Museum Media. Группа авторов
preservation of information. This is an ever growing problem for electronic media starting from old photographs, which have a surprising endurance over 150 years, although they become yellow, but film is more difficult. The early films, with their chemical material that tends to burn when stored somewhere too hot, or the color films where the colors fade – now this is a big problem for film restorers. So there is physical entropy, the tendency to decay in the material. We have the video tape and magnetic audio tape ... one can say, “Well, I can listen to a 50-year-old magnetic tape and still hear a lot” – which is a positive surprise, but at the same time there are dropouts. As for digital tapes, as almost everyone knows now from their own experience, these are more efficient than ever, can be faster transmitters and processors than ever, but they are not long-lasting. The CD-ROM will not last – in itself, it will not keep its data intact for a long time – but the machines themselves will also become dated and be replaced by other systems and faster rhythms. So we have a big technical problem.
Compared to that, if we consider the museum in terms of its objects (the thing that differentiates the museum from the library and the archive is the collection of material artifacts), these objects are surprisingly enduring. This quality of the museum should not be lost when museums are trying to be immaterial themselves. The discussion of the immaterial museum has been a media and cultural studies project starting with photography and with André Malraux and others, and to a certain degree Walter Benjamin, who were already concerned with the question whether or not the photograph-based image collection could be called the imaginary museum (Malraux [1947] 1967; Benjamin [1936] 2002a). This is fine: it’s opening the museum, extending the museum, but it loses the museum’s material basis. The basis of the museum is the material object, the picture which is actually, in its physicality, there, and this is completely different from the photographic or the electronic image reproduction.
MH: I am almost going to reverse my earlier question, because I asked how media archaeology likes to think about museums. In reverse, it seems that thinking museologically, as well, actually helps you to understand about media. That orientation toward preservation, toward storage, and so on, which is very familiar within the museum context, is quite new to thinking about media, isn’t it? It seems that you’re doing both, examining the productive differences between the two things.
WE: Yeah, it’s trying to take both sides. On the one hand, one can look at how computer architecture works and then one discovers that a lot of the storage mechanisms sound familiar if one has done museum studies or archive studies or library studies. Even down to the terms that we are using, terms like “memory” in the computer, which is actually a metaphor because technically the computer does not have a memory. We call it a memory because our culture tends to address even technology in terms that have been created in previous agencies of tradition, such as the museum or library or archive.
But, on the other hand, one reason to call what we do “media archaeology” is, of course, that one is concentrating on the material object, which sounds like traditional archaeology which has always been object-oriented. But then the other use of the word “archaeology” comes from Michel Foucault’s nonmetaphorical use of “archaeology,” meaning analyzing the hidden mechanisms which create knowledge or evidence and through that term, and in his book The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault said, let us look at the discontinuities ([1969] 2002). That’s what makes his archaeology different from “history,” and media archaeology different from media history. Media archaeology looks at discontinuity. What difference do media make to previous cultural mechanisms of memory and tradition? Now, what this emphasis on discontinuity, rupture, and difference does is sharpen analysis. It may be a bit one-sided overall; maybe in the end there are many more continuities. But historians would always tend to emphasize the continuities. Our traditional cultural model emphasizes continuities, from the ancient Greek temple to today. Learning from Foucault, let’s look at the discontinuities – that’s how to look archaeologically. Then we can decide how, when we talk about computer architecture with words such as “memory,” how far it is a metaphor, which in a way makes the discontinuity oblique, which harms the discontinuity. Let’s look at where the discontinuity is and name it, in order to make our contemporaries realize that it makes a difference.
MH: When you talk about how metaphors might harm the discontinuities, I remember Walter Benjamin writing about iron architecture in the nineteenth century being covered by a veil of stone, so that the newness of the thing was concealed, and that was a problem: the radically new disguised as tradition (Benjamin [1935] 2002b). Is that the kind of thing you’re talking about?
WE: Yes, yes. Once again I would quote Marshall McLuhan, who said that, very quickly, the content of the new medium tends to become the older medium (McLuhan [1964] 2003, 8). Like in early films that took a lot of theater plays as their content, or how television shows a lot of films even today. It’s true for the computer. In a way, we use the computer like an extended book when it comes to texts. We use it now to listen to radio formats or to look at various kinds of media movies. Media archaeology tries to uncover the media and to lay their structure bare.
MH: And so, by doing that, reveal the discontinuities that are concealed by that continuity of content?
WE: For example, to come back to what happens if media are objects in museums. We have the radio of the 1940s which, stylistically, looks like it is part of the design of that era but, if we take off this external appearance and look at the technological structure, it looks almost ahistorical. As a technological object, it principally works as a radio from much later. The electronic tubes (or valves) have been replaced by transistors, but functionally it works in exactly the same way, amplitude motivated (AM) or frequency motivated (FM) radio – which some people still remember! It’s still working on the same principle. Considered in this way, suddenly there are objects that, from the archaeological point of view, are structurally not that historical: they are invariant against temporal change until they are completely displaced or replaced by a completely new system. It’s another temporal rhythm. Now, to show this is a challenge to the idea of display: What do I display if I display media? If I display them on the surface, then I miss their essence, but it’s more difficult for visitors to have a medium opened and to understand what’s going on. It’s a big challenge to museum education and didactics to explain what’s really happening there. That’s a challenge to the design-oriented, surface-oriented display.
MH: Coming back to the museum being a medium or not a medium – one of the things you talk about in your writing is the time–space structure of exhibitions and museums. By which I mean, the ways in which museums or exhibitions are experienced by visitors in terms of how they control their time by pausing in front of an exhibit or moving on, whether they are linear in design, and so on. One of the things that interests me in your writing is that, although you’re not saying that the museum is a medium, at the same time you are drawing parallels between some of the technical structures, between the experiences of the contemporary computer-based media and the experience of moving around an exhibition space, in particular the spaces of contemporary art exhibitions.
WE: With interactive media, we come back closer to the museum than we did with earlier mass media. But, first of all, let me quote the German museologist Heinz Ladendorf who said the museum is not a medium but a collection, which makes it very clear that the basic function of the traditional museum is a very different one (Ladendorf 1973, 23). It has to collect a choice of objects, not everything, unlike in an archive, which normally gets from its administration, first of all, all the files and then they can make a selection. Whereas a library or a museum is a selection, they can select objects from the beginning. In most cases, it’s their duty to preserve the choice of objects; officially, even legally, they are there for protecting certain types of objects. It’s different from data processing; it’s different from the archive; it’s a collection. Museums are therefore differentiated from the medium in its technical and other senses.
Now, for a long time media was meant to be mass media which means broadcasting, you know, radio, television and so on, which had no feedback channel, which could only be consumed in a way. At that time, how we experienced images, on television or in cinemas, was not directed by the viewer. The cuts, the speed, the change of perspective – all of these were done by the