to mimic the media, the media are also trying to mimic the museum by constantly trying to simulate an experience of the thing itself.
WE: Yes, that is why the relationship is dynamic. I would not categorically say that the museum is completely and categorically different from media. To a high degree, it is different, but there is a dynamic relationship of course: the modes of perception of the visitors are dominated by media perception and museums have to react to it. And the other way round: museum aesthetics has an influence on media interface display. Brenda Laurel in her book Computers as Theater (1991) has shown how much our aesthetics of the interface of the computer is dominated by cultural ways of looking which come from theater, from the drama of the theatrical space, and in a way this is true of museum space as well. Still, the media archaeological analysis would like to emphasize the discontinuity because otherwise it looks as if culture was a friendly, coexistent, and homogeneous and harmonious play between different agencies. I think the challenge is much much bigger, to be aware of what really changes now and what has changed.
MH: You mentioned that you took from Foucault the concept of rupture and historical discontinuity, as opposed to a kind of narrative progression that you have in traditional history, but presumably you also took from Foucault that concept of power as something that’s not centralized or held, that’s dispersed ...?
WE: Yes, and both the critique of the narrative progression and the analysis of power mechanisms are essential parts of media archaeology, even in the analysis of the museum. For example, the museum includes not just the public display parts of the museum; the real powerful side of the museum is in the parts which are hidden to the normal visitor, the offices where the inventories are being created, even the storage spaces where a lot of objects are being stored which are never on display. It is only recently that museums have started to open these spaces. Spaces which are not normally ordered, they are just open shelves (Figure 1.2).
MH: And you’re quite in favor of that aren’t you?
WE: I am in favor of that – it’s like opening a medium and looking at how it works. One does not have the offer of an interpreted presentation already. But we have a data bank, one that we could now call the aesthetics of the data bank itself, now that we live in a media culture where the user is much more able than we used to be before to handle a data bank itself. Not to get it translated into a narrative, but to work with the databank itself, to get access to the information in the data bank itself, even to demand open source, to get access to the source codes: this is the equivalent of getting access to the nonprefigured, nonordered spaces of the museum.
FIGURE 1.2 8 mm film cameras in storage at the National Media Museum.
Photo: Michelle Henning. Reproduced by kind permission of the National Media Museum.
MH: To me, one of the ironies of the use of new media interactive booths or touch screens in museums is that they seem to be based in a desire to increase access to all the information that maybe would be too much to put on a written label, to the detailed context or the provenance of the object, all the stuff that the museum knows and can now share. But, for me, the experience is the other way: what actually happens is that it’s just more interpretation, instead of opening up to the concealed parts of the museum or to information you couldn’t otherwise normally have on display. Instead of opening and expanding the display, it just seems to put more layers of interpretation between you and the experience of really going down into the basement, unlocking the doors, and having a poke around.
WE: There was, of course, always a debate within museums studies itself as to how much text should be provided in a museum. Was the strength of the museum the material object or do we urgently need contextualization? – which was, of course, a very enlightened attitude. But to what degree can the museum then be replaced by just reading the texts? I can get a lot of information on museum objects online, but it cannot replace my confrontation with the objects as long as we are confronted with traditional objects. However, it all changes now with a culture that not only produces pieces of art as objects, but also as digitally born objects, as they are called. Then the difference is that it is not that book anymore. A book that is produced and published only online ... I don’t have to go to a library to borrow a book; I can download it at home and it’s as authentic as ever. And digital art, for example, which is digitally born, there is good reason to say it is the original which I experience if I download it online. I don’t have to go to an art museum to see that. So that changes.
For the traditional culture, which is object-oriented to a high degree, we need the traditional museum, which displays the real object, and so far the difference works. But it becomes different now – the museum loses it and becomes itself changed from an institution, a place, or an agency to a format. When it comes to truly digital culture, then the museum is a format. It’s a way of ordering information, ordering images, offering a guided tour. Once the museum is a format, it’s not an institution anymore. I would make a difference between a format, which is a sort of technical term, and a real institution. The real place, which is based on material objects, exists on two different levels. Of course we can make it as complicated as we like. If we look at the history of the term “museum” or the history of the museum itself, we find it was not always the object-based rooms and places. In the early Renaissance, it could be the name for an empty room where you think: this was a museum as well – a cognitive space.
MH: You have that in contemporary holocaust museums sometimes – contemplative spaces.
WE: Yes, but this example shows that the very word “museum” was not bound strictly to the object base; it could mean arranging things in your head only, and for that you only needed a quiet and empty space – we call it the museum. So even that was genealogically more thinkable already but, as we know, the museum is an institution. It’s an object-bound institution and the strength is its object-basedness. It’s not like time-based media – that’s not the strength. Its resistance against time, that’s the incredible power of the museum – the resistance against time.
MH: You mentioned this earlier and you used a phrase that reminded me of Harold Innis, the transmitting through time, the museum as something that transmits through time but at the same time resists the passing of time (Innis [1951] 2008).
WE: Yes, the objects of the museum by their very presence resist the passing of time. We can see Roman inscriptions in the Vatican Museum, and it’s not that self-evident that for 2000 years we would still be able to decipher the letters inscribed in stone, so in a way it resists time. Actually one of the allegories of the paintings on the ceiling that connects the Vatican Museum to the Vatican Library, painted by Anton Raphael Mengs, who was a friend of Johann Joachim Winckelmann in the eighteenth century, shows how the Vatican Museum was actually founded on the idea that there are long-lasting values. The Catholic Church was very interested in claiming its authority as not changing with history [this painting is known in English as The Triumph of History over Time, or The Allegory of History, and is in the Camera dei Papiri]. There is an authority which traverses history and which resists time, which we can see by this allegorical painting which nicely shows the mechanism of tradition.
We now live in a media culture that is now very much real time-oriented, in which fast transmission is the most valuable quality. The almost immediate transfer of information which was already present in the transmission of live radio and live television is now referred to as real time processing. This traversing of space almost immediately started with the age of telegraphy and other information media communication. The virtue of the museum is completely different: to traverse long distances of time, to transfer objects in a time channel which lasts for several thousand years in the case of ancient Egypt and several other civilizations. This is a completely different
