Page 161 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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equivalent in annual urban fairs, where some of the same objects held in court
collections would sometimes be shown). The ‘return to curiosity’ is, however,
seen as a means to make the museum more dialogic and polysemic. The
Foucault quotation with which I began this chapter directly links curiosity with
a more interactive, two-way media, multiplying ‘the possibility of comings and
goings’ (Foucault 1988: 198–9).
For these writers, a return to curiosity implies a different construction
of knowledge in the museum, and the rejection of linear, historicist arrange-
ments of objects. Their views appear to complement recent developments in
museums, which since the 1980s have begun to move toward hybrid display
techniques. We can now see across a range of museums ways of grouping
the collections which would have been unthinkable in the late Victorian or
Edwardian museum, or even in the modernist museum. In natural history
museums, an emphasis on endangered species, environmentalism and bio-
diversity has changed the criteria for grouping specimens, so that now they are
frequently arranged not according to species, habitat or geographic location,
but in ways that express their interdependence and interrelatedness. Visual
diversity and similarity become a means of communicating biodiversity and, in
the case of ethnographic museums, cultural diversity and hybridity or cross-
cultural influences. New elaborate exhibition designs have begun to recall the
crowded and decorative displays depicted in well-known engravings of early
curiosity cabinets. For instance, the Hall of Biodiversity in the American
Museum of Natural History, New York includes a wall covered with taxidermy
specimens, ‘spirit specimens’ in jars and mounted insects, as well as screens
displaying video footage of animals. In the Primates Gallery in the Natural
History Museum, London, skeletons dance, suspended from the ceiling. In the
Grande Galerie de l’Évolution at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle
in Paris, a Noah’s Ark-style procession of animals is displayed in the centre of
the enormous space, while stuffed monkeys appear to climb a metal scaffold
on the walls. At the Museum Naturalis in Leiden, the Netherlands, some spe-
cimens are displayed under glass in the floor, others amassed on glass shelves
with minimal labelling. In exhibits developed since the 1980s, visitors are
expected to navigate between very different kinds of information and modes of
representation. Poetic and visual connections and resemblances are just as pos-
sible as scientific comparisons. Decorative and suggestive compositions replace
both the hyper-realism of the diorama and the sparse didacticism of evolution-
ary arrangements.
In the Hall of Biodiversity at the AMNH, butterflies flock up the wall. I have
never seen butterflies flock. Perhaps they do. But the pattern they form
resembles a network or the expanding branching tree structures used in inter-
active media. It is also reminiscent of ‘artificial life’ computer programs in