About the Museum of Electrical Philosophy

This is the start of an ongoing excursion into thoughts and images relating in some way or another to electricity and museums.

It is an online parallel to the physical exhibits at the public display area of the Museum of Electrical Philosophy which can be found on the 6th floor of the Nicholas Building.

The rationale of the Museum of Electrical Philosophy is to explore the visual representation of interactions between electricity and human thoughts and emotions. In particular the museum’s exhibits, together with their associated documentation and signage, are concerned with feelings of fear, bewilderment, uncertainty, sexuality, pain, self-awareness... and any combination of these and more.

Electricity remains a mysterious, almost magical phenomenon for many people - and perhaps most. This is despite two centuries or more of observation and theory that preceded our current era of technological vanity. In that time what was once called ‘natural philosophy’ has been refined, reborn and renamed as ‘science’. More than just a lexicographical refinement, this came with a paradigm shift from the realm of thought to knowledge, from observation and wonder to theories and definitions, from humility before God to the arrogance of technology.

And yet the magic remains, despite the physics, the equations and unattainably uncertain world of electrons. If anything the physical existence of wires and silicon chips and all the other paraphernalia only adds to the mystery of it all while the diagrams and symbols of textbooks are as arcane to the general population today as the alchemist’s were yesterday.

Not surprisingly the mystery and inexplicability of electricity can be found in art, both implicitly and explicitly. When Michelangelo showed God reaching out to give life to Adam, their outstretched fingers could easily be read as electrodes, positive and negative, carrying energy from one cosmic level to another. On a different scale, Walter De Maria’s ‘Lightning Field’ embraced the incalculable energy of the atmosphere.

In the centuries between these two artists came the experimenters. Volta made dead frogs jump and thought he had found the spark of life; Edison proposed the spark of death in the form of the electric chair. Today we switch on a light or read an online blog, but for most of us our conceptualisation is little different from the realm of ‘influence machines’ of the 19th century.

It is in this context of mystery and magic that the Museum of Electrical Philosophy offers its collection of drawings. Not drawings in the sense of marks on paper but images and objects that are drawn (or derived) from electrically related concepts. The electric shock remains a potent source of fear, the electric lamp carries messages of more than illumination. The lightning bolt remains as a universally recognised symbol of danger and the risk of death. Nothing is sure; all is uncertain; this is the philosophy.