About the Museum
Founding Mandates:
- Objects hold memory. This is why we have souvenirs and mementos.
- “For every choice you make, you kill off a possible future. Sometimes you have to live with their ghosts.”
- You only put important objects in a museum once they are no longer in use.
The Museum of Almost Realities is a collection of artifacts from the life you might have had. A museum of all the significant things from another past/present/future, a glimpse into a multiverse where you turned left instead of right, said yes instead of no. Sometimes it makes no difference. Sometimes it makes all the difference in the world.
We accept all artifacts of almost realities, past, present, and future. Artifacts will be valued, protected, and maintained. They will be here whenever you decide to return, but you can leave them behind.
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About the Creator
The Museum of Almost Realities is a narrative immersive installation founded, written, designed, produced, coded, and built by April Soetarman. It was created out of the artist’s interest in exploring the relationship between objects, memory, and what-if’s, a deeply personal alternate-reality autobiography made physical. This piece invites the visitor to contemplate how we curate our own personal narratives, and acknowledge the importance of what we choose to keep, remember, and let go.
The Museum exists both as a physical installation (currently on tour) and a borderless virtual version, online here and quietly lingering in the minds of its visitors.
Press & Talks
- “A museum of almost-real pasts, presents, and futures”, KUOW Public Radio, September 2018
- “A Seattle artist shows you the ‘life you might have had’ at her Museum of Almost Realities”, The Evergrey, April 2018
- SF Tech Poetics Dec 2017 - April Soetarman (starts at 9:35)