usefully sought to connect and establish continuities between “new media” and earlier technologies of visual display. She writes of the parallel between the organization and modes of address of analogue and digital media, employing an example from the American Museum of Natural History in New York where the
famous halls of dioramas, dating from the 1920s to the 1940s, the darkened spaces recall cinema auditoriums. The backlit habitat dioramas are breathtakingly naturalistic. Taxidermy, painted backdrops, and wax modeling, through “multimedia,” are combined to give the organic coherence of narrative cinema, inviting us to momentarily forget their status as representations and imagine they are more than skin deep. (Henning 2006, 304)
Here the “spectacular mise-en-scene” of the museum and the cinema coalesce and both must be seen as part of an “exhibitionary complex” where technologies of display developed in circulation across a number of exhibitionary sites and institutions (Huyssen 1995, 34; Bennett 1995, ch. 2).4 The “Big Picture Show” is part of a continuing relationship between the museum and the moving image that evokes persistent tensions between the stillness and movement of artifacts, images, technologies, and bodies.5 These tensions reveal the temporal and spatial characteristics of the “Big Picture Show” exhibition strategy as a media archaelogical intervention.
On every hour the exhibition hall of IWM North plunges into near darkness to be lit only by the bright red lights illuminating the bases of the static exhibits (a theatrical flourish that is no doubt a product of health and safety regulations). The visitor is enclosed within the darkness, to some extent hostage to the sights and sounds of the film. The six architectural silos which intersect this permanent exhibition space are independent of the “Big Picture Show” and are still navigable during each performance. The projection itself is not cast on one fluid 360 degree screen but is pieced together over a series of disjointed walls that fragment the large cavernous space of the main hall. The experience is spectacular, cinematic, yet verisimilitude is not its aim. It neither evokes the naturalistic dioramas of Henning’s description nor the simulation of “total cinema” (Bazin 1967) offered by the IMAX experience (which accompanies many contemporary science museums). It is an example of an immersive exhibition strategy, as discussed by Habsburg-Lothringen in this volume (see Chapter 15), in both its scale and the ways in which it organizes the movement and attention of the visitor.
We have already seen the tension between stasis and movement at play in the interruptive nature of the works previously discussed. However, in contrast to the temporal uncertainty of these artworks, the “Big Picture Show” returns us to the “punctual” media of the second memory boom, programmed to “interrupt” the visitor’s time with a different film on each hour of the museum’s day (the schedule itself is projected onto one of the white walls of the main exhibition space). While the visitor is perhaps less likely to become a victim of its timing, the “Big Picture Show” is still a time-based installation with distinctive temporal and spatial characteristics. Elizabeth Cowie, while arguing for the specificity of digital media in the gallery, writes that “each place of viewing a time-based installation is not only a context – geographical and social, public or private – but also an architectural place, organizing the spectator’s access to mobility and stillness” (2009, 124). Here, the stillness of the museal artifact and the movement of the film are reflected by the spatial configurations of stillness and movement enacted by the visitor.
Whether the visitor has planned the show into their visit or are taken by surprise, the temporal darkness of the exhibition hall necessitates the interruption of movement. Most sit against the walls/screens or stand still; a few others continue moving through the space with added care. Architectural and space syntax approaches to museum studies remind us how, “like any spatial layout, a museum or gallery will generate and sustain a certain pattern of co-presence and encounter amongst visitors through the way it shapes movement” (Hillier and Tzortzi 2006, 299). The Daniel Libeskind-designed architecture of IWM North already affords the exhibition space a fragmentary and chaotic character within and onto which the “Big Picture Show” is projected. Jonathan Shaw, Ben Squire Scholes, and Christopher Thurgood, for instance, writing on space and place at IWM North, argue: “As an example of deconstructivist architecture, which is a subset or development of post-industrial architecture, a sense of controlled chaos is conveyed through architectural forms” (2008, 227). Here then, the combined temporalspatial ecology of the museum mediates visitor experience to a unique event.6 The deconstructivist architecture and scattered artifacts produce a fragmented screen, but one which is further disjointed by the movement of visitors onto whom the film also projects and distorts, affording another level of random mobility to the “Big Picture Show.” In this latter instance, there is a certain media-visitor coconstruction in that media interrupt the churn of visitor patterns to produce a time-based “integration core, where congregation takes place” (Hillier and Tzortzi, 2006, 299).7 These congregations, however, are relatively dispersed and not really crowd-like: affected through the location of the seating and visitors’ sense of the best advantage points for viewing and being immersed in the spectacle.
There is another temporal element to this experience and that is duration. If visitors are patient enough (and/or aware of the schedule) then they will experience the full 25 minutes of each performance. Otherwise, they will be subject to the same temporal uncertainty of beginning, end and duration, of looped and other video/filmic screenings in museum spaces.
So, the space and time of the museum is wrapped in the immersive strategies of the projection. In its play with the built environment, and its kinesthetic and sensory staging of bodies, to what extent does immersion, as Margaret Morse (1990) and Elizabeth Cowie (2009) have argued, give way to reflection? Once again, the organization of stillness and movement is central and draws on the performative characteristics of commemorative practices.
In their introduction to the edited collection Still Moving, an interrogation of the relationship between photography and cinema, Karen Beckman and Jean Ma argue that “the hesitation between stasis and motion actually produces an interval in which rigorous thinking can emerge” (2008, 5). In contrast, social psychologist Steven Brown’s discussion of the two-minute silence as a commemorative practice offers an alternative perspective. Brown usefully challenges some of the assumptions about the commemorative or reflective functions/experiences of silence and, by extension, stillness, as he questions the “modes of access to the past [that] are opened up through public silence and the forms of experience that are thereby afforded” (2012, 239). Here, public silence becomes a spectacle, a performance of empathy and sorrow where those commemorated are doubly absent. But the commemorative silence remains a particularly powerful social force, dictated by an enactment of remembrance and dominated instead by particular behavioral expectations around the stillness and silence of our bodies. As an experiential form it evokes the “scopic reciprocity” (Bennett 1995) of the museum. While the behavioral expectations of visitors within this hybrid museum/cinema space are arguably less clear, the sense of copresence maintained throughout the “Big Picture Show” insists on a peripheral awareness of the bodies of the other visitors.
Sat against screens, or moving through the projectile stream, bodies, disruptive or compliant, also become part of the surface of the projection, made over as “temporary monuments” and integrated into the exhibition space. Brown argues that
to stand still, to make oneself into a temporary monument, is to have accomplished the act of making the past relevant without words. Again this is not so much as “overmastering of self” as allowing one’s own bodily substrate to temporarily become a vehicle for the performance of the past in the present. (2012, 248)
And, when the show is over, the congregation departs, as the “instant community” dissipates throughout the museum and the museum reverts to its recognizable self.
While the “Big Picture Show” can be seen to choreograph bodies and a performance of remembrance in a similar vein to Brown’s argument, the interruption
