museum has recast itself as a commissioner and/or collaborator in new forms of social activism involved in “increasingly complex constellations of media use” and the “deterritorialization of museum contents and programming” (Rectanus, Chapter 23). In many cases, museums have been quick to respond to new media environments and are not as wary of media as they are sometimes portrayed. Proctor observes that they were “early adopters of personal handheld devices” (Chapter 22) while Wasson writes of the wide range of ways in which museums have engaged with modern media over a long period, “effectively participating in a vast media ecology” (Chapter 26). The Metropolitan Museum, New York, had an early film program in the 1920s, that sent films out “like mobile, mechanical docents,” producing “satellite museums out of ad hoc, often impromptu, spaces” (Wasson, Chapter 26). Images traveled too: in my chapter, I discuss André Malraux’s notion of the “museum without walls”: a world of mass reproduction that was connected to, but not entirely controlled by, museums (Chapter 25). The new context for museum artworks is nicely evoked by Wasson when she talks of how reproductions “shared space with pictures of fashion contestants, bathing beauties, coronations, and presidential speeches” in the newspapers (Chapter 26). While Ernst sees museums’ media specificity as residing in the material object (Chapter 1), several contributors emphasize museums’ long-term engagement with media.
Media objects
This deep and historical involvement with different kinds of electronic media has involved museums reinventing themselves, no longer to be understood as “a permanent, unmoving, physical structure but as a kind of tentacular hub for a range of circulating things and ways of presenting those things” (Wasson, Chapter 26). However, both electronic media and the museum as medium have a tendency to efface themselves, to conceal or naturalize their own technologies. For this reason, it is important to preserve older museum arrangements (such as dioramas or the avant-garde installations discussed earlier), and also to archive and collect media as objects.
However, because museum displays tend to center around visibility, media objects prove problematic to collect and display. Even visual electronic media such as television need to be operational to be understood as more than a piece of product design, and often the core similarities and differences between media as technological objects are not visible. Ernst indicates that electronic media raise all sorts of questions about how you display dynamic objects, operational machines, and software. Displaying media objects often requires the creative reinvention of exhibition space. The blackbox space is an invention necessary for the increasing number of film and media projections, especially in art contexts. Chamarette (Chapter 5) and Graham (Chapter 20) mention some of the difficulties of engaging with such exhibits, from the “bleeding” of sound, to the problems of visitors’ time commitment.
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 (
