museum. In this respect, the relation between media and museum becomes more complicated.
The next step, and the most complicated, is, of course, asking whether the museum itself is a medium. I would always try to emphasize that it makes sense to keep the difference. There is a broad sense of the term “medium,” which even covers the human body as a medium. Luckily there is no master definition of media but, if it becomes too broadly defined, the strength of the museum would be lost; it would lose its specificity if you just call it a medium. I would say the museum is not a technical medium because it’s not able to operate itself. It needs to be run by the museum people – which differentiates it from the first medium in the technical sense, the photographic camera. The camera can actually produce a picture without human intervention. It needs a human to start it, but the rest of it can be done using the apparatus. An electronic camera can produce a live transmission from Cairo to our living room on the television screen. This is done by the medium: the medium is operative. But the museum in itself does not move and operate – it depends on humans as the processor. That is why I couldn’t call it medium in the strict sense.
Since when did “media” become a popular word? Let’s take Marshall McLuhan’s influential book from 1964, Understanding Media, where the word “media” became part of a book title that wasn’t just for the physical sciences. He meant the mass medium, the electronic mass media. They are based on an electric current, on signal processing, on all kinds of electrical engineering which are completely different from how a museum works, how an archive works, or how a library works (which are the old memory institutions).
These are institutions, they are memory agencies; I would say they are symbolic systems for sure. A lot of work in museums is coded by symbolic systems, by inventories, by labeling and moving real objects. But this is different from the way a medium would be defined. And, since the word “medium” as a discursive term only emerged in coexistence with the modern apparatus-based or even electricity-based systems, it makes sense to limit the word “medium” to those systems and not to use it too broadly for everything that is somehow doing something.
MH: Nevertheless, as a media archaeologist you’ve written quite a bit about museums and exhibitions. So, given that you’re saying that the museum isn’t a medium, what can media archaeology tell us? How can it give us a different perspective from conventional museum studies?
WE: By discovering similarities and differences. A lot of archaeologists now are interested in how cultural memory works. A lot of studies have been done on how memory is being created in societies. What are the institutions, the agencies, the places where memory takes place? And how and where does cultural transmission take place? How is tradition made? How does tradition actually work? Now both media in the technical sense, and museums and other agencies in the traditional sense, are transferring information from one point to another, or from one point in time to another. One of the main tasks of the museum has been how to transmit information over time. Time is the channel. Doing media studies, I am sensitive in terms of being aware of how to analyze this: How does it work? Where is the sender? Where is the channel? Where is the receiver? How are things coded? How is this done? So, media studies creates the kinds of questions which I readdress to previous agencies of memory transmission. Media studies provides me with a vocabulary and the questions through which I look at something like tradition in a more differentiated way, maybe even a bit more technical way. Then the notion of tradition loses a bit of its metaphysical, culturally somehow cloudy, quality and can be more precisely analyzed: Who has the power? What technology do we need for transmission? What is the institutional part? What is the technical part? To what degree is memory a social event, a technical event, a storage event? Since technical media are always based on processes of transmission and storage, the study of them provides me with a vocabulary to ask how the museum works.
The next step would then be to find out how the museum is different from technical media. For example, the museum has a strength that so far no other medium is able to provide, and that is the material object. We still can’t send material objects over the Internet. We can order objects but they still have to be sent by traditional mail. Also, think about the preservation of information. This is an ever growing problem for electronic media starting from old photographs, which have a surprising endurance over 150 years, although they become yellow, but film is more difficult. The early films, with their chemical material that tends to burn when stored somewhere too hot, or the color films where the colors fade – now this is a big problem for film restorers. So there is physical entropy, the tendency to decay in the material. We have the video tape and magnetic audio tape ... one can say, “Well, I can listen to a 50-year-old magnetic tape and still hear a lot” – which is a positive surprise, but at the same time there are dropouts. As for digital tapes, as almost everyone knows now from their own experience, these are more efficient than ever, can be faster transmitters and processors than ever, but they are not long-lasting. The CD-ROM will not last – in itself, it will not keep its data intact for a long time – but the machines themselves will also become dated and be replaced by other systems and faster rhythms. So we have a big technical problem.
Compared to that, if we consider the museum in terms of its objects (the thing that differentiates the museum from the library and the archive is the collection of material artifacts), these objects are surprisingly enduring. This quality of the museum should not be lost when museums are trying to be immaterial themselves. The discussion of the immaterial museum has been a media and cultural studies project starting with photography and with André Malraux and others, and to a certain degree Walter Benjamin, who were already concerned with the question whether or not the photograph-based image collection could be called the imaginary museum (Malraux [1947] 1967; Benjamin [1936] 2002a). This is fine: it’s opening the museum, extending the museum, but it loses the museum’s material basis. The basis of the museum is the material object, the picture which is actually, in its physicality, there, and this is completely different from the photographic or the electronic image reproduction.
MH: I am almost going to reverse my earlier question, because I asked how media archaeology likes to think about museums. In reverse, it seems that thinking museologically, as well, actually helps you to understand about media. That orientation toward preservation, toward storage, and so on, which is very familiar within the museum context, is quite new to thinking about media, isn’t it? It seems that you’re doing both, examining the productive differences between the two things.
WE: Yeah, it’s trying to take both sides. On the one hand, one can look at how computer architecture works and then one discovers that a lot of the storage mechanisms sound familiar if one has done museum studies or archive studies or library studies. Even down to the terms that we are using, terms like “memory” in the computer, which is actually a metaphor because technically the computer does not have a memory. We call it a memory because our culture tends to address even technology in terms that have been created in previous agencies of tradition, such as the museum or library or archive.
But, on the other hand, one reason to call what we do “media archaeology” is, of course, that one is concentrating on the material object, which sounds like traditional archaeology which has always been object-oriented. But then the other use of the word “archaeology” comes from Michel Foucault’s nonmetaphorical use of “archaeology,” meaning analyzing the hidden mechanisms which create knowledge or evidence and through that term, and in his book The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault said, let us look at the discontinuities ([1969] 2002). That’s what makes his archaeology different from “history,” and media archaeology different from media history. Media archaeology looks at discontinuity. What difference do media make to previous cultural mechanisms of memory and tradition? Now, what this emphasis on discontinuity, rupture, and difference does is sharpen analysis. It may be a bit one-sided overall; maybe in the end there are many more continuities. But historians would always tend to emphasize the continuities. Our traditional cultural model emphasizes continuities, from the ancient Greek temple to today. Learning from Foucault, let’s look at the discontinuities – that’s how to look archaeologically. Then we can decide how, when we talk
