Page 87 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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system of language. So while semiotic approaches are useful for interpreting the
ideology of the museum, and revealing how meaning is constructed through
exhibits, they tend to play down the materiality of museum collections, treating
material objects as simply concrete instances of an abstract schema. Some
studies have considered museums and exhibitions in terms of the ways in
which they manage visitor attention, choreographing them, and organizing
their experience of space and time (see also Chapter 4). For instance, Roger
Silverstone (1992) uses the concepts of ‘orienting’ and ‘clocking’ (derived from
family therapy literature) to describe the ways in which both television schedul-
ing and exhibition design work to organize time for spectators. The exhibition
orients them toward past, present or future, regulating the time spent in differ-
ent parts of a gallery, and the sequence in which visitors experience events in
the exhibition space (‘clocking’) (Silverstone 1992: 38–9). This approach begins
to acknowledge that how the exhibit is experienced bodily by visitors, through
the activities and sensations it engages, is as important as the more explicit
messages of the exhibition, and that this is something it has in common with
other media.
Yet the material aspect of museums seems to distinguish them from other
media. Modern media are characterized by their ability to detach objects,
scenes and people, from their fixed place in time and space, and to allow them –
or their forensic traces – to circulate as multiples and reproductions. Museums
traditionally prioritize objects, and tend toward permanence, toward the
monumental and the unique rather than ephemeral reproductions. By contrast,
media seem to threaten the ‘aura’ of the unique object, through making it
available for close inspection by a mass audience (Brown 2001:16; Benjamin
2002: 105). Yet if we look at the development of exhibition design we see a
similar tendency to both dematerialize and bring objects closer. We can see it in
interwar exhibition design, which replaced frames and glass cases with peep-
holes, and paintings and artefacts with photographs. A related development
occurs in historical and industrial museums, which turn to reconstruction and
simulation in their attempt to bring the past closer. Since the 1960s, science
centres, in order to be ‘hands-on’, have rid themselves of artefacts altogether
and devised new display devices as a means to exhibit abstract concepts. All of
these, I argue, suggest that museums have become increasingly mediatic.
New digital media are commonly seen as dematerializing. The word ‘virtual’
is often used to describe the representations produced in these media as a world
separate from, and substituting for, concrete reality. Even in this case, or espe-
cially in this case, it is worth remembering that media representations are also
tangible physical things, that it is not simply a question of opposition between
the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ worlds. Computer terminals are increasingly mini-
aturized, until they can be held in a palm, or concealed in a flat screen. Yet the