MH: One thing I have noticed, though, and this is just speculative, if you look at the halls of dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History, or any number of American exhibits from the 1920s to the 1940s, what you see is something incredibly cinematic. Alison Griffiths pointed to this when she linked early twentieth-century museum curators’ anxieties about museum life groups to anxieties about motion pictures and spectacle, and I mention it in an essay on new media in museums (Griffiths 2002, 24–30; Henning 2006a, 304). You know: the darkened hall, the lit-up windows, the scene that you watch from the outside. It is immersive but cinematic: your presence isn’t acknowledged; it’s going to unravel without you. And I really noticed, particularly in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, that when you came to present-day exhibits of natural history they were much more inviting you to look over here, then look over there – they were much more dispersed or networked in their structure (Henning 2006b, 145–146). So I wonder if another tendency is for museums to actually mimic the popular media of their time, whether that’s something that also happened so that they conceal their own medium specificity.
WE: There has always been a sort of mirroring of the new media in museum practices. It started with photography, when suddenly the period rooms started appearing in museums. That’s the idea that a historical museum might create a room which recreates the historical atmosphere of the period of the time. This is certainly an effect of the photographic medium which could preserve a coherent image of a moment in time. The art historian Stephen Bann, for example, has shown that the idea of a period room was contemporary to the emergence of photography (Bann 1984; Ernst 2005). And, of course, with cinematography, the museum tried to emulate moving parts, even moving images and that happened until today as if the museum always had to rival the prospective new media. I would almost say that the museum misses its own quality and its strength. I would propose a counterstrategy: What can the museum do that new media cannot do?
It might sound very conservative if I return to the material object but materiality is the blind spot of the information age. Because, first of all, digital media cannot provide materiality, the resistance of the object, which is not the same as the information of the object. The object has more information in it than a recording or a scan of an object would be able to provide. Then we have things that have been discussed again and again, things like the aura which Walter Benjamin has described: to what degree does the aura depend on the materiality? For Walter Benjamin, any reproduction of the material object makes it lose its aura, which is its quality of being here and now (Benjamin [1936] 2002a). The idea of presence which is created by a material object is not easily mimicked by electronic media. This is true even of virtual spaces that you are immersed in, three-dimensional spaces, because human perception can clearly work out the difference as to whether you’re really hitting a rock or whether this is something that is happening in a data glove space. So there is a quality of the museum there.
MH: And that’s something that media are constantly trying to mimic, and so, if the museum were trying to mimic the media, the media are also trying to mimic the museum by constantly trying to simulate an experience of the thing itself.
WE: Yes, that is why the relationship is dynamic. I would not categorically say that the museum is completely and categorically different from media. To a high degree, it is different, but there is a dynamic relationship of course: the modes of perception of the visitors are dominated by media perception and museums have to react to it. And the other way round: museum aesthetics has an influence on media interface display. Brenda Laurel in her book Computers as Theater (1991) has shown how much our aesthetics of the interface of the computer is dominated by cultural ways of looking which come from theater, from the drama of the theatrical space, and in a way this is true of museum space as well. Still, the media archaeological analysis would like to emphasize the discontinuity because otherwise it looks as if culture was a friendly, coexistent, and homogeneous and harmonious play between different agencies. I think the challenge is much much bigger, to be aware of what really changes now and what has changed.
MH: You mentioned that you took from Foucault the concept of rupture and historical discontinuity, as opposed to a kind of narrative progression that you have in traditional history, but presumably you also took from Foucault that concept of power as something that’s not centralized or held, that’s dispersed ...?
WE: Yes, and both the critique of the narrative progression and the analysis of power mechanisms are essential parts of media archaeology, even in the analysis of the museum. For example, the museum includes not just the public display parts of the museum; the real powerful side of the museum is in the parts which are hidden to the normal visitor, the offices where the inventories are being created, even the storage spaces where a lot of objects are being stored which are never on display. It is only recently that museums have started to open these spaces. Spaces which are not normally ordered, they are just open shelves (Figure 1.2).
MH: And you’re quite in favor of that aren’t you?
WE: I am in favor of that – it’s like opening a medium and looking at how it works. One does not have the offer of an interpreted presentation already. But we have a data bank, one that we could now call the aesthetics of the data bank itself, now that we live in a media culture where the user is much more able than we used to be before to handle a data bank itself. Not to get it translated into a narrative, but to work with the databank itself, to get access to the information in the data bank itself, even to demand open source, to get access to the source codes: this is the equivalent of getting access to the nonprefigured, nonordered spaces of the museum.
FIGURE 1.2 8 mm film cameras in storage at the National Media Museum.
Photo: Michelle Henning. Reproduced by kind permission of the National Media Museum.
MH: To me, one of the ironies of the use of new media interactive booths or touch screens in museums is that they seem to be based in a desire to increase access to all the information that maybe would be too much to put on a written label, to the detailed context or the provenance of the object, all the stuff that the museum knows and can now share. But, for me, the experience is the other way: what actually happens is that it’s just more interpretation, instead of opening up to the concealed parts of the museum or to information you couldn’t otherwise normally have on display. Instead of opening and expanding the display, it just seems to put more layers of interpretation between you and the experience of really going down into the basement, unlocking the doors, and having a poke around.
WE: There was, of course, always a debate within museums studies itself as to how much text should be provided in a museum. Was the strength of the museum the material object or do we urgently need contextualization? – which was, of course, a very enlightened attitude. But to what degree can the museum then be replaced by just reading the texts? I can get a lot of information on museum objects online, but it cannot replace my confrontation with the objects as long as we are confronted with traditional objects. However, it all changes now with a culture that not only produces pieces of art as objects, but also as digitally born objects, as they are called. Then the difference is that it is not that book anymore. A book that is produced and published only online ... I don’t have to go to a library to borrow a