposition for design.