an alternative guide to the universe

I've been meaning to visit this show for some time. I came close once, a few weeks ago, but it was closed.

Fortunately, I had a break between a couple of meetings today and was able to drop in.

'An alternative guide to the universe' at 'the museum of everything' sounds like a bold promise. Inside are a range of ideas by all manner of visionaries and inventors. These were mainly non scientists who had worked out their ideas often single handedly. In some cases the work had not been shown before and could be considered the private work of the artist.

Whether it was someone inventing whole town designs, creating alternate views of space travel or building robots, there was plenty to see. One set of exhibits featured re-imagined buildings and structures, another turned the letters of the alphabet into a sort of flying space fleet.

It was fascinating because of the thoroughness of most of the visionaries' work. Sometimes quite obsessional, whether in the calculations of an alternative physics, a reworking of the periodic tables using a Circlon nuclear stability model, or the draftsmanship in discovering patterns in magic squares of numbers.

I found a youtube description of Emery Blagden's Healing Machines which was one of the exhibits. It's not directly from the 'Do NOT Photograph' of the exhibition, but gives a sense of the ideas in just one of the myriad of exhibits.