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Michelle Henning

Professor Wolfgang Ernst is Chair of Media Theories at the Institute of Musicology and Media Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin, where he also runs the Media Archaeological Fundus, a collection of historical technical media artifacts. The collection is intended to support media studies teaching and research by grounding it in the material history of developments in electronic media hardware, through the examination of working media technologies (as opposed to “dead,” unworkable radios, televisions, etc.). Ernst has written several books (in German): M.edium F.oucault (2000), Das Rumoren der Archive (The rumbling of the archives, 2002), Im Namen von Geschichte (In the name of history, 2003), and Das Gesetz des Gedächtnisses (The law of memory, 2007), and many articles and book chapters, including several English-language articles, which outline his approach to media theory. An English-language collection of his writings, entitled Digital Memory and the Archive, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2013 (Ernst 2013a).

My own interest in Ernst’s work came out of a broader interest in German media theory, particularly the work of the late Friedrich Kittler, who held a chair in media aesthetics and history at Humboldt from 1993, and Siegfried Zielinski, currently chair in Media Theory: Archaeology and Varientology of the Media at Berlin University of the Arts: both of these writers, though their approaches are quite distinctive, are influenced by the French historian Michel Foucault, especially his notion of history as “archaeology,” as outlined in The Archaeology of Knowledge ([1969] 2002). Kittler, in particular, was also influenced by the Canadian media theorist Harold Innis, who distinguished between media according to how their material properties oriented them in terms of time and space, and attempted to trace the impact of this on the social and political development of different societies (Innis [1951] 2008). Kittler has become well known in anglophone media studies for his materialist approach to media, emphasizing the significance of the forms and technology of media over questions of representation.

Ernst also engages with Foucault’s ideas in his books and through the practice of a distinctive kind of “media archaeology” which addresses questions relating to archives and museums. Like Kittler, Ernst emphasizes not just the transmission and broadcast aspects of media, but data storage and machine memory, media as recording devices. His English-language writings include a chapter in Susan Crane’s anthology Museums and Memory (2000), in which he noted the ways in which information-processing technologies are reshaping museums, and also the ways in which museum display and collection management techniques follow the logic of database technologies in doing away with the separation between storage and display and replacing it with a model of data processing and retrieval (Ernst 2000, 25–26). German media archaeology is usually characterized as focusing on hardware over symbolic meaning, on machinic agency over human agency (Winthrop-Young 2006; Parikka 2011, 54). In Ernst’s case there is also a strong emphasis on temporal media processes, on data flows and electrical signals (Parikka 2011, 54). For me, Ernst’s writing on museums and history suggested new ways of thinking about museums. Media become more than objects for the media archaeologist to research, they are themselves machinic “techniques of remembering” that are very different from the practice and discourse of history (Ernst 2005, 595). This machinic memory nevertheless has cultural implications, reconfiguring the very cultural constructions on which museums depend, as in the case of photography: “the improved technologies of visual reproduction led to the availability of arts and artefacts which André Malraux praised as a condition for the thinkability of notions such as a cross artistic ‘style’ in his celebrated photo-based musée imaginaire of 1947” (Ernst 2005, 599). Media archaeologist Jussi Parikka summarizes the relevance of Ernst’s work for museums as follows:

The implications for the wider set of cultural institutions and museums are radical: the need to think museums and archives as nonplaces, and as addresses and hence as modes of management of protocols, software structures and patterns of retrieval which potentially can open up new ways of user-engagement as well, and where data storage cannot be detached from its continuous searchability and distribution. (Parikka 2011, 58).

However, this corresponds more to Ernst’s understanding of the archive (which becomes transformed into software structures) rather than of the museum, which he views as quite distinct. In the following interview, conducted in his office in Humboldt University in February 2011, Ernst’s materialist approach to media leads him to insist on the resistance of the material object (which cannot be completely absorbed by digitalization). Thus, he envisages the museum as something that cannot be understood along the lines of electronic media, as something that is not immune to the effects of technological change, but that needs to maintain its own distinctive quality, centered around the thing that sets it apart from electronic media: the physical presentation of material objects.¹

MH: Could you explain what media archaeology is, in your version of it?

WE: Media archaeology refers to the well-known discipline of archaeology in the sense that it takes the media first of all as material objects, even in our so-called virtual world and information society. All this information flow is still based on real cables, real transmitters, real technologies. So media archaeology tries to take the point of view of the media as technological object, which means, for example, to look at what a television image is, not in terms of content. The question of what the political or whatever manipulated message of the video or the television image is has been taken care of by communication studies and other related disciplines – and it has to be done – and, to a certain degree, cultural studies interprets this semiotics and coding and decoding of the television image. Media archaeology is in this respect closer to Marshall McLuhan’s approach and looks at what the television image means, which makes it different from the cinematographic image, or the photographic image, or the digital image (McLuhan [1964] 2003).

Now, how is the electronic image different from the digital image, what difference does it make? First of all, one has to look at it technically, and technomathematically, to know how it is made, for example, what the electronic image does to our eyes, which is of a completely different nature to the projected screen image of cinema. How does it subconsciously influence our perception? The cathode ray, the light, the speed of lines of television: these are processes where the medium works on our perception although we are not conscious of it.

So media archaeology tries to uncover or discover these processes. In order to discover it, media archaeology has to know how your own perception works in terms of neuro-biology and physiology, and at the same time how the medium actually works, because it makes such a big difference whether it is electronically driven or driven by software, which has a completely different cultural power and mechanism and technique behind it. So, to take the example of the most popular medium of today, which would be the computer as laptop (most people now have computers as laptops or similar devices): whereas most people know the computer from the interface, media archaeology looks behind the interface. Like the open software movement, it asks: What are the driving mechanisms behind the interface? What is the software behind the interface? How can we actually gain control of the computer ourselves? This means, not just being a user – using, clicking icons, or using apps, which is the most popular way now to use these devices – but analyzing who decides and what decides what can be used, what can’t be used, and how can we use that in different ways. In order to know that, we have to look to what is behind the interface, which today would be software, and in the old media would be electronic technology (Figure 1.1).

FIGURE 1.1 “Who Built the Internet?” display at the National Media Museum, Bradford, UK.

Photo: Michelle Henning. Reproduced by kind permission of the National Media Museum.

MH: How do you then go from looking at media, such as the examples you gave of the computer, the television, software, etc. to thinking about museums and exhibitions? What’s the connection there? How does that relate?

WE: Well, first of all, the relationship between media and museums, of course, is a manifold one. The traditional approach would ask for media as objects of museum display. Science museums and technology museums do this, they show old media on display as part of cultural history. That’s the most natural relation between media and museums – they become museum objects. Already, at that point, the problem starts. In Berlin, for example, you can go to the Museum of Technology and you see old televisions of the late 1950s – you see them as an object like any other object displayed by the museum.

Now as a media theorist I would say that a medium that is not performing in its medium state is just a piece of furniture. A television on display in a museum which does not show the screen working is not shown as a medium; it’s just a piece of hardware, a design object. And most people actually look at old TVs and radios like a piece of furniture: they recognize the style of the fifties and sixties and they become nostalgic about it, and see it as a piece of furniture, not attending to it as a medium. And that’s a big challenge for museums because, if they want to show the medium, they somehow need to show it running. Now, this is a big problem for museum conservators: it’s not easy to get those old media working again. If you have to replace parts of the medium, then it’s not original anymore – little condensers have to be exchanged. When you show it running, do you show historical footage from the period of the television or do you show up-to-date programs? So it undermines already the idea of the museum object. Since media are so process-oriented, they are only media when they are in operation. They somehow are a challenge to the idea of a museum as a place to present objects, material objects.

MH: But in science and technology museums you often have steam engines, don’t you, or that kind of thing, actually running?

WE: They definitely have to be shown working, which is suddenly the dynamic object, and this becomes a new genre of museum display. This is a challenge, of course, for museums to manage to keep it running and conservators to allow it to run, because one should have it as an original running or a replica at least. Museums are progressing to this but already it shows the challenge. The mobile object, the cultural artifact, which is also a dynamic object, is a challenge to museums.

New media are defined by the fact that they are not primarily the technology but formats. Television or radio or the book – these are all being perceived more on more on the computer screen. And behind them is the software which defines these objects and enables these old media to return. Now how do you display software? As a cultural good which needs to be preserved as a document of our time, it’s very difficult. How you preserve software? Doron Swade – the former curator of the computer department at the London Science museum who has now moved to the United States to run the Computer History Museum – has said this is now a challenge for curators (Swade 2002). It’s very complex to preserve software on the original hardware or to emulate software. How do you display it? It has to do something and then again you need the running system to operate this software. It’s very immaterial: you cannot touch software as such. This is a big challenge for the traditional object-/artifact-oriented museum. In this respect, the relation between media and museum becomes more complicated.

The next step, and the most complicated, is, of course, asking whether the museum itself is a medium. I would always try to emphasize that it makes sense to keep the difference. There is a broad sense of the term “medium,” which even covers the human body as a medium. Luckily there is no master definition of media but, if it becomes too broadly defined, the strength of the museum would be lost; it would lose its specificity if you just call it a medium. I would say the museum is not a technical medium because it’s not able to operate itself. It needs to be run by the museum people – which differentiates it from the first medium in the technical sense, the photographic camera. The camera can actually produce a picture without human intervention. It needs a human to start it, but the rest of it can be done using the apparatus. An electronic camera can produce a live transmission from Cairo to our living room on the television screen. This is done by the medium: the medium is operative. But the museum in itself does not move and operate – it depends on humans as the processor. That is why I couldn’t call it medium in the strict sense.

Since when did “media” become a popular word? Let’s take Marshall McLuhan’s influential book from 1964, Understanding Media, where the word “media” became part of a book title that wasn’t just for the physical sciences. He meant the mass medium, the electronic mass media. They are based on an electric current, on signal processing, on all kinds of electrical engineering which are completely different from how a museum works, how an archive works, or how a library works (which are the old memory institutions).

These are institutions, they are memory agencies; I would say they are symbolic systems for sure. A lot of work in museums is coded by symbolic systems, by inventories, by labeling and moving real objects. But this is different from the way a medium would be defined. And, since the word “medium” as a discursive term only emerged in coexistence with the modern apparatus-based or even electricity-based systems, it makes sense to limit the word “medium” to those systems and not to use it too broadly for everything that is somehow doing something.

MH: Nevertheless, as a media archaeologist you’ve written quite a bit about museums and exhibitions. So, given that you’re saying that the museum isn’t a medium, what can media archaeology tell us? How can it give us a different perspective from conventional museum studies?

WE: By discovering similarities and differences. A lot of archaeologists now are interested in how cultural memory works. A lot of studies have been done on how memory is being created in societies. What are the institutions, the agencies, the places where memory takes place? And how and where does cultural transmission take place? How is tradition made? How does tradition actually work? Now both media in the technical sense, and museums and other agencies in the traditional sense, are transferring information from one point to another, or from one point in time to another. One of the main tasks of the museum has been how to transmit information over time. Time is the channel. Doing media studies, I am sensitive in terms of being aware of how to analyze this: How does it work? Where is the sender? Where is the channel? Where is the receiver? How are things coded? How is this done? So, media studies creates the kinds of questions which I readdress to previous agencies of memory transmission. Media studies provides me with a vocabulary and the questions through which I look at something like tradition in a more differentiated way, maybe even a bit more technical way. Then the notion of tradition loses a bit of its metaphysical, culturally somehow cloudy, quality and can be more precisely analyzed: Who has the power? What technology do we need for transmission? What is the institutional part? What is the technical part? To what degree is memory a social event, a technical event, a storage event? Since technical media are always based on processes of transmission and storage, the study of them provides me with a vocabulary to ask how the museum works.

The next step would then be to find out how the museum is different from technical media. For example, the museum has a strength that so far no other medium is able to provide, and that is the material object. We still can’t send material objects over the Internet. We can order objects but they still have to be sent by traditional mail. Also, think about the preservation of information. This is an ever growing problem for electronic media starting from old photographs, which have a surprising endurance over 150 years, although they become yellow, but film is more difficult. The early films, with their chemical material that tends to burn when stored somewhere too hot, or the color films where the colors fade – now this is a big problem for film restorers. So there is physical entropy, the tendency to decay in the material. We have the video tape and magnetic audio tape ... one can say, “Well, I can listen to a 50-year-old magnetic tape and still hear a lot” – which is a positive surprise, but at the same time there are dropouts. As for digital tapes, as almost everyone knows now from their own experience, these are more efficient than ever, can be faster transmitters and processors than ever, but they are not long-lasting. The CD-ROM will not last – in itself, it will not keep its data intact for a long time – but the machines themselves will also become dated and be replaced by other systems and faster rhythms. So we have a big technical problem.

Compared to that, if we consider the museum in terms of its objects (the thing that differentiates the museum from the library and the archive is the collection of material artifacts), these objects are surprisingly enduring. This quality of the museum should not be lost when museums are trying to be immaterial themselves. The discussion of the immaterial museum has been a media and cultural studies project starting with photography and with André Malraux and others, and to a certain degree Walter Benjamin, who were already concerned with the question whether or not the photograph-based image collection could be called the imaginary museum (Malraux [1947] 1967; Benjamin [1936] 2002a). This is fine: it’s opening the museum, extending the museum, but it loses the museum’s material basis. The basis of the museum is the material object, the picture which is actually, in its physicality, there, and this is completely different from the photographic or the electronic image reproduction.

MH: I am almost going to reverse my earlier question, because I asked how media archaeology likes to think about museums. In reverse, it seems that thinking museologically, as well, actually helps you to understand about media. That orientation toward preservation, toward storage, and so on, which is very familiar within the museum context, is quite new to thinking about media, isn’t it? It seems that you’re doing both, examining the productive differences between the two things.

WE: Yeah, it’s trying to take both sides. On the one hand, one can look at how computer architecture works and then one discovers that a lot of the storage mechanisms sound familiar if one has done museum studies or archive studies or library studies. Even down to the terms that we are using, terms like “memory” in the computer, which is actually a metaphor because technically the computer does not have a memory. We call it a memory because our culture tends to address even technology in terms that have been created in previous agencies of tradition, such as the museum or library or archive.

But, on the other hand, one reason to call what we do “media archaeology” is, of course, that one is concentrating on the material object, which sounds like traditional archaeology which has always been object-oriented. But then the other use of the word “archaeology” comes from Michel Foucault’s nonmetaphorical use of “archaeology,” meaning analyzing the hidden mechanisms which create knowledge or evidence and through that term, and in his book The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault said, let us look at the discontinuities ([1969] 2002). That’s what makes his archaeology different from “history,” and media archaeology different from media history. Media archaeology looks at discontinuity. What difference do media make to previous cultural mechanisms of memory and tradition? Now, what this emphasis on discontinuity, rupture, and difference does is sharpen analysis. It may be a bit one-sided overall; maybe in the end there are many more continuities. But historians would always tend to emphasize the continuities. Our traditional cultural model emphasizes continuities, from the ancient Greek temple to today. Learning from Foucault, let’s look at the discontinuities – that’s how to look archaeologically. Then we can decide how, when we talk about computer architecture with words such as “memory,” how far it is a metaphor, which in a way makes the discontinuity oblique, which harms the discontinuity. Let’s look at where the discontinuity is and name it, in order to make our contemporaries realize that it makes a difference.

MH: When you talk about how metaphors might harm the discontinuities, I remember Walter Benjamin writing about iron architecture in the nineteenth century being covered by a veil of stone, so that the newness of the thing was concealed, and that was a problem: the radically new disguised as tradition (Benjamin [1935] 2002b). Is that the kind of thing you’re talking about?

WE: Yes, yes. Once again I would quote Marshall McLuhan, who said that, very quickly, the content of the new medium tends to become the older medium (McLuhan [1964] 2003, 8). Like in early films that took a lot of theater plays as their content, or how television shows a lot of films even today. It’s true for the computer. In a way, we use the computer like an extended book when it comes to texts. We use it now to listen to radio formats or to look at various kinds of media movies. Media archaeology tries to uncover the media and to lay their structure bare.

MH: And so, by doing that, reveal the discontinuities that are concealed by that continuity of content?

WE: For example, to come back to what happens if media are objects in museums. We have the radio of the 1940s which, stylistically, looks like it is part of the design of that era but, if we take off this external appearance and look at the technological structure, it looks almost ahistorical. As a technological object, it principally works as a radio from much later. The electronic tubes (or valves) have been replaced by transistors, but functionally it works in exactly the same way, amplitude motivated (AM) or frequency motivated (FM) radio – which some people still remember! It’s still working on the same principle. Considered in this way, suddenly there are objects that, from the archaeological point of view, are structurally not that historical: they are invariant against temporal change until they are completely displaced or replaced by a completely new system. It’s another temporal rhythm. Now, to show this is a challenge to the idea of display: What do I display if I display media? If I display them on the surface, then I miss their essence, but it’s more difficult for visitors to have a medium opened and to understand what’s going on. It’s a big challenge to museum education and didactics to explain what’s really happening there. That’s a challenge to the design-oriented, surface-oriented display.

MH: Coming back to the museum being a medium or not a medium – one of the things you talk about in your writing is the time–space structure of exhibitions and museums. By which I mean, the ways in which museums or exhibitions are experienced by visitors in terms of how they control their time by pausing in front of an exhibit or moving on, whether they are linear in design, and so on. One of the things that interests me in your writing is that, although you’re not saying that the museum is a medium, at the same time you are drawing parallels between some of the technical structures, between the experiences of the contemporary computer-based media and the experience of moving around an exhibition space, in particular the spaces of contemporary art exhibitions.

WE: With interactive media, we come back closer to the museum than we did with earlier mass media. But, first of all, let me quote the German museologist Heinz Ladendorf who said the museum is not a medium but a collection, which makes it very clear that the basic function of the traditional museum is a very different one (Ladendorf 1973, 23). It has to collect a choice of objects, not everything, unlike in an archive, which normally gets from its administration, first of all, all the files and then they can make a selection. Whereas a library or a museum is a selection, they can select objects from the beginning. In most cases, it’s their duty to preserve the choice of objects; officially, even legally, they are there for protecting certain types of objects. It’s different from data processing; it’s different from the archive; it’s a collection. Museums are therefore differentiated from the medium in its technical and other senses.

Now, for a long time media was meant to be mass media which means broadcasting, you know, radio, television and so on, which had no feedback channel, which could only be consumed in a way. At that time, how we experienced images, on television or in cinemas, was not directed by the viewer. The cuts, the speed, the change of perspective – all of these were done by the camera and we were just subjected to them as viewers. That differentiated the experience of objects and images from the museum, where the visitor is free to move, usually at their own speed, and to make a choice where to stand or view an image more closely. Now this self-autonomous, sovereign time of information processing used to be a quality of the museum against the dictatorship of time in the mass media. This has now changed, with interactive media, with the Internet. Again, the user decides to a large degree how long to stay at an object, to choose whether to get it replayed, like with a video as opposed to a television image. You could look at it in your own time; you can see it several times; you can even cut it, manipulate it, and appropriate it. For a long time the medium had a time dominance over the viewer, whereas in the museum the visitor could be in control of their own time of information processing, so this was a virtue of the museum against this dominating of time.

MH: One thing I have noticed, though, and this is just speculative, if you look at the halls of dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History, or any number of American exhibits from the 1920s to the 1940s, what you see is something incredibly cinematic. Alison Griffiths pointed to this when she linked early twentieth-century museum curators’ anxieties about museum life groups to anxieties about motion pictures and spectacle, and I mention it in an essay on new media in museums (Griffiths 2002, 24–30; Henning 2006a, 304). You know: the darkened hall, the lit-up windows, the scene that you watch from the outside. It is immersive but cinematic: your presence isn’t acknowledged; it’s going to unravel without you. And I really noticed, particularly in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, that when you came to present-day exhibits of natural history they were much more inviting you to look over here, then look over there – they were much more dispersed or networked in their structure (Henning 2006b, 145–146). So I wonder if another tendency is for museums to actually mimic the popular media of their time, whether that’s something that also happened so that they conceal their own medium specificity.

WE: There has always been a sort of mirroring of the new media in museum practices. It started with photography, when suddenly the period rooms started appearing in museums. That’s the idea that a historical museum might create a room which recreates the historical atmosphere of the period of the time. This is certainly an effect of the photographic medium which could preserve a coherent image of a moment in time. The art historian Stephen Bann, for example, has shown that the idea of a period room was contemporary to the emergence of photography (Bann 1984; Ernst 2005). And, of course, with cinematography, the museum tried to emulate moving parts, even moving images and that happened until today as if the museum always had to rival the prospective new media. I would almost say that the museum misses its own quality and its strength. I would propose a counterstrategy: What can the museum do that new media cannot do?

It might sound very conservative if I return to the material object but materiality is the blind spot of the information age. Because, first of all, digital media cannot provide materiality, the resistance of the object, which is not the same as the information of the object. The object has more information in it than a recording or a scan of an object would be able to provide. Then we have things that have been discussed again and again, things like the aura which Walter Benjamin has described: to what degree does the aura depend on the materiality? For Walter Benjamin, any reproduction of the material object makes it lose its aura, which is its quality of being here and now (Benjamin [1936] 2002a). The idea of presence which is created by a material object is not easily mimicked by electronic media. This is true even of virtual spaces that you are immersed in, three-dimensional spaces, because human perception can clearly work out the difference as to whether you’re really hitting a rock or whether this is something that is happening in a data glove space. So there is a quality of the museum there.

MH: And that’s something that media are constantly trying to mimic, and so, if the museum were trying to mimic the media, the media are also trying to mimic the museum by constantly trying to simulate an experience of the thing itself.

WE: Yes, that is why the relationship is dynamic. I would not categorically say that the museum is completely and categorically different from media. To a high degree, it is different, but there is a dynamic relationship of course: the modes of perception of the visitors are dominated by media perception and museums have to react to it. And the other way round: museum aesthetics has an influence on media interface display. Brenda Laurel in her book Computers as Theater (1991) has shown how much our aesthetics of the interface of the computer is dominated by cultural ways of looking which come from theater, from the drama of the theatrical space, and in a way this is true of museum space as well. Still, the media archaeological analysis would like to emphasize the discontinuity because otherwise it looks as if culture was a friendly, coexistent, and homogeneous and harmonious play between different agencies. I think the challenge is much much bigger, to be aware of what really changes now and what has changed.

MH: You mentioned that you took from Foucault the concept of rupture and historical discontinuity, as opposed to a kind of narrative progression that you have in traditional history, but presumably you also took from Foucault that concept of power as something that’s not centralized or held, that’s dispersed ...?

WE: Yes, and both the critique of the narrative progression and the analysis of power mechanisms are essential parts of media archaeology, even in the analysis of the museum. For example, the museum includes not just the public display parts of the museum; the real powerful side of the museum is in the parts which are hidden to the normal visitor, the offices where the inventories are being created, even the storage spaces where a lot of objects are being stored which are never on display. It is only recently that museums have started to open these spaces. Spaces which are not normally ordered, they are just open shelves (Figure 1.2).

MH: And you’re quite in favor of that aren’t you?

WE: I am in favor of that – it’s like opening a medium and looking at how it works. One does not have the offer of an interpreted presentation already. But we have a data bank, one that we could now call the aesthetics of the data bank itself, now that we live in a media culture where the user is much more able than we used to be before to handle a data bank itself. Not to get it translated into a narrative, but to work with the databank itself, to get access to the information in the data bank itself, even to demand open source, to get access to the source codes: this is the equivalent of getting access to the nonprefigured, nonordered spaces of the museum.

FIGURE 1.2 8 mm film cameras in storage at the National Media Museum.

Photo: Michelle Henning. Reproduced by kind permission of the National Media Museum.

MH: To me, one of the ironies of the use of new media interactive booths or touch screens in museums is that they seem to be based in a desire to increase access to all the information that maybe would be too much to put on a written label, to the detailed context or the provenance of the object, all the stuff that the museum knows and can now share. But, for me, the experience is the other way: what actually happens is that it’s just more interpretation, instead of opening up to the concealed parts of the museum or to information you couldn’t otherwise normally have on display. Instead of opening and expanding the display, it just seems to put more layers of interpretation between you and the experience of really going down into the basement, unlocking the doors, and having a poke around.

WE: There was, of course, always a debate within museums studies itself as to how much text should be provided in a museum. Was the strength of the museum the material object or do we urgently need contextualization? – which was, of course, a very enlightened attitude. But to what degree can the museum then be replaced by just reading the texts? I can get a lot of information on museum objects online, but it cannot replace my confrontation with the objects as long as we are confronted with traditional objects. However, it all changes now with a culture that not only produces pieces of art as objects, but also as digitally born objects, as they are called. Then the difference is that it is not that book anymore. A book that is produced and published only online ... I don’t have to go to a library to borrow a book; I can download it at home and it’s as authentic as ever. And digital art, for example, which is digitally born, there is good reason to say it is the original which I experience if I download it online. I don’t have to go to an art museum to see that. So that changes.

For the traditional culture, which is object-oriented to a high degree, we need the traditional museum, which displays the real object, and so far the difference works. But it becomes different now – the museum loses it and becomes itself changed from an institution, a place, or an agency to a format. When it comes to truly digital culture, then the museum is a format. It’s a way of ordering information, ordering images, offering a guided tour. Once the museum is a format, it’s not an institution anymore. I would make a difference between a format, which is a sort of technical term, and a real institution. The real place, which is based on material objects, exists on two different levels. Of course we can make it as complicated as we like. If we look at the history of the term “museum” or the history of the museum itself, we find it was not always the object-based rooms and places. In the early Renaissance, it could be the name for an empty room where you think: this was a museum as well – a cognitive space.

MH: You have that in contemporary holocaust museums sometimes – contemplative spaces.

WE: Yes, but this example shows that the very word “museum” was not bound strictly to the object base; it could mean arranging things in your head only, and for that you only needed a quiet and empty space – we call it the museum. So even that was genealogically more thinkable already but, as we know, the museum is an institution. It’s an object-bound institution and the strength is its object-basedness. It’s not like time-based media – that’s not the strength. Its resistance against time, that’s the incredible power of the museum – the resistance against time.

MH: You mentioned this earlier and you used a phrase that reminded me of Harold Innis, the transmitting through time, the museum as something that transmits through time but at the same time resists the passing of time (Innis [1951] 2008).

WE: Yes, the objects of the museum by their very presence resist the passing of time. We can see Roman inscriptions in the Vatican Museum, and it’s not that self-evident that for 2000 years we would still be able to decipher the letters inscribed in stone, so in a way it resists time. Actually one of the allegories of the paintings on the ceiling that connects the Vatican Museum to the Vatican Library, painted by Anton Raphael Mengs, who was a friend of Johann Joachim Winckelmann in the eighteenth century, shows how the Vatican Museum was actually founded on the idea that there are long-lasting values. The Catholic Church was very interested in claiming its authority as not changing with history [this painting is known in English as The Triumph of History over Time, or The Allegory of History, and is in the Camera dei Papiri]. There is an authority which traverses history and which resists time, which we can see by this allegorical painting which nicely shows the mechanism of tradition.

We now live in a media culture that is now very much real time-oriented, in which fast transmission is the most valuable quality. The almost immediate transfer of information which was already present in the transmission of live radio and live television is now referred to as real time processing. This traversing of space almost immediately started with the age of telegraphy and other information media communication. The virtue of the museum is completely different: to traverse long distances of time, to transfer objects in a time channel which lasts for several thousand years in the case of ancient Egypt and several other civilizations. This is a completely different channel of transmission, to use this media technical term. And it’s even a challenge to the idea of history, the museum, because it’s based on the invariance of the object. We can see an object of the eighteenth century, a painting for example, and still be touched by it. That’s a very strange thing, because we don’t dress like people of that age, we don’t think like them anymore ... Or take Greek objects: something happens – something interacts between our perception and this object. This undercuts the idea of history which emphasizes the difference, the change, the transformation.

MH: Yes, in your writing on “media tempor(e)alities” you quoted Heidegger’s Being and Time on the question of the extent to which the object is historical (Ernst 2008; 2012; Heidegger [1927] 1962). There is a tendency to assume that the traces of use make an object historical.

WE: That’s the way Heidegger tries to answer it, but the question he poses, I think, is still open to discussion because we know most of the objects in a museum are traditionally understood as historical objects but they are present and they have a present impression on us. So there is dissonance, a cognitive dissonance: cognitively we know they are past but we are affected by the object as present. Now this is a big paradox, and this is a productive paradox actually, which shows that the museum is not just part of cultural history or an agency of cultural history. And even the idea of history is challenged: for a long time the museum tour or narrative would start in early times and end in the present, although they could be arranged in a completely different way. The archaeological reading would be to take objects which traverse this seemingly historical sequence. For a long time the museum as a history machine produced history by the illusion that things progress, so that we begin by experiencing rough or crude objects and then end up with the most elaborate versions, as in technical museums which show technological progress. A lot of nineteenth- and twentieth-century museums were built on this model, or rather they were not only built on the historical model but they helped to build the historical model. Because, by physically wandering through these museums, we got this idea of history as progress which was based on the Hegelian idea of progress.

MH: Yes it’s interesting that in the art historical museum you have this Hegelian notion of the progress of art, and yet at the same time it was punctuated by these masterpieces that were supposed to transcend time and that you were supposed to almost sit in front of and commune with in some transhistorical way.

WE: Yes, this was the aesthetics of the art museum, of the art piece in the collection, until the age of Winckelmann and others when suddenly art itself became historicized. It’s fascinating to see how, for a long time, art from antiquity would have a metahistorical perfection. There was no historical distance to it; there was just a perfection which to later generations was the guideline. And one was confronted with it in private collections or in public museums or collections. Then there were figures like Winckelmann in 1764, writing History of the Art of Antiquity, where he said that art is dependent on its historical contexts (Winckelmann [1764] 2006). Suddenly art itself became historicized. Museums like the Berlin Altes Museum, built by Schinkel, reacted to it by arranging pieces of art in a historical sequence. It’s a spatial sequence, because all the museum rooms coexist spatially, but it was arranged in a way that we get the idea of a historical progress. And Hegel, who was living near the museum, built a lot of his ideas influenced by this arrangement of a gallery of pictures in a historical way. We can take it very literally, this phenomenology of mind – he in the end writes how the world and spirit progress through a gallery of pictures. We can take it very literally and visit the Altes Museum in Berlin: he was living just a few hundred yards away, and so was very much influenced by the new way of arranging museums.

MH: Something else you said that really resonated with me was in your chapter in the Susan Crane book – it was where you are writing about archives and you say the “true tragic archive is the soil” (Ernst 2000, 28). And, while I suppose I think of archives as things that have been authored, things that have been put together and ordered, collections that have been cataloged, at the same time it’s interesting to think of soil as an archive; it is an interesting way to think of power and the museum and what museums occlude or cover up. It reminded me of when I was researching whaling museums: there’s always some display of whaling equipment and a couple of whales, but then I read how the blood and oil from each sperm whale soaked into the earth – an extreme amount so that the whole port stank and the ground was full of the oil (Henning 2011). Similarly, what you said about the tragic archive being the soil made me think of the way in which history materially embeds itself. The effects of human activity on the earth and so on are constructing an inadvertent record, an archaeological record, and that sometimes conflicts with the version of events the authored museum wants to present.

WE: Yes, and this again depends first of all on the physical evidence, those traces you can smell: with the old machines, if they are not cleaned too much in the museum, you can smell the oil. Now this is what physically would be the entropy of the material, the decay – the decay which physically provides the time era. In physics there is the law of thermodynamics which says there is a tendency from order to disorder: this is a law of nature which gives time an arrow at all in a physical sense. Now you can only experience this with physical objects. It might be the soil or a videotape: there is history at work in the physical sense and for that you need the real object. We need this experience and this again is a virtue of the museum as opposed to the experience which we make now. Because, for everything that is digitally there and you copy it, there is no decay; the information can be copied without loss.

MH: But the museum tries to halt decay sometimes and sanitizes things.

WE: Yes, and it erases history. I would almost say that the strengths of the museum now would be counterstrategies to this to the new negentropic virtue of the information society,² where you cannot make a distinction between the original and its copy anymore: for a digital copy this is true. The copy is not a copy anymore; it’s a second version of the original. Then you lose any trace of history. The negentropic material almost is not at work; it’s just very marginally at work – but that’s another discussion.

Now this creates a different sense of culture, of time, all those emphatic notions that are now in our cultural discourse. This opens a big gap between the old culture, which is dominated by the experience of entropy, and the new culture, which creates the illusion that there is lossless tradition. Now this is fascinating and worrying at the same time, this idea of lossless tradition. Where is the authority which can decide which is original and which is not? Is our authority within the material or is it just metadata providing the authority? Now, these are all questions the museum, if it’s clever, can address. The museum could be the place where those new semiological challenges are being reflected because the new media themselves have no place where they can reflect this. The Internet itself has no place where it can reflect itself. But the museum is a space and a place and a time; when you visit a museum you reserve some time to be open to reflection and contemplation. Now museums could be used to reflect cultural mechanisms or cultural technologies as they take place in the contemporary media world. Because we need another place, in the Foucauldian sense, we need a place which is different from the media in order to reflect on the media. You cannot reflect on a medium within the same medium – according to the system theory of the position of the observer, you have to create a difference. And, by proudly not being a medium in the modern sense, the museum could say exactly, “This is a place where we can reflect about media,” because it introduces a distance, a distance which is a precondition for reflection.

MH: Do you think there are any museums or exhibits that are already doing that, or starting to do that, in an interesting way?

WE: Yes there are museums which are starting to do that. For example, of recent experience the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford in England.

MH: It’s now the National Media Museum.

WE: Which is in itself interesting. It started out as a history museum of television and photography and is now called the National Media Museum. This change is significant: it says that we don’t just want to be known as some nostalgic place of the old electronic or electromechanical television but we use it as a place to reflect on the new media, the new audiovisual media. And then suddenly there is the whole message – that the museum is not about cultural history but a dynamic place of reflection; it’s a completely different function from that of the museum – it becomes in itself a flexible institution. This is, of course, losing a bit of its strong read-only memory-oriented function, which it used to have for a long time. There are maybe other museums which are stronger when they are just proudly keeping the read-only memory because they have pieces of art or so which derive their authority and aura exactly from not being replaced by contemporary versions. So different museums should have different strategies – it depends on if it’s a museum of technology or a museum of art. I think even the museum itself should be differentiated and should develop different strategies for the different types of objects it has.

MH: I was very interested when I visited the Darwin Centre in the Natural History Museum in London because they had that. I went on a tour where you could see the research collection and the scientists at work. So it’s like a behind-the-scenes tour but it’s actually part of the design of it.

WE: Yes, the archaeological aesthetic has already been opening up the museums. It’s because they are used to gaining and organizing information themselves. You can now open the archive. For a long time we needed historians to work in the archive, but then to write it for us in the form of a big narrative that produces history. Now, more and more as a product of information, the user wants to use the archive material directly themselves. It doesn’t mean it’s not interesting to have a plausible interpretation offered by historians in a plausible museum exhibition which arranges objects in a way that is convincing, but at the same time there is a chance to rearrange it in accordance with different criteria. This aesthetic has opened the museum through access to the shelves or the tendency to replace the long-term exhibition with more temporary exhibitions. It’s more dynamic – like the tendency to have more short-term memories being a product of our media age, which means that the idea of the emphatic long-term memory is being replaced by the idea of short-term memories which are more functionally reusable by the present but which won’t last long. Once more, museum people have to decide to choose a precise counterstrategy, to say we are one of the only few places where there is a resistance to this acceleration of short-term memory.

MH: But, by doing that, they risk situating themselves as reactionary?

WE: In the Jean Baudrillard way: not reactionary, but rather retroactive. Exactly because museums are challenged by new media, they can develop counterstrategies. Let’s look at the opera house and other cultural institutions. The idea was that the gramophone would kill opera. No, it didn’t; that never happened – it just displaced that institution. These institutions did not win by trying to rival the new media. A theater can never be as good as a cinema when it comes to bringing together different places in one, or a montage, or jumping back and forth between times. Every film can do that which a theater cannot easily do. But the theater has the real presence, the authority of the real actor, and the accidents of the actor. Every performance is live, so if something goes wrong it actually goes wrong – it’s not recorded on tape. So there are virtues or qualities which are preserved in the opera house, in the theater, and I would say in the museum, like the material object as a counterstrategy. Not completely separate from the new media, always playing with the critical dialogue, playing with it dynamically, critically, or adopting a bit but still caring about the difference.

MH: But you mentioned earlier, I think, that visitors arrive with their senses adjusted to the different media with which they live. I was thinking of taking my daughter when she was very young to the theater for the first time. She shouted, cried, hid under the chairs, and then stood up on them and clapped, completely responding to what was happening and all the other children were sat there blank-faced as if it were a screen. She had never been to the theater or cinema and so I did wonder if she was out of sync with them in terms of how her mode of attention had been adjusted.

WE: Yes but that shows that the strength of the real theater would be to make us aware of the difference. There are qualities which cannot be covered by the cinema, although the cinema has opened marvelous new cultural options and, as a media theorist, I am fascinated by what media can do. But there are things which media cannot do and there are at least interesting differences in perception, in aesthetics, in information, so that’s why I come back to this counterstrategy again and again.

MH: But I suppose what I’m getting at is that, if you arrive at the museum with a cinema-adjusted brain, you’re going to look at the same displays very differently than if you had arrived before the age of cinema.

WE: Yes, and that’s why museum people cannot simply proudly ignore the new media. That’s not what counterstrategy is. Counterstrategy means paying attention to what is part of a discursive field, and this is a media-dominated cultural field. Now that’s why museum people have to know other ways of looking, of hearing, of moving, of interacting. Now people want to interact in museums naturally because of the use of the Internet, and so on. So all of this has to be known by the museum people, calculated by them, in order to then create their aesthetic strategies of the museum. But, then in the next step, not by trying to imitate and mimic this or say that we’ve fulfilled this expectation as well, but maybe by cleverly showing them the difference that is the unique strength of the museum. Just as you could show a unique strength of what the archive is as opposed to other memory agencies. This archive could well be separated and differentiated from the old world collective memory agencies by saying this is a completely different kind of authority which the archive has. It’s not just a memory. The archive has to do with the power of having access to things like that. The museum has material properties which are its unique feature. Lyotard made that the topic of his big exhibition Les immatériaux in Paris in 1985: to what degree does the material physical world count in our immaterial media culture? Those are the questions to which the museum can really respond – which is more difficult for libraries, which consist mainly of printed symbols in books that are still material.

MH: In Britain at the moment the government is trying to close libraries, and it seems there is a very strong countercampaign because libraries have become the place where people who don’t have much money have access to the new media as well. So they’re not just the preserve of the book. The destruction of the library is about the destruction of public space and a kind of attack on the public sphere.

WE: Whereas, for the library, the situation is really different. First of all, it’s symbolic. It’s based on symbols, the printed object. Although the material object is there, and a lot of conservative librarians will always trust the material object of the book, now e-books can imitate even the turning of the page and things like that. Since the central quality of the postmedieval book is the printed letter, which can be reproduced on a symbolic level, this can be adopted by new media to a high degree. But I will say it again: The structure of the archive cannot be adopted because it’s an authoritative space which is, first of all, not about memory. The museum, with its quality of being out of time for the moment, creating a space out of time, based on the metareality or the physicality of objects, is a quality that so far can in no way be replaced by any other reproduction media, not photography, nor television, nor film, nor the digital computer. And from that it can derive a lot of energy as a counterenergy, a reflective, dynamic counterenergy. Not a conservative counterenergy, but a dynamic counterenergy.