Page 102 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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of knowledge’, the aim is to begin to dismantle hierarchies of knowledge and
to level the relationship between visitor and museum, public and science.
Furthermore, Gregory’s work on perception allowed science centres to engage
visitors’ different senses while dealing with intangible and abstract content.
However, there are potential contradictions between perception-based
exhibits and the aims of the Exploratorium as outlined by Oppenheimer as well
as the aims which other science centres espouse. One such contradiction is
noted by Andrew Barry (2001) who suggests that this focus on visitors as the
subject of their own experimentation does not give visitors a sense of what it is
like to be a scientist (as science centres might hope). While early scientists used
their own bodies for experimentation, modern science is marked out as ‘object-
ive’ through the dissociation of the scientist’s own body from the process of
experimentation (Barry 2001: 131). From the visitor’s point of view, the distri-
bution of knowledge is uneven: visitors seldom occupy the scientist’s position.
This is compounded by the possibility of reading perception-based exhibits as
suggesting that experience is not to be trusted. Although Oppenheimer’s stated
aim was to demonstrate that it was possible to understand the world, the use of
optical and other illusions could imply that the world is not easily knowable.
Instead of seeing perception as their own creative and cognitive act, visitors
might find themselves continually tricked by the exhibits on display. The gap
between what you see something as, and what you know it to be, becomes
apparent in certain kinds of illusion. On the one hand, illusions connect the
museum or science centre to popular entertainment in the form of the funfair
and the magic show, diminishing the unapproachable character of the museum.
On the other, they can give the impression that the science centre, like the
traditional museum, has all the answers and explanations, while all the visitor
has is (untrustworthy) experience.
In the Exploratorium, this effect was countered by a politics of display which
linked art and science and a deliberately makeshift approach to the manu-
facture of displays. Found objects from street corners, junk stores, and yard
sales were used in the construction of the displays. In her history of the
Exploratorium, Hilde Hein claims that by using everyday things and examples
drawn from day-to-day experience, staff ‘sought to bring home the point that
the wonders of the world are everywhere, directly under our noses but often
unnoticed’ (1986: 30). The everydayness of displays and the visibility of their
workings were linked to the demystification of science. In art and media, col-
lage and montage are historically associated with anti-illusory and demystify-
ing practice. The montage aesthetic rejects seamlessness, making use of found
components patched together into a new object or assemblage, which might
just as easily be disassembled into its constituent parts. There was a similar
patchwork aesthetic in the construction of the original Exploratorium displays.