The Museum of Contemporary Commodities

Valuing the things we buy today as the heritage of tomorrow

This arts-social science project is now live in a disused shop in Exeter's city centre. We're asking people to add commodities they value to our online collection in order to gently provoke conversations about commodities, values, ethics, consumption, anything! We're also asking people to value, comment on, and help people find out more about the commodities they have added. Our shop-gallery is open until May 21. Our website is open indefinitely. In this museum, we are all curators.

We invite all critters to add to the collection and join its conversations. Here's how to do it:

If you want to view and value commodities already in the collection:

a) visit this page, click on the commodities you like the look of, see what their curators have said about them;

b) re-value commodities by clicking the red 'value this commodity' button, move the value sliders, and submit;

c) answer the questions asked by their curators at the foot of each page, or look through the questions asked across the collection here;

d) add your own thoughts on commodities using the comment boxes at the foot of each page.

If you want to add a commodity to the museum:

a) register with your user name, enter your email address & wait for an email about your password: start with the 'register' link under 'Add a commodity' here;

b) log in with your user name and password and start adding what you know about your commodity, one or more photos of it, any questions you'd like others to answer, and then publish it;

c)  you can then continue on your page, valuing your commodity as above;

d) you can add more commodities, edit and delete your commodities whenever you like;

e) highly trained commodity consultants will be on hand to answer your questions this Saturday and next Saturday, so please ask them to find things out.

Please pass on this guide to everyone you think might be interested in this project, set it as a task for students, what you add will help the museum and its conversations to take and change shape.

Find out more about the Museum of Contemporary Commodities here and please let us know if you have any questions...

Ian and Paula

Ian Cook and Paula Crutchlow

Department of Geography

University of Exeter