Mason Inman - science journalist

21 March 2004, for The Monterey County Herald

Jeff Hoke wants to play with people's minds, with the way they see the world. He wants people to question their culture and beliefs, and to approach the world with wonder.

Museums are his tool.

Hoke, 49, has worked half his life in museums, first at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, then for the last 10 years at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where he's a senior exhibit designer. He was an integral part of creating the Splash Zone and Jellies: Living Art exhibits as well as the aquarium's much-anticipated Sharks: Myth and Mystery exhibit set to open April 2.

Hoke is so into museums that, in his spare time, he puts out a magazine called the "Guide to Lost Wonder," which takes readers through the halls of an imaginary museum in the form of Hoke's own highly detailed artwork.

"I had to admit I'd worked 20 years in museums and it was all I knew," Hoke said. "It became a part of me. I didn't mean it to be."

In the magazine, Hoke's elaborate line drawings and descriptions detail the practice of alchemists, known for their failed attempts to transform base metals into shining gold. But, as Hoke describes, alchemy also included practices for transforming emotions and ways of seeing the world. In his "Guide," Hoke pulls together alchemy, creation myths from around the world and even the dark history of museums.

Hoke plans to transform elements of his magazine into a traveling show, but in the meantime is pouring himself into his work at the aquarium.

Showing off one of his favorite works there, a mechanized diorama that takes viewers through the life cycle of a moon jelly, he said, "This is what I'd do if I had my own museum."

The push of a button set in the bottom of an ornate, gilt frame opens a red velvet curtain. Two wood cut-outs painted as jellies come together as "Sea of Love" plays and a many-splendored light shines behind them. Then a plaque shows a clump of eggs floating down before the plaque flips to show larval jellies. At the sea floor, the plaque disappears behind a box, which rotates to show polyps. Then another plaque floats toward the surface: baby jellies. Flip: juveniles, which rise to become adults—

—and the circle closes.

"Where did that come from?" a co-worker asked when he first saw the diorama.

The "Sea of Love" diorama, arguably one of the oddest and most enticing displays at the aquarium, was inspired by Hoke's longstanding interest in automatons, mechanical animals of centuries past that simulated behavior of living creatures. He tries to work touches like this into the aquarium wherever he can. "The jellies' life cycle was the crack in the door," he said. "Then I could go whole hog on my own obsession, not that I don't try anyway."

Continuing through the jellyfish exhibit, Hoke walked up to a label next to a tank that had a Jimi Hendrix lyric: "It's so groovy to float around sometimes, even a jellyfish will agree to that." He tried to recall the song it's from. "'Power of Soul,' I think."

After a pause, he started air guitaring and sang: "With the power of soul... anything is possible... With the power of you... anything you wanna do."

In a children's area, Hoke walked up to a stuffed eel toy peeking out of a cave. He yanked on it and let it snap back into its home, and made monkey noises, quick grunting laughs. Then he passed by a girl of about 5 who was kneading a blue blob of foam that feels like a jellyfish.

"She's having a ball," he said and smiled, again with the monkey noises.

"Museums alleviate boredom," Hoke said. "We come here and play."

Hoke speaks quickly and enthusiastically, and his tousled red hair and freckled face fit his playful attitude. Only a touch of gray at his temples and light wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, framed by wire-rimmed glasses, betray his age.

Walking toward another jellyfish display, Hoke said, "My heart's in old museums and 18th-century technology. I try to get away with as many curtains and simple mechanical devices as I can. And mirrors."

Hoke turned the corner into a hall with floor-to-ceiling tanks full of jellies on either side. It's a bewildering sight: in front and back, the hall stretches on forever.

"This is a cheap trick," Hoke said and smiled. He'd made an infinite hallway by putting mirrors on opposite sides of the room. "Louis the 15th did this at Versailles. It's like a joke -- and then you let people in on the joke."

Playing with perspectives

Since he was a fledgling artist, Hoke has been toying with the ways people see the world. After growing up in Chicago, he studied art at University of Exeter in England, then at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Early on he made anamorphic paintings, which look distorted from head-on, but produce a normal image when viewed at a sharp angle. He also made stereo paintings—a pair of paintings with slightly different perspectives. When seen through a special viewer at the right distance, the pair produce the illusion of a three-dimensional object.

"It's all playing with how people see," Hoke said. "It shows how you really put together the world in your head."

Hoke draws on phenomenology, the school of philosophy concerned with how people make sense of their experience to understand the world.

"We have some a priori knowledge, like heat, cold, this hurts or doesn't," he said. "After that, everything is hearsay. Everything is through our senses, and we can be fooled." Like so many people are by the infinite hallway.

Though Hoke is fascinated with the technology and methods of yesteryear, he's also been heavily influenced by modern and contemporary art. Instead of trying to represent nature, Hoke said, modern art asked, "How do you represent our way of seeing the world?"

"I like the ideas behind modern art," he said, but added, "A lot of it is cold."

Many contemporary artists are out of touch with the public, he said. "They think they've got something to give to people, but do people want it?"

Hoke has a more populist take on art and creativity, shaped by his time working in museums. After working odd jobs for a little while after college, Hoke stumbled onto a job at the Field Museum in Chicago. He started as a "preparator," schlepping stuff around and cleaning up the woodshop.

"It wasn't like, 'I want to work in museums,''' he said. "I was interested in a fun, paying job so I could do my art."
Later Hoke began building exhibits, a lot of hammer-and-nail work.

"I had to learn carpentry real fast," he said. Then the head of the woodshop retired, and Hoke was asked to fill the position.

"I was the only one that had been there long enough," he said.

After doing that for about five years, he was offered a job as an exhibit designer at the Field Museum, but he was torn.

"I've got this woodshop all to myself, all these toys, complete autonomy," he recalled thinking. "Why would I want to do that?"

He ended up taking the job and has been designing exhibits ever since. He tries to draw people in by giving them a key or a thread—something they can connect to.

The soon-to-debut shark exhibit, for instance, is designed to draw visitors in and transport them to another part of the world. It takes visitors through the myths that seven cultures have created around sharks and rays.

Collaborative effort

Visitors have a very aesthetic response to jellyfish, Hoke said, but sharks have a different appeal.

"What fascinates people about sharks is all the stories," Hoke said.

In the area devoted to Western culture, the shark exhibit shows 18th-century paintings of fierce sea monsters with horns and scales attacking sailors. As evidenced by the movie "Jaws," the redominant Western attitude toward sharks continues to be dread and awe.

The aquarium hopes to put sharks and rays in a broader context by showing the relations other cultures have had with these creatures.

In the Hawaiian area of the exhibit, a film shows a traditional hula dance that tells the mythical story of a shark that propelled the first settlers there from Tahiti. In other displays are masks painted in bold red, white and black from the Haida culture of the Pacific Northwest, and hammerhead headdresses from Africa.

The team behind the exhibit tried to make use of what visitors know of the Amazon, for example, with trees and huts signaling the entry into that area.

In the Central America area, there's a replica of a Mayan temple with a tunnel that ends in a domed window in the bottom of a tank. Rays glide over the window, and visitors can look up and see the mouth and gills on the rays' white underside.

"We really got to create this more immersive environment," Hoke said. Developing, designing and building the shark exhibit was "the most integrated group creative process that we've ever done," he said. "I'm very proud of everyone here for how we cooperated on it."

Hoke works closely with Ava Ferguson, an exhibit designer and writer at the aquarium who came up with the theme and much of the content in the shark exhibit. In putting together an exhibit, a whole crew is involved, from the developers who come up with the theme for the exhibit to the husbandry team that builds the displays in the tanks and picks
which animals to show.

Ferguson said, "People have this idea that you get to do whatever you want." But because it is a team effort, no one has free rein, and it can be frustrating creatively for artists who are accustomed to working on their own, Ferguson said.

"It is creative, but not as a personal means of expression," she said. That's why Hoke's "Guide to Lost Wonder" magazine is an important outlet, she said.

"In his zine, he's got complete control to express himself."
 

Integrating myth, science

The "Guide" is an eclectic mishmash, with descriptions of creation myths from around the world, the four humors of ancient medicine and Buddhist ideas of karma. Hoke's meticulous drawings of his Museum of Lost Wonder are reminiscent of old woodcuts or the work of M. C. Escher.

Hoke's editor on the "Guide," Clint Marsh, also publishes his own magazines and pamphlets.

"Having fun with the writing, with the art and with the publishing is very important to us," Marsh said. "We're doing it as a hobby, as a sideline to our professional work."

Even when Hoke is on vacation, he winds up working in museums. Two years ago he went to the Czech Republic to look for old curiosity cabinets. Then he saw a notice on the Web that in a small town outside Prague, Kutna Hora, the world's first alchemy museum was under construction. Hoke went there hoping for a sneak peek but wound up spending his whole two-week vacation working at the museum, helping arrange the collection.

Four years ago he went to tour India, but in Dharamsala he stumbled across the Tibet Museum, then a work-in-progress.

"I kind of just got stuck there," he said. He spent a month working there, helping to put up displays that describe the situation of Tibetans since China took over the area.

Hoke draws on what he's learned about other cultures from his travels and reading, and on the science that's surrounded him during his career museums. He brings this all together with myth to help create, for visitors to the museum or readers of his zine, an experience that's meaningful.

"Science will give you a vehicle to go anywhere in the universe," Hoke said. "But only myth will give you a reason to go there in the first place."