The Museum You Telephone

The museum in Nor Nork does not have a door you simply push: you telephone first, and the man who answered agreed on Thursday afternoon in a tone suggesting that Thursday afternoon was mostly free. The address is a number on Bagrevand Street and the building is new glass wrapped around old metal. I gave my name at a desk and was walked past three floors of start-ups to get to the last Soviet decade.

The cases hold what Armenian plants made for the whole union in the last Soviet decades: machine tools, household appliances, control units from the Yerevan institute of microelectronics, desk calculators, pieces of larger machines that no longer have the rest of themselves. The Mergelyan institute was founded in 1956 and had something like seven thousand people by the late 1980s. Nobody in the room called that a golden age. They called it work.

I did not come for computers. I came because a signal has to be received by an object, and an object is made by somebody in a building with a payroll and a delivery schedule. People write about the buzzer on 4625 kHz as though it were weather. It is hardware, built by people who went home at six and complained about the bus. I left with part numbers and no thesis.