how far it is a metaphor, which in a way makes the discontinuity oblique, which harms the discontinuity. Let’s look at where the discontinuity is and name it, in order to make our contemporaries realize that it makes a difference.
MH: When you talk about how metaphors might harm the discontinuities, I remember Walter Benjamin writing about iron architecture in the nineteenth century being covered by a veil of stone, so that the newness of the thing was concealed, and that was a problem: the radically new disguised as tradition (Benjamin [1935] 2002b). Is that the kind of thing you’re talking about?
WE: Yes, yes. Once again I would quote Marshall McLuhan, who said that, very quickly, the content of the new medium tends to become the older medium (McLuhan [1964] 2003, 8). Like in early films that took a lot of theater plays as their content, or how television shows a lot of films even today. It’s true for the computer. In a way, we use the computer like an extended book when it comes to texts. We use it now to listen to radio formats or to look at various kinds of media movies. Media archaeology tries to uncover the media and to lay their structure bare.
MH: And so, by doing that, reveal the discontinuities that are concealed by that continuity of content?
WE: For example, to come back to what happens if media are objects in museums. We have the radio of the 1940s which, stylistically, looks like it is part of the design of that era but, if we take off this external appearance and look at the technological structure, it looks almost ahistorical. As a technological object, it principally works as a radio from much later. The electronic tubes (or valves) have been replaced by transistors, but functionally it works in exactly the same way, amplitude motivated (AM) or frequency motivated (FM) radio – which some people still remember! It’s still working on the same principle. Considered in this way, suddenly there are objects that, from the archaeological point of view, are structurally not that historical: they are invariant against temporal change until they are completely displaced or replaced by a completely new system. It’s another temporal rhythm. Now, to show this is a challenge to the idea of display: What do I display if I display media? If I display them on the surface, then I miss their essence, but it’s more difficult for visitors to have a medium opened and to understand what’s going on. It’s a big challenge to museum education and didactics to explain what’s really happening there. That’s a challenge to the design-oriented, surface-oriented display.
MH: Coming back to the museum being a medium or not a medium – one of the things you talk about in your writing is the time–space structure of exhibitions and museums. By which I mean, the ways in which museums or exhibitions are experienced by visitors in terms of how they control their time by pausing in front of an exhibit or moving on, whether they are linear in design, and so on. One of the things that interests me in your writing is that, although you’re not saying that the museum is a medium, at the same time you are drawing parallels between some of the technical structures, between the experiences of the contemporary computer-based media and the experience of moving around an exhibition space, in particular the spaces of contemporary art exhibitions.
WE: With interactive media, we come back closer to the museum than we did with earlier mass media. But, first of all, let me quote the German museologist Heinz Ladendorf who said the museum is not a medium but a collection, which makes it very clear that the basic function of the traditional museum is a very different one (Ladendorf 1973, 23). It has to collect a choice of objects, not everything, unlike in an archive, which normally gets from its administration, first of all, all the files and then they can make a selection. Whereas a library or a museum is a selection, they can select objects from the beginning. In most cases, it’s their duty to preserve the choice of objects; officially, even legally, they are there for protecting certain types of objects. It’s different from data processing; it’s different from the archive; it’s a collection. Museums are therefore differentiated from the medium in its technical and other senses.
Now, for a long time media was meant to be mass media which means broadcasting, you know, radio, television and so on, which had no feedback channel, which could only be consumed in a way. At that time, how we experienced images, on television or in cinemas, was not directed by the viewer. The cuts, the speed, the change of perspective – all of these were done by the camera and we were just subjected to them as viewers. That differentiated the experience of objects and images from the museum, where the visitor is free to move, usually at their own speed, and to make a choice where to stand or view an image more closely. Now this self-autonomous, sovereign time of information processing used to be a quality of the museum against the dictatorship of time in the mass media. This has now changed, with interactive media, with the Internet. Again, the user decides to a large degree how long to stay at an object, to choose whether to get it replayed, like with a video as opposed to a television image. You could look at it in your own time; you can see it several times; you can even cut it, manipulate it, and appropriate it. For a long time the medium had a time dominance over the viewer, whereas in the museum the visitor could be in control of their own time of information processing, so this was a virtue of the museum against this dominating of time.
MH: One thing I have noticed, though, and this is just speculative, if you look at the halls of dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History, or any number of American exhibits from the 1920s to the 1940s, what you see is something incredibly cinematic. Alison Griffiths pointed to this when she linked early twentieth-century museum curators’ anxieties about museum life groups to anxieties about motion pictures and spectacle, and I mention it in an essay on new media in museums (Griffiths 2002, 24–30; Henning 2006a, 304). You know: the darkened hall, the lit-up windows, the scene that you watch from the outside. It is immersive but cinematic: your presence isn’t acknowledged; it’s going to unravel without you. And I really noticed, particularly in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, that when you came to present-day exhibits of natural history they were much more inviting you to look over here, then look over there – they were much more dispersed or networked in their structure (Henning 2006b, 145–146). So I wonder if another tendency is for museums to actually mimic the popular media of their time, whether that’s something that also happened so that they conceal their own medium specificity.
WE: There has always been a sort of mirroring of the new media in museum practices. It started with photography, when suddenly the period rooms started appearing in museums. That’s the idea that a historical museum might create a room which recreates the historical atmosphere of the period of the time. This is certainly an effect of the photographic medium which could preserve a coherent image of a moment in time. The art historian Stephen Bann, for example, has shown that the idea of a period room was contemporary to the emergence of photography (Bann 1984; Ernst 2005). And, of course, with cinematography, the museum tried to emulate moving parts, even moving images and that happened until today as if the museum always had to rival the prospective new media. I would almost say that the museum misses its own quality and its strength. I would propose a counterstrategy: What can the museum do that new media cannot do?
It might sound very conservative if I return to the material object but materiality is the blind spot of the information age. Because, first of all, digital media cannot provide materiality, the resistance of the object, which is not the same as the information of the object. The object has more information in it than a recording or a scan of an object would be able to provide. Then we have things that have been discussed again and again, things like the aura which Walter Benjamin has described: to what degree does the aura depend on the materiality? For Walter Benjamin, any reproduction of the material object makes it lose its aura, which is its quality of being here and now (Benjamin [1936] 2002a). The idea of presence which is created by a material object is not easily mimicked by electronic media. This is true even of virtual spaces that you are immersed in, three-dimensional spaces, because human perception can clearly work out the difference as to whether you’re really hitting a rock or whether this is something that is happening in a data glove space. So there is a quality of the museum there.
MH: And that’s something that media are constantly
