The material role of digital media in connecting with, within, and beyond museums

The connective potentials of digital media have been positioned as a key part of a contemporary museum visitor experience. Using a sociology of translation, we construct a network of visitor experiences using data from a digital media engagement project at a large and multi-sited museum in the United Kingdom. These experiences relate to (dis)connections with the museum, museum objects, and other visitors. Through this analysis we disclose the often contradictory roles of the non-human, including and going beyond the digital, as contributors to the success and failure of attempts to change museum visitor experiences through engagement activities rooted in narratives of participation and connectivity

Papery Graveyards: Sense and Silence With Archives

This article seeks to explore the problematics of engaging with archives. In exploring how nonexperts may come to a new topic and area to ask pertinent questions, this article seeks to put to work the author’s own reflexive engagements with an archive. The archives drew the author in both material and bodily senses and invited thinking about how we might reuse data or at least reengage with materials. The article challenges notions that reflexivity is circular or upholds sameness and proposes that the movement is iterative and one which seeks critical engagement with difference

Foucault, the museum and the diagram

Foucault’s work on the museum is partial and fragmentary but provides an interesting opportunity through which to explore issues of power, subjectivity and imagination. Following a discussion of Deleuze’s reading of Foucault and his introduction of the issue of diagram as a way of understanding the discursive and visual operation of power, the paper explores some of Foucault’s work from the period around 1967-9 on the non-relation to explore how he engaged with the question of seeing/saying that Deleuze identifies as a key problematic in his work. Through analysis of Foucault’s discussions of the themes of the outside, heterotopia and the work of the painter Manet, in the context of the museum, the paper explores how power operating through the diagram of the museum allows us to understand the space of imagination as one in which subjectivity is constituted