Author: Irene Castillo
Beelzebub, the fish with human teeth, looked even more horrifying in the histogram in the computer. Moving the Eva to make it scan properly the face of the fish was not the problem, but the animal’s naturally hideous face was, as it emerged on the computer screen. I wanted to perfectly capture the ridges of its scales, the gaps between its teeth, just to be able to help everyone understand how truly perfectly unnerving it was.
Beelzebub was one of the artworks I 3D scanned during my internship at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Edward O’Neil Research Center (or, as everybody calls it, The Annex), under the mentorship of Dr. Lisa Haney. The small team consisted of Curator Haney, some registrar specialists and two other second-year undergraduate students, Abbey and Derek. We would meet weekly as a team on Wednesdays, for two hours, where we all learned together about the Space Spider and the Eva, our two machines for 3D scanning.
As an intern, I didn’t just find myself getting experience from being there, but I learned things about the scanning process that could be noted down to help future interns and museum workers. While my mentors are amazing professionals, they won’t have all the answers to my questions on how the Eva or the Space Spider (an amazing name, if you ask me), will work best. How can I properly display the hairy back of a moth on the computer? How do I record the imperfections of an ancient Egyptian pot? How do I perfectly catch the ridges found on the inside of Beezelbub’s mouth? Whatever my team and I learned, this was visual knowledge that we could share it through the Evertec website, which would make it accessible to the community of creators, scientists, artists and museum workers who are learning just like us.
During the time I was not scanning, I was helping with the process of remodeling the Egypt Hall in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The archives and I became best friends. The Anthropology department needed someone to look over the archives of the hall, spanning all the way to 1962, to understand what documents we had in storage. The documents could easily be old resumes from past staff members, but also include valuable materials like National Endowment for the Humanities proposals and exhibition catalogs. Last summer, I had gotten the opportunity to work with the Art Museum of Ponce’s archives as well, so I felt much more capable of tackling the six drawers in need of listing.
I believe Beelzebub’s face and all the other critters I have met will always be a reminder of the importance of not only new technologies in museums, but of how fun it can be to belong to them. Spending time every week in the Carnegie Museums allows me to fuel that desire to stay in the museum field, and to meet those strange artworks that belong to its collections.
Irene Castillo, Museum Studies Intern at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Fall 2022