Museum Media. Группа авторов

Now people want to interact in museums naturally because of the use of the Internet, and so on. So all of this has to be known by the museum people, calculated by them, in order to then create their aesthetic strategies of the museum. But, then in the next step, not by trying to imitate and mimic this or say that we’ve fulfilled this expectation as well, but maybe by cleverly showing them the difference that is the unique strength of the museum. Just as you could show a unique strength of what the archive is as opposed to other memory agencies. This archive could well be separated and differentiated from the old world collective memory agencies by saying this is a completely different kind of authority which the archive has. It’s not just a memory. The archive has to do with the power of having access to things like that. The museum has material properties which are its unique feature. Lyotard made that the topic of his big exhibition Les immatériaux in Paris in 1985: to what degree does the material physical world count in our immaterial media culture? Those are the questions to which the museum can really respond – which is more difficult for libraries, which consist mainly of printed symbols in books that are still material.

      MH: In Britain at the moment the government is trying to close libraries, and it seems there is a very strong countercampaign because libraries have become the place where people who don’t have much money have access to the new media as well. So they’re not just the preserve of the book. The destruction of the library is about the destruction of public space and a kind of attack on the public sphere.

      WE: Whereas, for the library, the situation is really different. First of all, it’s symbolic. It’s based on symbols, the printed object. Although the material object is there, and a lot of conservative librarians will always trust the material object of the book, now e-books can imitate even the turning of the page and things like that. Since the central quality of the postmedieval book is the printed letter, which can be reproduced on a symbolic level, this can be adopted by new media to a high degree. But I will say it again: The structure of the archive cannot be adopted because it’s an authoritative space which is, first of all, not about memory. The museum, with its quality of being out of time for the moment, creating a space out of time, based on the metareality or the physicality of objects, is a quality that so far can in no way be replaced by any other reproduction media, not photography, nor television, nor film, nor the digital computer. And from that it can derive a lot of energy as a counterenergy, a reflective, dynamic counterenergy. Not a conservative counterenergy, but a dynamic counterenergy.

Acknowledgments

      This interview was transcribed by Jen Rhodes. My thanks to her and to Wolfgang Ernst for all their help in the production of this chapter.

Notes

      1 1 See also Ernst 1994; 2013b; Emerson 2013.

      2 2 Negentropy is a scientific term meaning “negative entropy.” While, in thermodynamics, entropy refers to a tendency toward equilibrium in thermodynamic systems, which involves the dissipation or loss of useful energy, the term is more generally used to refer to a tendency to increased disorder and loss. Negentropy therefore has become associated with the idea that information processing produces order from chaos, with data appearing to become increasingly ordered and “lossless.”

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