Media also raise difficulties in terms of where to make the “cut.” Arguably, they are cultural phenomena that need to be understood in relation to an audience, to certain kinds of social spaces, professions, and practices. Do television and computers make sense when removed from their living room and office habitats; or the newspaper from the cafe or the train? Can film be understood without cinema, and do film collections need to also include the ephemera of cinema and cinema-going? There are also, inevitably, complex conservation and archival issues: for filmic culture to be preserved, the museum has to develop techniques to preserve its material, but Chamarette argues that there is a too common tendency in museums and museum studies to ignore film’s materiality and to treat it as a mode of transmission whose contents might therefore simply be translated across to magnetic tape or as digital data (Chapter 5). Cox, in Chapter 10, notes that scientific and anthropological recordings have a place in museums, but sound art proves difficult for art museums to conserve and classify. Indeed, sound art is often a live event and therefore poses problems for archivists and conservationists similar to those posed by performance art (on which see Clarke and Warren 2009). Similarly, Internet art has proved challenging for a number of reasons including the difficulties of classification and a lack of clarity over issues of conservation and display. New media curators have consequently found institutional support for the collection and display of Internet art to be somewhat shaky and variable (Vershooren 2010). In the face of poor institutional support and rapidly changing digital formats, many curators and scholars fear that early new media art and documentation is disappearing or already lost. An “international declaration” drawn up in 2011 called for sustainable funding structures and global collaboration to halt this process.10
Media collections are important because they offer the possibility for reflection and analysis of media worlds that otherwise appear to us as very natural and normal, since they are so integrated into our everyday lives. In this volume, Huhtamo argues that the widespread use of interactivity, not just in the form of museum interactives but also in everyday life, contributes to a normalization or naturalization of it that makes it harder to ask questions about it, and that embeds it as involuntary reflex, mere habit (Chapter 12). Harrasser expresses concern that the close coupling of museum interactives and visitors’ wider media environment may not be a good thing, making rarer “the moment when the medium creeps into perception that triggers complex learning processes” (Chapter 17). Rectanus also warns that the audience’s deep and proliferating involvement in media production and use can eat away at the space for critical reflection, challenging museums to find ways to provide that reflective space in a media-saturated world (Chapter 23).
The museum as reflective space is a model that is frequently invoked, but it does not take account of the possibility that the tradition of silent, receptive, critical contemplation, especially in the art museum, is itself the product of a particular culture, social class, and set of priorities. In my chapter, I refer to play as the name for another kind of aesthetic experience (Chapter 25). Kalshoven sees play as a means to enable a deep engagement with historical objects (Chapter 24). And, while Huhtamo questions the impact of an increasingly tactile emphasis in museum contexts (Chapter 12), Ciolfi affirms the value of tangibility for keeping visitors focused on the site and on the material, sensual aspects of their experience (Chapter 19). I draw on Jacques Rancière’s notion of a “[re]distribution of the sensible,” arguing that the present all-pervasive image culture, the product of an increasingly mobile, networked digital photography, can offer new models of attention and aesthetic experience for art museums (Chapter 25). Rectanus refers to turning the museum “inside out,” to museums becoming increasingly flexible, mobile, and connected with a wider “commons,” both geographically and online (Chapter 23). Graham argues that the incorporation of new media art in the museum has involved a “rethinking of the role of the visitor, the artist, and the curator,” and leads us to the notion of the “open” participatory museum (Chapter 20; see also Simon 2010). Museums continue to “keep the record,” to enable people to reflect on and attend to their present as well as the past, but, as the diverse essays in this volume suggest, changes in media bring with them changed forms of attention that require new strategies for museum-making, and new kinds of research and analysis.
Notes
1 1 “We all live in an information age – or so we tell each other as we caress our smart phones like rosary beads, heads down, checking, monitoring, tweeting. We’re wired; we’re on message; and the dominant theme of the message is ourselves. Identity is the zeitgeist. A lifetime ago in ‘Brave New World,’ Aldous Huxley predicted this as the ultimate means of social control because it was voluntary, addictive and shrouded in illusions of personal freedom” (Pilger 2014).
2 2 In his introduction to the 1964 edition of Innis’s book The Bias of Communication (originally published in 1951), McLuhan wrote: “I am pleased to think of my own book The Gutenberg Galaxy as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing then of printing” (McLuhan 2005, 8).
3 3 In his essay “The Bias of Communication” Innis argued that different historical technologies of communication (stone and hieroglyphics; clay and cuneiform script; papyrus and alphabet; paper and printed gothic script) favored or hindered different kinds of social organization – from centralized absolute monarchies to oligarchies, to complexly administered empires. In Innis’s terms, radio itself already carries a specific and undemocratic bias toward “centralization” and “a concern with continuity” (Innis [1951] 2008, 33).
4 4 The research conducted by Karin Harrasser and her colleagues makes use of Stuart Hall’s semiotic encoding–decoding model, but while Hall tended to view oppositional, or resistant, readings as empowering, Harrasser found that the process of negotiating such readings can actually be stressful and difficult (Harrasser, Chapter 17).
5 5 “Whether the light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference. It could be argued that these activities are in some way the ‘content’ of the electric light, since they could not exist without the electric light. This fact merely underlines the point that ‘the medium is the message’ because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The content or uses of such media are as diverse as they are ineffectual in shaping the form of human association” (McLuhan [1964] 2001, 23–24).
6 6 See http://www.hauserwirthsomerset.com/about (accessed September 2, 2014).
7 7