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New media curator and writer Beryl Graham notes that participation is challenging to some art curators, critics, and institutions because it is associated with a loss of curatorial control and with inciting disorderly audience behavior – notoriously in installations like Cyprien Gaillard’s The Recovery of Discovery (2011) discussed by Rectanus in Chapter 23, or Robert Morris’s 1971 Bodyspacemotionthings discussed by Graham in Chapter 20. Huhtamo characterizes visitor engagement with interactives as often chaotic, impulsive, and depthless: “momentary acts of punching and tapping, pushing and pulling” (Chapter 12). Yet, Luigina Ciolfi, who designs interactives for heritage sites, shows how the design process is increasingly rooted in a “rich view of human interaction and experience” and how point-and-click technologies are being replaced with multisensory forms of engagement, and site-specific designs (Chapter 19). For John Bell and Jon Ippolito, as for Ciolfi, digital technologies can actually enhance the sensual, emotional experience of place (Chapter 21).

Hands-on participatory exhibits have often led to accusations that the museum is treading too closely to other nonserious popular contexts such as the circus, the dime museum, and the fairground (see Goodman 1990, Giddings, Chapter 7). I have written elsewhere about how the pioneering exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity at London’s ICA attracted this kind of criticism (Henning 2006, 88). Sue Perks cites the critics of the Human Biology exhibition at the Natural History Museum, London, which opened in 1977: they referred to the exhibition variously as a “cheap disco,” a “lewd offal-shop nightmare,” “tasteless,” and like a “fairground ‘tunnel of love’” (Chapter 18). These are associated with fears about populism and “dumbing down”; anxieties about the working class are not far from the surface in this discourse. In this context, the most interesting (and, as Perks points out, “scathing”) critique came from Patrick Boylan who “considered Human Biology to be selfconsciously ‘modern tasteful’ in style – ‘pure Middle Class “Habitat”’. reinforcing ‘fashionable, mildly liberal, educational and social theory and practice’” (quoted in Chapter 18). By associating the visual style of the exhibition with the homes of middle-class liberals (who shopped at Terence Conran’s fashionable Habitat store), Boylan manages to imply that, far from making the museum more accessible, the Human Biology Hall was actually speaking to a narrow self-congratulatory elite.

Boylan was right to recognize that the Human Biology exhibits owed at least as much to liberal educational theory as they did to the inspiration of popular entertainment and commerce. In fact, while they are heavily associated with entertainment contexts, interactives actually developed in the context of the museum’s educational remit. Perks recounts how the Natural History Museum, in planning its innovative New Exhibition Scheme in the 1970s, drew on the influence of the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the work of the Open University, and the Isotype method of the 1920s and 1930s (Chapter 18). These shaped a new emphasis on visitor participation, well-defined learning objectives, and techniques to evaluate effectiveness. At the Exploratorium, interactives and hands-on exhibits were intended to communicate abstract scientific concepts in an enjoyable and accessible way, and to enable visitors to understand the workings of technologies that appeared to them in everyday life as mysterious “black boxes.” However, as interactives have become more widely used, their use has changed: in heritage contexts, for example, the priority is not an understanding of technology; rather, the technology is there to enhance a sense of place and to embody the kinds of interactions associated with the place (Ciolfi, Chapter 19). This is facilitated by technologies disguised as mock-historical artifacts, which record and respond to visitors’ locations, including motion sensors, GPS (satellite-based navigation), and geotagging (using geographical metadata attached to images, video, or objects).

Instead of increasing accessibility, Karin Harrasser argues, hands-on learning in museums can stand in the way of deeper learning and reproduce existing educational inequalities (Chapter 17). In their research on hands-on displays in children’s museums, Harrasser and her colleagues focused on observing children using them. Their research confirmed Pierre Bourdieu’s observations in the 1970s that “open learning” through interaction privileges the already privileged, while other children struggle, being “unfamiliar with the whole environment” and lacking a sense of entitlement. The irony (or tragedy) here is that the development of interaction and visitor participation in museums was a genuine attempt to expand the audience across social classes and to increase accessibility.

Other devices intended to enrich visitor experience can also have unintended effects. Biehl-Missal and vom Lehn find that information kiosks and handheld devices can mean that visitors spend more time with the technology than with the objects it is intended to support, and that groups either separate and take in the exhibition individually, or “become frustrated with the systems and abandon them” (Chapter 11). In other words, these media can have the same effect of individuation that has been observed with the older audio guides. Yet we should differentiate between these media and their effects: as Proctor suggests (quoting Laura Mann), the linear audio tour had an ability to immerse visitors in the experience that later interactive, or personalized, digital tours lost (Chapter 22). Reduced sociability is not an inevitable effect of interactives: Higgins points to ways in which they can provide a social experience where “one person, the avatar, is able to operate the system of behalf of much larger user groups who may be engaged with the learning process” (Chapter 14). Similarly, Graham observes that the audience for one augmented reality-based artwork “even went so far as to loan that most intimate and covetable of devices, the mobile phone, to strangers without a camera, in order to pass on the experience” (Chapter 20).

Graham suggests that new media art can offer “critical tools” for understanding audience participation and interaction with artworks, beyond the traditional model of aesthetic contemplation. Participation and interaction include the audience’s role in documenting and archiving the experience of the artwork: so for example, in the case of audience photography, museums have tended to move away from seeing it as a threat to copyright and ownership, to viewing it as (variously or simultaneously) documentation, publicity, and participation (Graham, Chapter 20; Henning, Chapter 25). Networked media also allow for “art projects which are distributed coproductions,” with the audience as coproducer, and for audiences to become involved in curating. This can include the online tagging and annotation of artworks and collections, as well as collaborative curating using live online chat and discussion boards (Graham, Chapter 20).

The audience role is diversifying. Rectanus argues that “museums increasingly position audiences in multiple roles as viewers, spectators, performers, and consumers” (Chapter 23). Networked audiences have different expectations, different ways of engaging with museums, and, according to Proctor, “the potential to transform the museum, the way it works, its structures of power, and even its mission” (Chapter 22). As Proctor describes in her chapter, mobile media used for interpretation “can capture data (metrics) and feedback from these visitors on where they go, what they do, and what questions they ask of the museum’s content and collections, events, and so on.” Museums increasingly “data-mine” social media, but must be wary that they do not “violate the public trust” (Proctor, Chapter 22). From an exhibition design perspective, the potential of new media seems very exciting, with “individual profiling” increasing the possibility of personalized content (Higgins, Chapter 14).⁹ On a larger scale, violating trust is perhaps less of a concern than the ways in which institutions play an uncritical role in an increasingly standard practice of audiences voluntarily (and often unwittingly) supplying large amounts of data about themselves. This kind of audience participation has worrying political implications.