MAKING A MUSEUM: Materializing Regimes of Value with the NYC Department of Sanitation

Because a lot of our readings/discussions vis-a-vis documentation/archives don't really talk about the personal connection a person might have to the items catalogued, the next site I'll visit is also one near and dear to my heart: Gallery of Nebraska Payphones. As a born-and-raised Nebraskan, the images give me a chance to geek-out looking at the physical/cultural topography of the place where I grew up. The Nebraska section is part of a larger "Payphone Project" to collect images, stories, phone numbers and news about payphones throughout the world. There's an image of a solar-powered payphone that's on top of a post in the middle of Lake Victoria, Uganda, with a nice write-up about its technology. What I like best about this site is that I get a pretty good sense of place simply from the context surrounding the phones in the photographs. Take, for example, the payphones in Antarctica, which (at least to me) clearly demark a science center of sorts.

As a sort of sidelight, the site has a database of 500,000 payphone phone numbers. (And in the Nebraska payphone images, each image is attached to its number, so if you want to call a payphone and know exactly where the answerer is, you can!) Why this site? According to its founder: "The original intention of the Payphone Project was to promote random contacts among complete strangers. By listing public payphone numbers throughout America I invited people to pick up the phone and call some random street corner in some random town and talk to whomever answered." This is quite romantic and appealing, though, as the founder points out: "That original purpose is now nearly moot. Virtually all payphones reject incoming calls. Those that accept calls would be programmed otherwise once people start calling them."

The site plays off of people's desire to connect with others while still maintaining a safe distance. Certainly, even without any of the calling, a large appeal is to look at the phones in other places and to feel you "understand" that place without having to visit. The site's navigation helps this by providing stories directly next to images, and by having a continent-by-continent organizational structure that allows you to narrow in on the place you want to see.

Lastly, I will go to The Condiment Packet Gallery. The site has a very pleasing interface (all the packets are laid out in rows, forming a mosaic, and if you're interested in a particular packet, you click on it and then get to zoom in). Like Mr. Bali Hai's Sixties Soviet Postcard Collection, there's almost nothing in terms of description of the item. But the topic of condiment packages is so much an ingrained part of our consumer culture that everyone is already an expert of sorts. Browsing the site, therefore, becomes an exercise in design-marketing-critique, as well as a vote of confidence towards consumerism and disposability. For example, I was able to find the exact duck sauce that my favorite take-out Chinese restaurant gives to me.

This discovery is pleasing because it shows that I'm connected to a wider network of condiment users, all of whom have acquired, enjoyed, and chucked the duck sauce package. And yet, even with this immanently disposable object, there's a database that's holding onto our passing bit of ephemera. Oddly, it makes me proud of my disposable product habits - who needs a whole, reusable, and environmentally-superior jar of duck sauce when the image of the dinky, wasteful package is preserved right here, online?! And, the site's founder, Chris Hame, isn't just keeping records online - he has a physical archive of the actual packets as well. He stores them like baseball cards. It's enough to make a Luddite proud.