&Now 2019 Conference

“What is the point?” in the &NOW 2019 call for proposals presents a useful shorthand for the explorations of the Museum of Alternative History, a multimedia projects uniting differing visual art modalities with descriptively fake gallery text. The Museum is a critique of its place—embedded in a time of intense division—and a product of the discussions that inhabit the divisive space. First presented in smaller form at Omaha’s Ring Gallery in 2013, and in an expanded version in Omaha’s Kaneko Gallery in 2018, the award-winning exhibition included 33 established and emerging visual artists, seven writers, two editors, one graphic designer, and a single curator with the initial animating vision.

The Museum of Alternative History filters facts through biases. It explores the concepts of confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance in the structure of a natural history museum. This museum addresses fake, revised, and twisted versions of history, and serves as a response to how biased opinions can supplant systematic observation, measurement, verifiable experimentation, and hypotheses. It is about using facts—selectively— to make disingenuous arguments based on partisan opinions. It addresses the way personal beliefs can be forced onto others through culture. The Museum of Alternative History offers a selection of the fittest explanations for the nature of the world, universe, and alternate histories contrary to...well...history.

This panel is composed of the curator, the lead author, the graphic designer, and one of the 33 artists, for a presentation and discussion, focused on hybridity—in the practice of visual art paired with text outside of the artist’s “intent,” and in the experience of those visual-written pairs inhabited by the audience. MOAH is meant to be as disruptive as it is dissipative, to act on the viewer as a tornado acts upon a landscape viewed through a series of infinitely regressive screens.