MH: But the museum tries to halt decay sometimes and sanitizes things.
WE: Yes, and it erases history. I would almost say that the strengths of the museum now would be counterstrategies to this to the new negentropic virtue of the information society,2 where you cannot make a distinction between the original and its copy anymore: for a digital copy this is true. The copy is not a copy anymore; it’s a second version of the original. Then you lose any trace of history. The negentropic material almost is not at work; it’s just very marginally at work – but that’s another discussion.
Now this creates a different sense of culture, of time, all those emphatic notions that are now in our cultural discourse. This opens a big gap between the old culture, which is dominated by the experience of entropy, and the new culture, which creates the illusion that there is lossless tradition. Now this is fascinating and worrying at the same time, this idea of lossless tradition. Where is the authority which can decide which is original and which is not? Is our authority within the material or is it just metadata providing the authority? Now, these are all questions the museum, if it’s clever, can address. The museum could be the place where those new semiological challenges are being reflected because the new media themselves have no place where they can reflect this. The Internet itself has no place where it can reflect itself. But the museum is a space and a place and a time; when you visit a museum you reserve some time to be open to reflection and contemplation. Now museums could be used to reflect cultural mechanisms or cultural technologies as they take place in the contemporary media world. Because we need another place, in the Foucauldian sense, we need a place which is different from the media in order to reflect on the media. You cannot reflect on a medium within the same medium – according to the system theory of the position of the observer, you have to create a difference. And, by proudly not being a medium in the modern sense, the museum could say exactly, “This is a place where we can reflect about media,” because it introduces a distance, a distance which is a precondition for reflection.
MH: Do you think there are any museums or exhibits that are already doing that, or starting to do that, in an interesting way?
WE: Yes there are museums which are starting to do that. For example, of recent experience the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford in England.
MH: It’s now the National Media Museum.
WE: Which is in itself interesting. It started out as a history museum of television and photography and is now called the National Media Museum. This change is significant: it says that we don’t just want to be known as some nostalgic place of the old electronic or electromechanical television but we use it as a place to reflect on the new media, the new audiovisual media. And then suddenly there is the whole message – that the museum is not about cultural history but a dynamic place of reflection; it’s a completely different function from that of the museum – it becomes in itself a flexible institution. This is, of course, losing a bit of its strong read-only memory-oriented function, which it used to have for a long time. There are maybe other museums which are stronger when they are just proudly keeping the read-only memory because they have pieces of art or so which derive their authority and aura exactly from not being replaced by contemporary versions. So different museums should have different strategies – it depends on if it’s a museum of technology or a museum of art. I think even the museum itself should be differentiated and should develop different strategies for the different types of objects it has.
MH: I was very interested when I visited the Darwin Centre in the Natural History Museum in London because they had that. I went on a tour where you could see the research collection and the scientists at work. So it’s like a behind-the-scenes tour but it’s actually part of the design of it.
WE: Yes, the archaeological aesthetic has already been opening up the museums. It’s because they are used to gaining and organizing information themselves. You can now open the archive. For a long time we needed historians to work in the archive, but then to write it for us in the form of a big narrative that produces history. Now, more and more as a product of information, the user wants to use the archive material directly themselves. It doesn’t mean it’s not interesting to have a plausible interpretation offered by historians in a plausible museum exhibition which arranges objects in a way that is convincing, but at the same time there is a chance to rearrange it in accordance with different criteria. This aesthetic has opened the museum through access to the shelves or the tendency to replace the long-term exhibition with more temporary exhibitions. It’s more dynamic – like the tendency to have more short-term memories being a product of our media age, which means that the idea of the emphatic long-term memory is being replaced by the idea of short-term memories which are more functionally reusable by the present but which won’t last long. Once more, museum people have to decide to choose a precise counterstrategy, to say we are one of the only few places where there is a resistance to this acceleration of short-term memory.
MH: But, by doing that, they risk situating themselves as reactionary?
WE: In the Jean Baudrillard way: not reactionary, but rather retroactive. Exactly because museums are challenged by new media, they can develop counterstrategies. Let’s look at the opera house and other cultural institutions. The idea was that the gramophone would kill opera. No, it didn’t; that never happened – it just displaced that institution. These institutions did not win by trying to rival the new media. A theater can never be as good as a cinema when it comes to bringing together different places in one, or a montage, or jumping back and forth between times. Every film can do that which a theater cannot easily do. But the theater has the real presence, the authority of the real actor, and the accidents of the actor. Every performance is live, so if something goes wrong it actually goes wrong – it’s not recorded on tape. So there are virtues or qualities which are preserved in the opera house, in the theater, and I would say in the museum, like the material object as a counterstrategy. Not completely separate from the new media, always playing with the critical dialogue, playing with it dynamically, critically, or adopting a bit but still caring about the difference.
MH: But you mentioned earlier, I think, that visitors arrive with their senses adjusted to the different media with which they live. I was thinking of taking my daughter when she was very young to the theater for the first time. She shouted, cried, hid under the chairs, and then stood up on them and clapped, completely responding to what was happening and all the other children were sat there blank-faced as if it were a screen. She had never been to the theater or cinema and so I did wonder if she was out of sync with them in terms of how her mode of attention had been adjusted.
WE: Yes but that shows that the strength of the real theater would be to make us aware of the difference. There are qualities which cannot be covered by the cinema, although the cinema has opened marvelous new cultural options and, as a media theorist, I am fascinated by what media can do. But there are things which media cannot do and there are at least interesting differences in perception, in aesthetics, in information, so that’s why I come back to this counterstrategy again and again.
MH: But I suppose what I’m getting at is that, if you arrive at the museum with a cinema-adjusted brain, you’re going to look at the same displays very differently than if you had arrived before the age of cinema.
WE: Yes, and that’s why museum people cannot simply proudly ignore the new media. That’s not what counterstrategy is. Counterstrategy means paying attention to what is part of a discursive field, and this is a media-dominated