Page 106 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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responses and where the knowledge produced by the exhibit is predetermined
from the outset.
We might expect to see one or other of these models winning out in the many
hands-on science exhibits which have appeared since the founding of the
Exploratorium. Certainly we could look at individual ‘interactives’ and see
them as either tending towards the serendipitous or the behaviourist. However
Barry’s analysis of the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie at La Villette, Paris,
suggests that the visitor is invited to be a creative participant, and what they
learn is not entirely predetermined, but also that the exhibit is designed to
‘articulate bodies and objects’ in such a way as to produce visitors as new kinds of
subjects – as ‘technological citizens’ (Barry 2001: 148). This is a very different
model of citizenship from the one Bennett identifies in the Victorian museum.
Bennett reads the Victorian museum as designed to discipline the public. By
contrast, Barry argues that interactivity in new science centres such as the Cité
at La Villette suggests ‘a much less rigid articulation of bodies and objects’ not
intended to regiment the body but rather to ‘turn it into a source of pleasure
and experiment’ through pleasurable interaction. Play is not entirely serendipit-
ous: the exhibit is designed to induct and accustom its visitors to a new techno-
logical world in which the boundary between human and non-human has
become more fluid (Barry 2001: 144–9). In a society in which the public is
increasingly required to make their own judgements on scientific and technical
matters, interactivity is a means to shape them as ‘responsible’ and ‘moral’
citizens. The Cité works not only through the explicit communication of mes-
sages and knowledge, but also through a direct address to the bodies of visitors.
Writing about IBM’s Information Machine display at the 1964–5 New York
World’s Fair, Ben Highmore states, ‘It is the form of the display that addresses
an audience with a “content” aimed not at the mind or the heart but at the
body’s own potential for change’ (2003: 128). The Information Machine was a
combination of cinematic experience and giant fairground ride, which lifted
spectators into the air and bombarded them with images. Highmore reads it as
turning technological modernity’s traumatic effect on the fragile human body
into a thrilling transcendence of bodily limitations and everyday anxieties
(2003: 146–7). Similarly, interactivity in its current form may be less effective
in facilitating the ‘discovery’ of scientific truths and principles than it is in
popularizing a new set of machine–body relationships.

From things to experiences

In this chapter we have considered how the museum has become increasingly
like other media, severing connection with artefacts in favour of representations,