As you enter an exhibit, you see a rusty mailbox before you.

 

You may notice that inside the mailbox are dozens of envelopes written by Augusta Melville addressed to various people. All of them are two dimensional. With only a back and a front, they contain nothing, so what feels and looks like an envelope cannot ever be opened.

 

They are contentless, but what about the way they connect to each other? One of the envelopes is addressed to Miss Van Rensselaer of Albany, New York. While it makes sense that she would be writing a letter to her cousin, the contents of which is freely available on the NYPL’s website, something wedged in the back of the mailbox questions that. It’s an old copy of Moby Dick, and within its pages is wild marginalia and the notes of a conspiracy theorist. Literally, between the lines of the book, their writer connects the dots to reveal Stephen Van Rensselaer’s scheme to turn the entire world into Albany, New York. And, like most ridiculous conspiracy theory, it goes all the way to the top -- involving an entire gang of Van Rensselaer's descendants, including Melville, Edith Wharton, and suffragette and women’s education advocate, Martha Van Rensselaer.

 

The idea for the exhibit comes from a joke-theory that my family has. That everyone is actually from Albany. To explain, my Mom’s side of the family has lived in Albany for over a century, and my Mom has a knack at connecting anyone we ever meet back to Albany. For example, I’ll make a new friend, and suddenly my mom will tell me that my aunt went to prom with his uncle.

 

So, as this and other bits of evidence suggests, clearly everyone is from Albany. Which is, of course, untrue because contrary to popular belief, most people are from China and India -- and not Albany.   

 

The silly conclusion can still fool people because it still sort of makes sense if you ignore most of the world. It operates by taking a few weird stories that stand out, selecting a narrative detail, and then stretching what we have to fit together, picking away what doesn’t fit as we go, and finally presenting evidence to support the claim that everyone is from Albany, New York.   

 

This process is actually a long studied psychological phenomena called “confirmation bias.” Which is the tendency many of us have to take evidence that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, and disregard the overwhelming amount of evidence that contradicts what we want to find. A good conspiracy story, with its cherry picked evidence, is eaten up by believers because it helps put words to an indescribable feeling a lot of people have that something isn’t right. And since conspiracy theorizing relies on wildly rearranging elements of reality, it seems grounded in a reality that can be shared -- as opposed to something that is built entirely on outright hallucinations, which are hard to describe, and so hard to share with others.

 

In a world filled with wild conspiracy theories, I’d like to show how they work. Because they do work, and we need to understand them, so we can satirize them. And maybe, show people all the bullshit hidden under a tiny bit of topsoil laid down over it.