Travelling for Words

By Jacob Westergaard Madsen

01. Nov. 2006

The coming children's exhibition at Post & Tele Museum - opening in February next year - will send our visitors on a journey through time leading to among other things Bedouin tents in the desert, an idyllic Japanese veranda, a sinking ship, and a genuine inventor's workshop from the days when telecommunication was new. 

When you intend to send your visitors on an extensive journey, you have to seek out the world, too: The museum has bought a Bedouin tent from Jordan. Here the visitors can learn how communication takes place in extreme and isolated surroundings.  

The Vanished Words

Alexandria, in the year of 2103: The distant planet is inhabited by descendants of human beings who travelled there through space a long time ago. A terrible disaster has hit the Alexandrians. A dreadful storm has raged and destroyed almost all traces of history reminding them of the place they originally came from: Their motherland, the planet Earth. The libraries have been destroyed by enormous wages, and the archives and museums have been smashed by gigantic typhoons. How are they now going to teach their children their history? The words that represented knowledge of the past are no longer there. And the few that are left are no longer comprehensible to the Alexandrians.

Help Sanura

In order to recreate the lost history it has been decided at Alexandria to send the girl Sanura on a mis-sion: With a few surviving traces of past communication - strange tapes with dots and dashes, scraps of paper with mysterious characters, odd and peculiar apparatuses - she has made a journey through time back to Earth in the year 2007 to find answers to the many questions. Chance so ordained it that she has landed in Post & Tele Museum. Now she is ready to meet the museum's visitors whom she will ask for assistance with her important mission.

In order to help Sanura the visitors must enter her spaceship/time machine. Through a time portal they will be taken back in time and around the world - looking for the words and communication tech-nologies of bygone days. In this way the journey becomes an instructive experience of the history of communication. And it becomes an extensive journey through both time and space: From cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia to the newest development within language technology.

The mission is to send Sanura back to the future with the recreated knowledge of the words of the past. If accomplished, she will hopefully be able to give the Alexandrians back their history - only when they understand the words, will they understand the world they originally came from. So a great re-sponsibility is resting on the museum's guests.

A Children's Exhibition for Everybody

At the museum the exhibition section is presently busy with preparations. In November artisans started working to make the Assembly Hall ready for the opening in February. The exhibition caters primarily for schools and families with young children. The primary target group is children aged 6-12 years, but the exhibition will appeal to anyone with an inclination to time journeys and entertaining challenges in the history of words and communication. 

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