Our Senses

AMNH’s latest exhibition promises an immersive journey through human perception.


I’ve been a fan of the American Museum of Natural History’s travelling exhibitions for some time now, and I was particularly excited to see the scale model for Our Senses last spring at the American Alliance of Museums conference. It looked fun, immersive, and different from everything they’d done before, so I was eager to see it in person when it opened in New York this winter.

The experience begins as a series of large stacked cubes with abstract imagery converge to form a forced-perspective image of a human eye. This introduces one of the key messages of the exhibition – that sensing and perceiving are distinct processes, and the input we receive via our senses is subject to interpretation by our brains.

The next space makes this point through a singular demonstration – the illustrations on its walls appear to change every few seconds as the the lighting changes color. In fact, the room’s wallpaper is printed with three distinct ink colors which become invisible in the monochromatic washes of light. At a few stations, visitors can “project” white light onto the walls to see the overlapping images. It’s a vibrant effect writ large and presented with style.

The third gallery explores sensory perception across the animal kingdom. Its visual centerpiece is one of the exhibition’s most effective – standing before an abstract garden of oversized flowers, visitors can opt to see how the same flowers would look to a bee, triggering a lighting effect that paints the petals with vibrant colors. The gallery explores how animals recognize different wavelengths of light and sound that go unnoticed by other species, and features some hands-on interactives to support this content.

The next space tackles sound, with orange walls and low seating in-between two absurdly large speakers. Soundscapes of a city and rainforest play, and projected text invites us to listen carefully to pick up individual sounds within the recordings. This, to me, is the exhibition’s biggest fail. Instead of chirping frogs, I heard crying children and conversing adults (who should have known better!). Deep listening only works with quiet spaces, which simply don’t exist at AMNH.

The following room, about selective sensing, devoted most of its square footage to a non-functioning interactive, based around rotating mechanical mannequins of dolphin, coyote, and human heads. It attracted a lot of attention, leaving visitors baffled when it didn’t seem to do anything; an out-of-order statement would have helped.

Next comes one of the more immersive spaces, a white room painted with distorted, undulating gridlines, which features heavily in the exhibition’s promotion. I liked it – in theory – but the optical illusion didn’t work for me at all. It reads better in photographs, or with one eye closed so that depth perception doesn’t interfere with the effect.

A series of hands-on galleries follow, covering touch, smell, and sensory correction. These are nicely designed spaces, though the interactives they present are fairly commonplace for science museums.

The exhibition next inserts a fairly large presentation space into the flow; here, an educator reinforced some of the exhibition’s themes using a projector and a few props. I’ve seen this strategy at a few previous AMNH exhibitions and it really seems to be working here – the room was packed and the audience engaged.

A final gallery considers how technology can extend our sensory perception, using vibrant photography and a digital/physical interactive about machine learning. The visitor is invited to build an image using a variety of primary shapes, then see if the exhibit’s computer can identify it as butterfly, car, flower, face, or house. I tried a few times, and the computer correctly identified the images about 50% of the time. I appreciated the opportunity for creative play here, but all the science was mysterious and magic, behind the scenes. It seems like a missed opportunity to compare computers and brains synthesize visual input.


With the exhibit’s marketing pushing it as an “immersive experience,” I feared it would be a series of Instragram selfie-ops, but only a few of the spaces seemed truly immersive. There’s some bold visual style here, ambitious for a soon-to-be travelling exhibition, but the colorful, full-room designs often drew my attention to awkward layouts and empty spaces – the scent gallery, in particular, felt half-complete.

AMNH, as a relatively traditional natural history museum, isn’t known for hands-on interactives, so it was good to see so many in play here. Given the museum’s tourist crowds, structuring individual experiences is challenging. The throughput is relentless – even for this timed-admission upcharge exhibition. Some interactives were crowded, others empty, perhaps a consequence of the presentation theater interfering with natural visitor flow patterns. Stations are duplicated, sometimes meaning that a large room hosts only a single activity. I imagine the exhibit’s designers will rebalance these elements as the exhibition prepares for its touring configuration.

While billed as an exhibition for all ages, the content is clearly geared for its youngest visitors. Still, I wish I had learned something a little more substantial. The last exhibition I saw in this space, The Secret World Inside You, was dense with detail, carefully edited to stop just shy of overwhelming visitors. In contrast, Our Senses feels a little… superficial. The message of sensing vs. perceiving was hammered home repeatedly, and the animal-sense experiences were well presented, but I saw so many missed opportunities to go deeper – sensory impairment, wave physics, evolution of senses, etc.

Ultimately, I found the exhibition to be soft on immersion, soft on interaction, and soft on content. I think it could have focused on any one of these three and been truly remarkable, but instead it plays it safe. It’s a fun topic, colorful and immediately engaging to young visitors, but it’s not the extraordinary experience it could have been.

Our Senses

Through January 6, 2019
American Museum of Natural History

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