Page 99 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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in one go, but developed episodically in spurts. As he suggests, technologies
are not simply transferred from one museum to another but translated and
transformed in the process, and interactive techniques took on new forms and
meanings as they developed (Barry 2001: 130, 139). In the case of avant-garde
exhibition design, the shift to the US in the 1930s and ’40s had involved a
translation of socialist conceptions of the ‘active’ citizen into a new conception
of the American citizen as discriminating consumer. According to Barry, inter-
active science exhibits also underwent a political shift, from being associated
with political empowerment and creativity in the 1960s and ’70s to a more
prosaic attempt to increase the public understanding of science and make sci-
ence museums more attractive to visitors (2001: 139). A 1960s to ’70s emphasis
on the visitor as active participant and the incorporation of the visitor into the
exhibit through interactivity, becomes by the 1990s a kind of ‘feedback system’
in which visitors’ engagement with exhibits is monitored and registered as part
of the museum’s ‘internal audit’ (Barry 2001: 140). Most importantly, interac-
tivity has become ‘a dominant model of how objects can be used to produce
subjects’, intended to turn ‘unfocussed visitor-consumers’ into ‘interested,
engaged and informed technological citizens’ (Barry 2001: 147–8,129).
In this section I want both to explain these developments more fully and to
connect them with the ‘mediatization’ of the museum. I see this process of
translation and circulation as having various implications and working on vari-
ous levels. First, as Barry suggests, it involves changes in the relationship
between the exhibition and the body of the visitor. The visitor’s body replaces
the museum artefact as the thing that is examined in the display space, but
also becomes increasingly subject to monitoring and surveillance. Second,
as mentioned above, it involves shifts in the way visitors are conceived of as
political subjects. Third, and central to my argument about the museum as
media form, it involves changes in the way material artefacts perform in the
museum setting, changes in what visitors are interacting with – to the extent
that interactivity in the science museum has begun to move away from being
about a hands-on interaction with the material and physical world.
Amongst the first interactive science museums and galleries were the
Children’s Gallery at the Science Museum in London (1931), the Palais de la
Découverte in Paris (1937), the Deutsches Museum in Munich (1925) and the
Chicago Museum of Science and Industry (1933). These were educational,
intended to demonstrate scientific principles. They featured industrial engines
in operation, demonstrations of experiments, machinery and moving models
which visitors could activate using buttons and cranks. From the beginning,
science museums were connected to the promotion of national scientific
achievement and industry. They developed out of the great exhibitions and
world’s fairs, which cities took turns to host and where various nation states