and messages, on the films as memorials and the experience as commemorative, and also on the different and various strategies of mediation and the use of media within the museum. Morse, writing on video installation in the gallery, argues that “installation art in this setting reinvigorates all the spaces-in-between, so that the museum visitor becomes aware of the museum itself as a mega-installation, even to the point of self-critique” (1990, 166).
The collection, Susan Stewart writes, is often about containment as a mode of control and confinement in which it strives for the closure of all space and temporality (1993, 151). While this is perhaps not a fair interpretation of all contemporary curatorial practices, it is precisely through an aesthetics of immersion and enclosure that the world of the exhibition at IWM North is self-reflexively thrown open. The curators and visitors’ mastery over the world of the collection is tested by both the dramatically shifting scales of the exhibition and the challenges of an emergent post-scarcity culture.
The nature and development of the “Big Picture Show,” projected against and on the artifacts and the architecture housed in and constitutive of the space, reveals the upgradable form of this kind of intervention. For example, this exhibition strategy was originally composed of 60 slide projectors to showcase the museum’s photographic archive; digital projectors were installed in 2011, allowing greater flexibility and creativity in the commissioning of audiovisual presentations. The “Big Picture Show” has also upgraded from an original three to its current eight shows. This, as we have already observed, reflects IWM North’s focus on people’s experience of war. However, the increased flexibility that came with the projection of media content into the void, so to speak, enables the museum to be more responsive to understandings and representations of more recent conflicts (e.g., Al-Mutanabbi Street: A Reaction). But this also opens the potential for the museum space to become more of a mutable medium in its own right, being liberated “from archival space into archival time” (Ernst 2004; see also Hoskins 2009).This is how even static architecture and artifacts – and their impression of permanence – suddenly seem vulnerable to the more fluid temporalities and dynamics of “permanent data transfer” (Ernst 2004, 46) as their surfaces and fissures are increasingly employed as, and connected to, screens. In this way, IWM North reveals its media archaeological tensions. Although IWM North is an artifactually and architecturally determined space, it is also fundamentally mediated through the smothering immediacy and pervasiveness of post-scarcity media.
Whereas the ICA’s Memorial to the Iraq War exhibition, discussed above, sought (in part at least) to wrest a separate and distinct time and space in contradistinction to the flux of the new media ecology, IWM North exposes itself to the data-driven extended and immersive present of post-scarcity culture. While the aesthetics of immersion in the “Big Picture Show” operate as a particular exhibition strategy, the space and times of IWM North and other museums are being more radically thrown open and diffused through the inexorable penetration of digital and social media. For example, Huhtamo (Chapter 12 in this volume) argues that an “exhibition anthropology” approach is needed to take account of the new permeability of the museum’s walls, while other contributions to this volume envisage the museum as “diffused” (Bell and Ippolito, Chapter 21) and “elastic” (Wasson, Chapter 26). As an example of this, as part of a Social Interpretation project, IWM London and IWM North have developed mobile applications through which visitors can scan objects’ Quick Response (QR) codes to access the “story” of each. This enables the visitor-as-curator to “share stories of their own memories and experiences about War and the IWM collections.”8 And the IWM blog claims that, via the IWM website, they have “added social interpretation elements to over 750,000 collection objects!”9 This development is part of the “Internet of Things” linking the material and the Internet, whereby objects are embedded with sensors to produce a sophisticated network of traceable items. In this context, the museum is newly extended, networked and diffused, plugged in to a distributed sociality of its objects and their ongoing trajectories of connections. This challenges its principal authority of containment and closure (in Stewart’s terms: see above) but also gives its objects new temporal momentum and new status as media archaeology.
Conclusion
Media archaeology is inexorably an effect and a strategy of/in the museum, subject to a post-scarcity culture which is ushering in both a digital revelation/revolution of the past and an astonishing connectivity in and of the present. The post-scarcity museum offers a new archival regime that can more easily track the history of events that are still unfolding, as part of a longer trajectory of time.
Yet, the museum’s increased capacity to be responsive to the events of the day, as well as recent and more distant histories, presents both a media archaeological tension and an opportunity. Technologies and media of the day have long developed modes of representation and mediation. But the advantage and the challenge of pervasive digital media networks and connectivities is their terrific temporal force. Connective culture fundamentally reconstitutes the past but digitally bleeds more of the present into all of the museum’s fissures. The result is a pressure pot in which the media of this day have not only become irresistible to shaping curatorial strategies but inexorable in pushing a connective present into representational spaces, and in pushing the museum’s objects and artifacts outward as part of the emergent “Internet of Things.” In these circumstances, containment and scarcity are no longer workable as curatorial strategies: cultural memory is well and truly out of its metaphorical box made transparent through post-scarcity culture. The digital present inexorably disinters the past of, and the past in, museums, and new curatorial imaginations are required to make a greater play for the memory of the future (as with the ICA’s Memorial to the Iraq War).
And yet the very challenges of the temporality and pervasiveness of museum and media content can be seized and reimagined as strategy: to redeploy and reimagine museum artifacts as part of the “Internet of Things,” for example, makes the museum a centrifugal dynamic of the connective turn, rather than being merely its subject, and in effect networks the “canon” and the “archive” in Aleida Assmann’s (2008) terms.10 The new temporal and memorial paradigm of the third memory boom can be harnessed as a rampant media archaeology which turns the museum inside out and (re)creates it anew.
Notes
1 1 The work of contemporary media artists and their media archaeological approach can be seen in part as a continuation of the strategies of artists such as Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell. Their play with, and configurations of, television hardware were in part an effort to defamiliarize the medium and to interrogate and critique commercial television.
2 2 Imperial Imperial War Museum Acquisition and Disposal Policy, March 2011, http://www.iwm.org.uk/sites/default/files/public-document/A%26D_Policy_March_2011.pdf (accessed July 24, 2014). This policy is due for review in March 2016.
3 3 See http://www.iwm.org.uk/exhibitions/iwm-north/big-picture-show (accessed July 22, 2014).
4 4 For example, between the 1880s and the 1940s, architects and designers in the United States worked on and with technologies of display across a series of sites including theaters, department stores, and museums (Leach 1989, quoted in Henning 2006, 304).
5 5 The relationship between vision and movement within the museum and its influence on the development of cinema in the nineteenth century have been well traced. For an excellent overview see Eleftheriotis’s Cinematic Journeys (2010).
6 6 See also Peter Higgins’s
