Another approach is the method Erkki Huhtamo calls “exhibition anthropology,” an observational approach to the minute details of visitor activity within exhibitions, which involves treating the museum as “a kind of experience apparatus” (Huhtamo, Chapter 12). While Huhtamo observes visitor and museum behaviors, Giddings has proposed “microethology” as a more intimate and participative methodology, which attends to both human and nonhuman agency in “everyday technoculture.” Microethology uses participant observation to investigate “the everyday and habitual coming-together of human bodies and technologies” (Giddings 2009). For Harrasser, these encounters need to be understood in terms of performance: contemporary immersive exhibitions and interactive science centers “offer beautiful and effective ‘stages’ for both the training and transgression of culturally coded identities” (Harrasser, Chapter 17).
Where does this leave a politics of media and of museums? Pilger’s central (and most controversial) point on the Today program was that the British media had misrepresented and underrepresented the Iraq war, leaving the British public largely ignorant of the scale of civilian deaths. Similar critiques have been directed at museums and this is what is generally understood as a political critique within museum studies – one which focuses on the museum’s role in power and governance, its constructions of canons and dominant narratives.
It might seem, therefore, like a depoliticizing move to pay close attention, as this volume does, to the formal and technical aspects of exhibition practice (and to a lesser extent the collection, research, and conservation practices of museums), since (to some extent) it brackets off questions of representation, relationships to stakeholder communities, and institutional politics. However, just as there is another politics of media, there is another politics of museums, and there is a different political urgency to attending to museum media. This is related to, for example, questions of the transformation of history and memory by new media; the ways in which media habits and expectations are imported into museums; and the insertion of museums into a wider commercial and corporate landscape.
The present volume is divided into four parts. Part I, “The Museum as Medium,” focuses primarily on the question of how museums draw on other media, and also introduces some key approaches from media studies (such as media archaeology). Part II, “Mediation and Immersion,” centers around the pervasive and often intangible ways in which exhibitions mediate visitor experience, and also around the question of how material objects in particular are experienced and encountered. Part III, “Design and Curating in the Media Age,” looks at museums and media primarily from the perspective of the designer and curator, and at new kinds of relationships with visitors. Part IV, “Extending the Museum,” is particularly concerned with how media enable the museum to go beyond its walls and spill out into the world.
The structure of the volume is intended to highlight some connections between the chapters. However, the following discussion offers some other ways of thinking about the thematic connections between chapters, linking them to a wider literature. I explore questions of temporality, museums’ relationships to various media and genres, attachment to objects, atmospheric and immersive exhibition design, the reinvention of the exhibition medium, the rise of scenography, new roles for audiences and for museum makers, and, finally, the collection and display of media objects.
Changing times
As Wolfgang Ernst explains, in the interview that opens Part I, our cultural objects are increasingly “digitally born” and the dominance of time-based, pervasive digital media means that material experience is neglected or underplayed. In contemporary culture, the emphasis on liveness and high-speed transmission poses a challenge to the traditional collection-based museum (Chapter 1). Andrew Hoskins and Amy Holdsworth use the term “post-scarcity culture” to describe the massive and simultaneous availability of images, footage, text, and data. This new media environment appears to be transforming cultural memory and crushing historical distance by making the past available on demand, producing a “smooth and smothering immediacy” (Chapter 2). This is something museums are forced to engage with because it is reconfiguring their role. How museums engage with this media environment, whether they embrace it, attempt to reconfigure or shape it, or stolidly continue to pursue their own goals regardless, are politicized issues.
In the past, museums have been criticized for their irrelevance to the present. In my own chapter, I give the example of a 1920s dispute in which museum director Alexander Dornor advocated facsimiles as a means of bringing museums into “the stream of contemporary life” (Dorner, cited in Chapter 25). The way in which museums construct the past has also come under critical scrutiny: the myth of history as progress is reinforced and naturalized by linear evolutionary arrangements that marshal objects into an “encyclopedic overview” (Habsburg-Lothringen, Chapter 15). The chronological display that invites the visitor to walk through time naturalizes the timeline, creating the sense that this is actually how history unravels (Lubar 2013). Meanwhile, the contemporary art world, now dominated by large private contemporary art galleries, has been characterized as locked in a kind of “presentism” in which fashion and the market rule (Bishop 2013, 12–23). Art historian Claire Bishop suggests that “the permanent collection can be a museum’s greatest weapon in breaking the stasis of presentism,” to create new forms of historical awareness, new ways of mobilizing the past in the present, in displays that go far beyond the chronological (Bishop 2013, 24, 61–62).
In the present volume, several contributors see museums as able to provide alternatives to the historical flattening produced by digital networked media. New approaches in display design, open storage, and collection management can provide counterstrategies to a dominant understanding of history (Ernst, Chapter 1). Some museums seem to fully embrace the new digital immediacy, opening themselves up to the onslaught of images in a new, networked culture. Others try to reveal the discontinuities and gaps in both traditional narratives of smooth progress and the contemporary sense of complete and simultaneous availability of history (Hoskins and Holdsworth, Chapter 2). This is not so far removed from the aims of 1980s museum designers and curators such as Gottfried Korff. Bettina Habsburg-Lothringen, head of the Museumsakademie Joanneum in Graz, writes in Chapter 15 of the ways Korff wanted to challenge the sense of an accessible, unmediated historical past that folk museum reconstructions and period rooms seemed to promote.
Arguably, these changes in the cultural relationship to the past began as early as the mid-nineteenth century when photographic, telegraphic, and phonographic media made it possible to see and hear the faces and voices of the dead. As writers such as John Durham Peters have shown, this was especially poignant in wartime and in an era of high child mortality (Peters 1999). In 1936 Walter Benjamin wrote about an increasing inability in the modern period to make experiences – the things that happen to us – into experience, in the sense of a deeply embedded and practical understanding. He connected this to media via the example of the newspaper, with its fragmented and disconnected articles, but also more widely to modernity, an era of rapid and accelerating social and technological change in which an onslaught of stimuli combines with the absence of any stable, unchanging position from which to view the world (Benjamin [1936] 2002, 146). Swiss curator Beat Hächler, in Chapter 16, considers this decay of experience as offering a new remit to museums to transform themselves into spaces that enable people to experience and reflect on their collective present.
One way in which stable and coherent historical accounts have traditionally been ensured is via a strict separation between individual