Page 92 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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language of icons or pictograms. He was also the founder of museums in
Vienna and Holland, involved in town planning and housing projects in Austria
and England. He had links to avant-garde art and design – notably the Bauhaus
in Germany and Constructivism in the USSR. He was one of a number of
people who were pivotal in the dissemination of modernist ideas between main-
land Europe, Britain and North America. For our purposes he is interesting
because of how his work was used, during his lifetime and posthumously, to
reconfigure museums in a way which made them increasingly media-like. By
considering his museum work and writings we can develop a clearer sense of the
possibilities for a mediatic museum, of museums as media-forms and of how
museums have become increasingly ‘experience’ centred.
In 1924, Neurath founded the Social and Economic Museum in Vienna,
having been involved in running various museums since 1916 (Vossoughian
2003: 82). Funded by unions and the city government, the museum originated in
the context of the dramatic changes brought about by the socialist welfare and
housing programme. It set out to translate information relevant to Viennese

Figure 4 The Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Museum of Society and
Economy) Vienna, late 1920s.
Source: Courtesy of the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication,
University of Reading.