Reconfiguring the Museum

Download or read book Reconfiguring the Museum written by Ana-Maria Herman and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2023-02-10 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital media technologies have provided an occasion not only for novel ways to display and exhibit collections, but also for new politics to arise as museums and urban settings change. While some believe these changes are driven by humans, others see digital media technologies at the heart of these changes. Reconfiguring the Museum offers a third explanation that considers both the social and technical together and thereby captures the experimental nature of introducing novel digital media technologies to museums, and the uncertainty, messiness, contingency, and complexity involved. In this sociotechnical case study of a novel augmented reality app – first designed to exhibit collections from the Museum of London across the sprawling capital city, and later remade for the McCord Museum to display collections throughout Montreal – Ana-Maria Herman reveals how the app introduced unexpected new relations between the museums, their collections, advertising agencies, sponsors, technology companies, corporations, urban spaces, and end users. She shows how museum practices related to curating, designing, building, visiting, and modifying exhibitions were transformed, and how, in such unsettled arrangements, what we think of as old cultural politics can unexpectedly re-emerge, while new digital politics – related to big data, surveillance, and automated processes – may not necessarily materialize. A detailed account of emerging actors and practices involved in making digital exhibitions, Reconfiguring the Museum offers practical considerations for museum, culture, and heritage practitioners charged with creating digital displays and accounting for their success or failure.