Mediazation and transmediation
De Jong’s account shows how video testimonies have developed a specific aesthetic: framing, location, and lighting prioritize emotional, extra-verbal expression and create the impression of direct eye contact between interviewee and viewer, an illusion of conversational directness. At the same time, these aesthetic conventions reinforce the museum’s traditional role: to transmit historical information and moral messages, to produce a self-disciplining form of citizenship (Bennett 1995; de Jong, Chapter 4). Video testimony is a powerful tool for this purpose, because it is affective (communicating feeling via facial expression and nonverbal signals) yet its aesthetic and methodology imply objectivity, neutrality, and a documentary status.
The potential of media to bring new kinds of authority and new forms of audience address make them attractive to museums and galleries, which not only incorporate different media in their exhibition spaces, but frequently invoke or engage with other media by adapting and quoting media genres and formats. One issue discussed in Chapter 1 is how museums tend to mirror the media of their time, emulating cinema, for example, through displays such as the period room or the diorama. In fact, it is hard to imagine a museum remaining unchanged by media: my own chapter (25) relates how photography has dramatically altered the ways in which museum visitors see and understand art, so that the art museum, without even rehanging its collections, is subjected to altered modes of attention. Haidee Wasson’s chapter shows that American museums became closely involved with media as technologies and institutions from a very early date: museums’ “early experiments with television” began almost as soon as television was launched at the 1939 New York World’s Fair (Wasson, Chapter 26).
Sometimes museums and exhibitions explicitly use media formats in order to comment critically on them or to reflect on the museum as institution. For instance, in her chapter in Part I, Maeve Connolly discusses how contemporary art exhibitions that explore television as a cultural form have used design techniques to evoke television studios and the living room as a television viewing space. Design elements such as the choice of monitor, seating, and lighting have been used to evoke different relationships to television, the social and pedagogic role of the medium, and TV’s changing status. TV formats are also used to reflect on the art institution and art market itself, from the use of reality TV references and modes, to close collaborations with broadcasters (Connolly, Chapter 6).
Elsewhere, museums’ attempts to embrace contemporary media are not intended to produce commentary or reflection on either institution, but rather to reinvent the museum as medium. In Chapter 3, Nils Lindahl Elliot describes Wildwalk in Bristol, UK (a futuristic attraction that closed only seven years after opening), as an attempt to “transmediate” the wildlife documentary in the form of a museum/zoo. Zoos had already attempted to transmediate wildlife television – giving visitors the sense that they were visiting animals in their habitats – and attempting to make the whole experience more cinematic. Using C. S. Peirce’s semeiotics (as distinguished from the more familiar post-Saussurean “semiotics”), Lindahl Elliot shows the complex and contradictory character of transmediation and “mediazation” (Thompson 1990, 11). He concludes that while transmediation can happen between museums and media genres, the effects can be unforeseen and problematic, producing inadvertent pedagogic effects.
Seth Giddings’s chapter also touches on the ways in which museums’ incorporation of other media forms can contradict or give a very different message from that intended. He acknowledges the limitations of certain museum videogames, in which what is learnt is mainly “knowledge of the game itself, its structures and puzzles” (Giddings, Chapter 7). Rather than see this as a consequence of transmediation, Giddings sees it as related to expectations of “what kinds of knowledge – or knowledge of what kind of object” museum games and interactives might produce. He argues that simulations produce knowledge not of objects but of systems, also using an example from Wildwalk, where artificial life (Alife) flocking simulations were used to produce the experience of walking through water among schools of fish. For Giddings, “attention to the machinery of display” is not necessarily at odds with processes of learning and the generating of knowledges, while even the simulation designer cannot always constrain the possibilities opened up by a playful simulation.
Part of the problem for Wildwalk, Lindahl Elliot argues, was that genres “involve not just techniques and technologies of communication, but also a horizon of expectation shared by the audience” (Chapter 3). Such horizons of expectation may remain invisible and unspoken, but they determine the form of visitors engagement with displays. In Chapter 5, Jenny Chamarette starts from the premise that the museum itself does a similar disappearing act. Yet, by bringing cinema into the museum, Chamarette argues, the museum (as well as cinema) is put on display. This idea, that cinema can work critically to make the museum’s framing visible, recalls a point made by Alexander Horwath, director of the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, that the detachment of artists’ film from both commercial cinema and the art museum enables it to reflect critically on both institutions (Sperlinger and White 2008, 119). Chamarette focuses on the Pompidou Center in Paris, where, she suggests, filmmakers have challenged the status of the museum as the protector of cultural heritage or patrimony. She gives the example of Roberto Rossellini’s 1977 film Le Centre Georges Pompidou which, she argues, subtly critiqued the ideas of high culture and democratization that underpinned the new museum, as did the sociological analysis of the center, undertaken at the same time under the direction of Pierre Bourdieu (Fabiani and Menger 1979; Heinich 2003).
For Horwath, the film museum is the in-between space that artists’ film can occupy (and has occupied in the past), an institution closely related to cinémathèques and film libraries, and one that has marginal status compared to the art museum (Sperlinger and White 2008, 120). The Pompidou both collects and shows moving image work within an art museum context. But, according to Chamarette, the meeting of cinema and museum at the Pompidou is not a tale of the incorporation of one by the other but of a clash of spaces, conventions, and expectations; a relationship of mutual suspicion as well as interdependence. That this is not always the case is suggested by Wasson’s account of the “harmonious and mutually interdependent” historical relationship between the two institutions in the United States (Chapter 26). Even at the Pompidou, Chamarette suggests, the relationship has ultimately been productive: faced with the resistance and challenges of film, the Pompidou Center has been able to renegotiate itself and to challenge what a museum can be and do (Chapter 5).