Luciferjones

DECONSTRUCTING THE MUSEUM SPACE WITH CINEMA IDEAS.
By Mike Jones

[first presented at the Australian Teachers Of Media conference, Melbourne July 2004. First published in Australian Screen Education, September 2004. Presented at the international Cinema and Technology conference, Lancaster University , UK June 2005 ]

Of the same mould.
The making of media and the curating of a museum exhibition are two endeavours born of the same mould. Distilled, both can be described as interpretive constructions for the communication of collective ideas. Both construct a ‘Reality’ by which meaning is made and communicated. Or, as Foucault would attest, create Heterotopias. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves, we’ll come back to that…

Filmmaking or, more correctly, Media Making, is simply a process of interpretation; screenplay into storyboard, storyboard into recorded images, characters into performances, footage into sequences. All these layered interpretations form constructed meanings, a network of connections, by which an idea may be experienced by a viewer. By image association and montage proximity they form a network, and therefore a framework, through which meaning is delivered.

The process of developing a museum exhibition is, at its heart, no different. Russian cinematic pioneers Sergi Eisenstein and Lev Kulesov articulated and put into practice ideas that shook the established ideas of photography and visual meaning. In films such as the often quoted and fastidiously studied Battleship Potemkin , they hammered home the idea that meaning is not inherent in the shot, performance or script but is ultimately built and constructed by the editor through a network of images, a montage. In this way meaning is built as networked ideas in the mind of the viewer almost wholly independent of any intended meaning on the part of the writer, performer or even director.

Enter the Heterotopia.
This idea is in many ways the essence of the Heterotopia outlined by Foucault in his work Of other spaces . If a Utopia is a non-place, outside of the bounds of real-time and real-place, that cannot be pointed out on a map (Heaven, Shangri-La, Valhalla) Then a heterotopia is a real-time, real-space, human construction, that can pointed out on a map but that is in someway outside of human tangibility and perceptions of time, space, geography. Foucault himself gives the key example of a Heterotopia as the Museum.

Foucault describes the modern museum as ‘the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes… a place of all times that is itself outside of time.’

The museum seeks to dissolve notions of time and geography by creating a non-place, a space where experiences may be had in the present and in-situ of a real-location manifesting the experience, but where those experiences are not ‘of that time’ and often geographically misplaced.

An exhibition on ancient Greek antiquities, for example, brings in unavoidable Heterotopian ideas and constraints. Such an exhibition is invariably explored by visitors in a very contemporary context. The display of ancient Greek antiquities in a modern city, perhaps inside anti-classical architecture, geographically far removed from Greece, using hi-tech audio-visual displays and interactive media right along side the antiquities themselves.

What a wonderfully cinematic idea…! Understanding this starts to make the distance between the museum exhibition and the media-form a whole lot smaller.

When watching a movie, be it in a cinema or a home theatre on in front of a computer screen online, the viewer is engaging with the media in much the same way as the museum exhibition. The movie is Heterotopian. The movie and its content (themes, stories, characters) are removed from real-world time, space, events, geography. The most naturalistic of character drama is still punctuated by editing, cutting, moving physically from point to point, time to time.

Here we come back to Eisenstein and the principals of montage that allow us to move and be moved seamlessly and without question from time to time, place to place. A flexible, constructed network of reality divorced from real-time and real-space. Take the famous Odessa stairs sequence from Battleship Potemkin. How long can a baby carriage in ‘reality’ tetter on the edge of stairs before rolling down. Two seconds? Three? In Eisenstein’s scene it’s a solid 30 seconds from the first time we see the baby wheels on the edge of the step until it begins it decent. But do we question the ‘reality’ of this? No. We buy into the constructed ‘truth’ of the dramatic moment. The juxtaposition of shots, the cutting between captured images and moments constructs and networks in our minds its own ‘reality’ that is beyond reality.

Likewise the museum exhibition follows suit. Museum objects unto themselves have no inherent meaning. Meaning is constructed in the mind of the viewer. Meaning is the result of a network of elements arrived at by the viewer from the stimulus of juxtaposition.

Museum education expert, Janet Griffin from the University of Technology, Sydney, has argued that in a sense visitors engage with an exhibition to see themselves reflected and personally connected; to see elements of their own lives and histories networked to the objects on display. “My grandmother had a Gramophone just like that…” This mirrors almost exactly Eisenstein and Kulesov’s ideas of Montage film making. Meaning is not inherent, it is constructed by, and ultimately resides in, the mind of the viewer through the network connections they make from observing visual sequences. The viewer sees the images in order, sequence and context, not in isolation. The viewer sees objects in a network context and thus makes deductions, predictions and assumptions based on what has passed before, what is to come and what they already know. Seeing the gun before the close-up of the man laughing is a very different ’story’ and ‘meaning’ to seeing the shot of the man laughing followed by a close-up of a gun.

Museum metaphysics
A museum object in isolation is simply an object unto itself. Certainly there is value in seeing a rare, odd, strange, valuable or important object but such an object in isolation is arguably a Display not an Exhibition. There is no network for the viewer to navigate, whether in their own mind of personal connection or in the more tangible physical network of exhibition images, objects, space and texts.

On its own the museum object and a film frame can be categorized simply as a Display and an Image respectively. The key central factor that separates a Display from an Exhibition and an Image from a Film is networked context. And the fundamental principal of context derived from network connections is that they are an imposed construction.

By way of example we can look at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney which has a collection totalling some 750,000 individual objects across three broad collecting fields - Decorative arts, Design and Technology, Social history. Exhibitions in the Powerhouse change and alter constantly in theme, title, genre and topic. And yet each exhibition, regardless of its theme, is able to draw upon the same unified collection of objects, effectively a database. So in this manner it’s quite likely, and very possible, that the same object may appear in different and diverse exhibitions with totally different themes and intentions.

A small case in point being an original Miller fluid-head tripod that is part of the Powerhouse collection. Without doubt a seminal technological development that had enormous impact on world wide TV production. The fluid head tripod can be held accountable for a fundamental shift in our visual media literacy and sensibilities. By making the camera more fluid, more flexible, able to move, tilt and pan without drawing attention to itself, without starkly reminding the audience that what they are seeing is the work of a camera-person and a TV crew, the means by which we engaged with the moving image changed forever. The fluid-head marked the first step towards the modern Steadi-Cam, the very personification of the camera.

The Fluid-Head tripod is on permanent display in the Powerhouse Museum. It stands in an exhibition known as Success and Innovation that explores Australian industrial and technological achievement; for the Fluid-head tripod was a wholly Australian development.

Thus the network connectivity created by the exhibition around the Miller tripod is not to link the object to TV, not the tripod’s place in cinema history or its effect on visual literacy. No, the network connections forged by the exhibition context link the Miller Fluid-head tripod as an Australian industrial design achievement that sold very well and made Miller an international, financially successful company. The themes behind the exhibition containing the tripod are those of industry, business success and Australian achievement. This particular experience of the Fluid-head tripod for the viewer is bourn on a deliberate network of freely connected, yet none the less constructed, pathways that hold very specific social and cultural notions. None of which are inherent in the end points, the nodes, of ‘tripod object’ and ‘nationalistic pride’. The context is found between these nodes, a network of ideas that link tripod with cultural ideal, but this contextual link is one that could just have easily linked ‘tripod object’ with ‘visual literacy’.

Taking this idea of networked and spatial context another step further and bringing us back, once again, into the fold of Foucault, we can then reaffirm the notion of the Museum exhibition as an attempt to construct a Utopia - a space that is beyond place and time. A space where ‘things’, as Foucault said, come ‘from all epochs’. And yet there are larger networks of meaning at work for both the Curator and the Filmmaker. Contexts that they cannot escape because they are contexts brought into the museum un-detected and hidden within the heads of the punters. Whilst the Curator and Filmmaker may strive to create Utopias beyond time and place as metaphysical spaces whereby their work can be experienced, their works are invariably rooted and given external, often times imposed, context by the network connections brought into the exhibition by socio-political climate, cultural ideals and the visitors personal experiences..

So, understanding this shared Heterotopian nature of the museum and media and the network nature of constructed contexts, interesting questions can then be posed on the impact of media technologies on the Museum experience and the Museum itself.

When Heterotopias Collide.
If we accept that it is not the Thing that has meaning but rather the pathways, connections and network linkages between Things that forge meaning, then the networks (and tools for forging networks) become as important (or more important) than the Things themselves.

In this sense it might be argued that the best way to explore a heterotopian space is with a tool for creating heterotopias; contemporary digital media technologies.

Pockets full of memories (PFOM) is a new media museum project devised at the Museum of contemporary art in Helsinki. PFOM uses digital media to freely form network connections of context and meaning between otherwise unrelated objects. Visitors to the museum are encouraged to supply images of objects of personal importance or provenance which are then added to a database. The database itself then uses an algorithm calculation to assemble the objects into an order and thus forge connections of context between them. Notes from the PFOM project describe this process;

This ‘final ordered state is called emergence as the order is not determined beforehand but emerges over time through the local interactions generated by the algorithm each time a new object enters the database.’

The PFOM project appears to take the notion of free, rhizome like, connections of meanings formed by visitors - between the objects, the space and their own experiences - into a new, more pure, state.

This is a direct connection to media making principles. Cinema historians, Asher and Pincus , give us a clear illustration of the experiments performed by Russian film theorist Lev Kulesov to illustrate the notions of pure cinematic montage. Students were shown two, three-shot, sequences.

The first sequence showed, in order;
1. A man
2. An injured girl
3. The man again.
The students concluded that the actors showed a great sense of pity for the girl, perhaps remorse that he may have caused her injuries.

The second sequence showed
1. A man (the same shot as the first sequence)
2. A bowl of soup
3. The man again. (same shot)
And in this case the students concluded that the man portrayed a sense of hunger, longing and poverty.

PFOM is essentially a very similar project to those early cinematic experiments. Just as Kulesov and Eisenstein illustrated that meaning is not inherent in the image but is formed by the connections viewers make between images in their own mind ; so to does PFOM replicate this notion by taking personal objects in the abstract and finding or forming the connections by which the objects will be experienced.

What’s more, the notion of networked meaning by association is taken a step further by the live mounting of the PFOM project to the internet, itself being a Rhizome-like network that privileges no particular path or connection. New Media theorists Delleuze and Guattari comment that the importance of the network is that it ‘doesn’t begin and doesn’t end but is always in the middle, between things’. Here the elements of PFOM are free to network with all the possible nodes of the internet.

A less ephemeral example. In 2003 a group of secondary students participated in a digital video workshop at the Powerhouse Museum. After discussing, analysing and practicing the basic building blocks of visual meaning - shot types, framing, camera handling - the participants were released into the Museum armed with a video camera and given a simple brief: find an exhibition you like and make a 2 minute documentary about it. No other instruction, clarification or context.

It’s the sort of scenario that would send many a museum curator into a catatonic state. After the months and years of careful research and planning, that goes into a museum exhibition the idea that wild packs of marauding school children would then re-interpret that exhibition free from the governance of the curator’s vision, free to form their own networks within their own self constructed heterotopia of cinematic form and, what’s more, then be able to show this new interpretation to others, even publish it on the web, to have an audience then form their own personal network connections of meaning and context, is the stuff of curatorial nightmares.

In the museum exhibition the placement, and thus network connectivity, of one object to another is the deliberate ‘montage editing’ of the curator. Arming museum visitors with video cameras is like handing over the 35mm negative and a razor blade to the audience member and saying, “cut the movie your own way.”

But for this particular group of Sydney school students the level of ‘de-construction’ went much further than re-interpretation and re-contextualisation of any museum exhibition. The short (and somewhat crude), music-video style, documentary they produced presented a direct challenge to the Museum itself; to the very concept of what it is to be a Museum.

They entitled their video ‘Rare Bins’ and, as the name might suggest, it documented the Powerhouse Museum’s ‘extensive’ collection of rubbish disposal units; an object collection that had, until then, needless to say, been unexplored.

They visually depicted numerous ‘rare bins’ around the museum, created viewer context and background information with voice-over narration and actively engaged the audience to experience the bins in new ways with special effects and chromakey superimpositions.

Of course the project was tongue in cheek and many moments of spontaneous hilarity had to be edited and left on the cutting room floor but the project none less served as a quite stark example of the very core of what the modern museum is and what it does, being directly challenged and questioned. Not just a questioning of exhibitions and their contents but a direct questioning of the very role of museums in contemporary society. It could be argued, as indeed I would I argue, that these particular students had engaged with the museum on a much more intrinsic and important level than most visitors to any museum in the world. They may well have missed altogether the exhibitions, spent so much time hunting the hallways of the museum for ‘Rare Bins’ that they failed to see in detail any single ‘real’ museum object. But those students, in their own way, now understand the process of valuing, preserving, documenting, communicating and contextualising material perhaps far better than any exhibition could deliver.

It is here that the use of media tools within the museum environment, tools that allow for the formation and exploration of new independent network linkages between museum objects and ideas, is able to prominently raise the important notion of the Museum as a public, accessible, Heterotopian space. A space that is as important and interesting and culturally rich unto itself, as an entity, as any of the objects it houses.

Museum as Mediascape
All this brings us back to Foucault and his testimony that our perception of the museum is one rising out of 20 century modernity. Cinematic media is likewise a purely modern phenomenon. Foucault argues that the modern museum seeks, as a space, to form a ‘general archive’, to ‘enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes… constituting a place of all times.’ These words are no less true for contemporary media. An all encompassing Mediascape, built on juxtapositions, constructed context, free networks connecting personal meaning with knowledge, and potentially embodying all things at all times in a place of non-time and non-place.

We rarely think of Museums in this light. Despite the ongoing evolution of museums to embrace more engaging, open and visitor-centred experiences the key perception of museums from the wider community still sits much closer to the 19th century notion of the museum as an expression of individual choice - a bigger, grander cabinet of curiosities; curators as glorified antique dealers expounding personal passions.

Of course the truth is that a great many museums are much more than this, employing open, modern, visitor and education centred ideals. But say aloud the word ‘museum’ and the first thing conjured into the minds of the average person is still more likely to be ‘Dinosaur bones’ than anything else. In the light of the modern age where Media is the dominant trade good, financial success is dictated in large part by Media exposure, and personal status is very often measured in TV Media appearances; it might been seen that the reason for these ongoing and dated misconceptions about the museum is because the museum as ‘concept’ does not view itself as a form of Media. It still sees itself in the shadow of private 19th century collections of antiquities; a place, a collection, physical things, tangible spaces, bricks and mortar.

When heterotopian-like media forms are introduced into the museum, not just as audio-visual communicative mediums (as they have been for many, many years) but as proactive tools in the hands of visitors, we begin to greatly extend our ability to view the museum in a new, more flexible light. Viewing the museum through the lens of the camera allows us to see the museum as media-form rather than as physical-form and allows for an enormous broadening of the possible network connections made between object, experience, knowledge and the visitor.

If the museum is to retain a culturally crucial role in a contemporary environment; an environment that is increasingly measured and mapped not in geography and physicality but in the metaphysical mappings of networks and media-scapes, it will need to increasingly view itself as a media-form capable of linking and networking complex and overlapping ideas.

Websites
www.rhizome.org
www.pocketsfullofmemories.com
www.foucault.info/
www.furtherfield.org
www.soundbyte.org
www.powerhousemuseum.com

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Eisenstein, S (dir) (1925), Battleship Potemkin. Screenplay Nina Agadzhanova, Sergi Eisenstein.
Foucault, M. (1984) “Of other spaces”, French journal of architecture, October 1984. (www.foucault.info/)
Ibid
Griffin, J. (1999) “Finding evidence of learning in Museum settings”,
Communicating Science: Contexts and Channels. pp 110-119 London Routledge.
http://www.pocketsfullofmemories.com as accessed May 15 2004.
Pockets Full Of Memories, (2004) Museum of contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki. May 7th to August 1st 2004. www.pocketsfullofmemories.com
Ascher, S and Pincus, E. (1999) The filmmakers handbook. Plume, New York.
Eisenstein, S. (1929), The cinematic principle and the ideogram. Available www.chicagomediaworks.com/ 2instructworks/3editing_doc/
3editingeisenstein.html (accessed 2004, June 6)
Delleuze G and Guattari F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Translation Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press