machinic “techniques of remembering” that are very different from the practice and discourse of history (Ernst 2005, 595). This machinic memory nevertheless has cultural implications, reconfiguring the very cultural constructions on which museums depend, as in the case of photography: “the improved technologies of visual reproduction led to the availability of arts and artefacts which André Malraux praised as a condition for the thinkability of notions such as a cross artistic ‘style’ in his celebrated photo-based musée imaginaire of 1947” (Ernst 2005, 599). Media archaeologist Jussi Parikka summarizes the relevance of Ernst’s work for museums as follows:
The implications for the wider set of cultural institutions and museums are radical: the need to think museums and archives as nonplaces, and as addresses and hence as modes of management of protocols, software structures and patterns of retrieval which potentially can open up new ways of user-engagement as well, and where data storage cannot be detached from its continuous searchability and distribution. (Parikka 2011, 58).
However, this corresponds more to Ernst’s understanding of the archive (which becomes transformed into software structures) rather than of the museum, which he views as quite distinct. In the following interview, conducted in his office in Humboldt University in February 2011, Ernst’s materialist approach to media leads him to insist on the resistance of the material object (which cannot be completely absorbed by digitalization). Thus, he envisages the museum as something that cannot be understood along the lines of electronic media, as something that is not immune to the effects of technological change, but that needs to maintain its own distinctive quality, centered around the thing that sets it apart from electronic media: the physical presentation of material objects.1
MH: Could you explain what media archaeology is, in your version of it?
WE: Media archaeology refers to the well-known discipline of archaeology in the sense that it takes the media first of all as material objects, even in our so-called virtual world and information society. All this information flow is still based on real cables, real transmitters, real technologies. So media archaeology tries to take the point of view of the media as technological object, which means, for example, to look at what a television image is, not in terms of content. The question of what the political or whatever manipulated message of the video or the television image is has been taken care of by communication studies and other related disciplines – and it has to be done – and, to a certain degree, cultural studies interprets this semiotics and coding and decoding of the television image. Media archaeology is in this respect closer to Marshall McLuhan’s approach and looks at what the television image means, which makes it different from the cinematographic image, or the photographic image, or the digital image (McLuhan [1964] 2003).
Now, how is the electronic image different from the digital image, what difference does it make? First of all, one has to look at it technically, and technomathematically, to know how it is made, for example, what the electronic image does to our eyes, which is of a completely different nature to the projected screen image of cinema. How does it subconsciously influence our perception? The cathode ray, the light, the speed of lines of television: these are processes where the medium works on our perception although we are not conscious of it.
So media archaeology tries to uncover or discover these processes. In order to discover it, media archaeology has to know how your own perception works in terms of neuro-biology and physiology, and at the same time how the medium actually works, because it makes such a big difference whether it is electronically driven or driven by software, which has a completely different cultural power and mechanism and technique behind it. So, to take the example of the most popular medium of today, which would be the computer as laptop (most people now have computers as laptops or similar devices): whereas most people know the computer from the interface, media archaeology looks behind the interface. Like the open software movement, it asks: What are the driving mechanisms behind the interface? What is the software behind the interface? How can we actually gain control of the computer ourselves? This means, not just being a user – using, clicking icons, or using apps, which is the most popular way now to use these devices – but analyzing who decides and what decides what can be used, what can’t be used, and how can we use that in different ways. In order to know that, we have to look to what is behind the interface, which today would be software, and in the old media would be electronic technology (Figure 1.1).
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:
