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146 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY
Figure 8 The Hall of Biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History
in New York.
Source: Photograph by the author with kind permission of the AMNH.
which simple scripts or rules cause groups of animated creatures to act collect-
ively in apparently complex ways – such as birds flocking. Artificial life theory is
based on mimicking or simulating biological evolution. What is interesting is
that these apparently decorative arrangements of specimens replace the simula-
tion of the visible habitat and appearance of animals (which we find in the
dioramas) with a simulation of larger principles relating to biodiversity and
new theories of biological life. Or rather, the arrangement corresponds to the
visual forms associated with these theories.
In many new exhibition designs, the displays are designed to be dazzling,
incorporating illusionistic multimedia displays that combine real objects with
computer interfaces and video footage in projections or screens embedded in
the display. In the display of musical instruments in the Horniman’s Museum in
London, unseen projectors and mirrors throw videos of people playing the
instruments onto the glass of the cabinets containing the instruments them-
selves. These floating rectangular images resemble television or computer
screens, but without borders and without substance – you can see through the
glass surface on which they appear. In this and many other displays, glass is no
longer intended to be ignored, no longer something we look through but not at,
as it was in picture framing and in traditional vitrines. In the Grande Galerie de