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Graham claims that “the behaviors of new media affect how curators and other museum workers work in time and space, online and offline” (Chapter 20). She explains that the overlap and blurring of boundaries between new media art and new media as interactives, as interpretation, as promotional tools for the museum, and as part of our everyday experience make new media art particularly difficult for museums and galleries to deal with. Proctor too sees mobile digital media as having a great deal of impact on museum professionals, who now have to take mobile access into account when planning, who have limited editorial control on the information being circulated about the museum, its events and exhibitions, and who are now responsible to people who may never actually visit the museum itself (Chapter 22).

In their chapter, John Bell and Jon Ippolito address ways in which new media art has challenged curatorial control, such as augmented reality projects that use the technology to invade and take over existing museum exhibitions – in ways that are perceivable only to those in the know and with the appropriate app on their mobile phone (Chapter 21). They understand this in terms of an expansion or “diffusion” of the museum into virtual space. They are interested in the ways in which museums have attempted to control and delimit the curatorial space, and set down boundary markers online. Bell and Ippolito concur with Graham when they say that “Even the brick-and-mortar museum has to accept that they are no longer singular authoritative voices on the artifacts they exhibit and that the voices of outside experts are at the fingertips of anyone with a smartphone.” Citing commentators who view the stretching of the term “curating” to include online curating as an insult to the profession, they celebrate this expansion of “vernacular curating.” In the attempt to restrict the title to “museum-appointed staff,” they perceive a certain anxiety about feminized, and consequently devalued, labor.

However, it is clear that neither the museum’s relationship with its audience nor the professional division of labor within museums and related institutions have been completely stable for a long time. Studies of audience attention in museums go back to the 1920s and 1930s. Wasson discusses how the use of Taylorist time–motion studies in that early period informed the exhibition strategies of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania in the United States, and also how “museum fatigue” became increasingly something museums attempted to address, or allay (Chapter 26). Perks’s study of the New Exhibition Scheme focuses on the collaborative relationship between scientists and designers at the Natural History Museum and the intermediary role of the “transformer,” invented in 1920s Vienna (Chapter 18). Her archival research shows how British Museum conferences in the early 1970s devoted much discussion to the difficult relationship between designers and curators, and the need for better communication with audiences. While designers tended to “neglect intellectual content,” scholarly curators seemed overly obsessed with it (Wade, quoted in Chapter 18).

Even today, the separation of curator and designer can be an inhibiting and problematic one: these are disciplines with their own discrete curricula, conferences, festivals, and professional bodies (den Oudsten 2012, 9). In addition, the field of exhibition design has opened up to include “representatives from the fields of art, film, comics, costume design, music, and dance” (Habsburg-Lothringen, Chapter 15). While “transformers” as such have disappeared, a whole host of new roles have sprung up to cater for the expanded field of museum and curatorial practice – from the independent “critical” curator and the scenographer, to the citizen curator mentioned earlier, to what Bell and Ippolito call vernacular curators, to new media strategists and new media curators. While writers such as Harrasser (Chapter 17) and Huhtamo (Chapter 12) argue for the need to observe visitor interaction as part of a critical methodology for analyzing exhibitions, Luigina Ciolfi’s chapter shows that a similar methodology is in use in design processes. At Bunratty Folk Park in Ireland, Ciolfi’s research involved “documenting the visitors’ relationships to the place and how they experienced it in terms of physical accommodation, cultural understandings, social interaction, and personal and emotional connections” (Chapter 19). Ethnographic, observational, and interview techniques were used as a basis for developing “design scenarios” and ultimately prototype interactive artifacts, which were then piloted and tested with visitors.

The museum has recast itself as a commissioner and/or collaborator in new forms of social activism involved in “increasingly complex constellations of media use” and the “deterritorialization of museum contents and programming” (Rectanus, Chapter 23). In many cases, museums have been quick to respond to new media environments and are not as wary of media as they are sometimes portrayed. Proctor observes that they were “early adopters of personal handheld devices” (Chapter 22) while Wasson writes of the wide range of ways in which museums have engaged with modern media over a long period, “effectively participating in a vast media ecology” (Chapter 26). The Metropolitan Museum, New York, had an early film program in the 1920s, that sent films out “like mobile, mechanical docents,” producing “satellite museums out of ad hoc, often impromptu, spaces” (Wasson, Chapter 26). Images traveled too: in my chapter, I discuss André Malraux’s notion of the “museum without walls”: a world of mass reproduction that was connected to, but not entirely controlled by, museums (Chapter 25). The new context for museum artworks is nicely evoked by Wasson when she talks of how reproductions “shared space with pictures of fashion contestants, bathing beauties, coronations, and presidential speeches” in the newspapers (Chapter 26). While Ernst sees museums’ media specificity as residing in the material object (Chapter 1), several contributors emphasize museums’ long-term engagement with media.