FIGURE 1.1 “Who Built the Internet?” display at the National Media Museum, Bradford, UK.
Photo: Michelle Henning. Reproduced by kind permission of the National Media Museum.
MH: How do you then go from looking at media, such as the examples you gave of the computer, the television, software, etc. to thinking about museums and exhibitions? What’s the connection there? How does that relate?
WE: Well, first of all, the relationship between media and museums, of course, is a manifold one. The traditional approach would ask for media as objects of museum display. Science museums and technology museums do this, they show old media on display as part of cultural history. That’s the most natural relation between media and museums – they become museum objects. Already, at that point, the problem starts. In Berlin, for example, you can go to the Museum of Technology and you see old televisions of the late 1950s – you see them as an object like any other object displayed by the museum.
Now as a media theorist I would say that a medium that is not performing in its medium state is just a piece of furniture. A television on display in a museum which does not show the screen working is not shown as a medium; it’s just a piece of hardware, a design object. And most people actually look at old TVs and radios like a piece of furniture: they recognize the style of the fifties and sixties and they become nostalgic about it, and see it as a piece of furniture, not attending to it as a medium. And that’s a big challenge for museums because, if they want to show the medium, they somehow need to show it running. Now, this is a big problem for museum conservators: it’s not easy to get those old media working again. If you have to replace parts of the medium, then it’s not original anymore – little condensers have to be exchanged. When you show it running, do you show historical footage from the period of the television or do you show up-to-date programs? So it undermines already the idea of the museum object. Since media are so process-oriented, they are only media when they are in operation. They somehow are a challenge to the idea of a museum as a place to present objects, material objects.
MH: But in science and technology museums you often have steam engines, don’t you, or that kind of thing, actually running?
WE: They definitely have to be shown working, which is suddenly the dynamic object, and this becomes a new genre of museum display. This is a challenge, of course, for museums to manage to keep it running and conservators to allow it to run, because one should have it as an original running or a replica at least. Museums are progressing to this but already it shows the challenge. The mobile object, the cultural artifact, which is also a dynamic object, is a challenge to museums.
New media are defined by the fact that they are not primarily the technology but formats. Television or radio or the book – these are all being perceived more on more on the computer screen. And behind them is the software which defines these objects and enables these old media to return. Now how do you display software? As a cultural good which needs to be preserved as a document of our time, it’s very difficult. How you preserve software? Doron Swade – the former curator of the computer department at the London Science museum who has now moved to the United States to run the Computer History Museum – has said this is now a challenge for curators (Swade 2002). It’s very complex to preserve software on the original hardware or to emulate software. How do you display it? It has to do something and then again you need the running system to operate this software. It’s very immaterial: you cannot touch software as such. This is a big challenge for the traditional object-/artifact-oriented museum. In this respect, the relation between media and museum becomes more complicated.
The next step, and the most complicated, is, of course, asking whether the museum itself is a medium. I would always try to emphasize that it makes sense to keep the difference. There is a broad sense of the term “medium,” which even covers the human body as a medium. Luckily there is no master definition of media but, if it becomes too broadly defined, the strength of the museum would be lost; it would lose its specificity if you just call it a medium. I would say the museum is not a technical medium because it’s not able to operate itself. It needs to be run by the museum people – which differentiates it from the first medium in the technical sense, the photographic camera. The camera can actually produce a picture without human intervention. It needs a human to start it, but the rest of it can be done using the apparatus. An electronic camera can produce a live transmission from Cairo to our living room on the television screen. This is done by the medium: the medium is operative. But the museum in itself does not move and operate – it depends on humans as the processor. That is why I couldn’t call it medium in the strict sense.
Since when did “media” become a popular word? Let’s take Marshall McLuhan’s influential book from 1964, Understanding Media, where the word “media” became part of a book title that wasn’t just for the physical sciences. He meant the mass medium, the electronic mass media. They are based on an electric current, on signal processing, on all kinds of electrical engineering which are completely different from how a museum works, how an archive works, or how a library works (which are the old memory institutions).
These are institutions, they are memory agencies; I would say they are symbolic systems for sure. A lot of work in museums is coded by symbolic systems, by inventories, by labeling and moving real objects. But this is different from the way a medium would be defined. And, since the word “medium” as a discursive term only emerged in coexistence with the modern apparatus-based or even electricity-based systems, it makes sense to limit the word “medium” to those systems and not to use it too broadly for everything that is somehow doing something.
MH: Nevertheless, as a media archaeologist you’ve written quite a bit about museums and exhibitions. So, given that you’re saying that the museum isn’t a medium, what can media archaeology tell us? How can it give us a different perspective from conventional museum studies?
WE: By discovering similarities and differences. A lot of archaeologists now are interested in how cultural memory works. A lot of studies have been done on how memory is being created in societies. What are the institutions, the agencies, the places where memory takes place? And how and where does cultural transmission take place? How is tradition made? How does tradition actually work? Now both media in the technical sense, and museums and other agencies in the traditional sense, are transferring information from one point to another, or from one point in time to another. One of the main tasks of the museum has been how to transmit information over time. Time is the channel. Doing media studies, I am sensitive in terms of being aware of how to analyze this: How does it work? Where is the sender? Where is the channel? Where is the receiver? How are things coded? How is this done? So, media studies creates the kinds of questions which I readdress to previous agencies of memory transmission. Media studies provides me with a vocabulary and the questions through which I look at something like tradition in a more differentiated way, maybe even a bit more technical way. Then the notion of tradition loses a bit of its metaphysical, culturally somehow cloudy, quality and can be more precisely analyzed: Who has the power? What technology do we need for transmission? What is the institutional part? What is the technical part? To what degree is memory a social event, a technical event, a storage event? Since technical media are always based on processes of transmission and storage, the study of them provides me with a vocabulary to ask how the museum works.
The next step would then be to find out how the museum is different from technical media. For example, the museum has a strength that so far no other medium is able to provide, and that is the material object. We still can’t send material objects over the Internet.