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In the main exhibition hall of the Imperial War Museum North (IWM North), in Manchester, UK, visitors are immersed every hour in the images and sounds of the “Big Picture Show” (see Figure 2.4). Designed as a showcase for the museum’s audiovisual collections of photography, art, archival footage, oral history, and testimony, the “Big Picture Show” consists of eight distinctive shows that focus predominantly on conflicts from World War I until the present day. The original three are themed around weaponry, the home front, and children’s experiences of war (Weapons of War, Children and War, and the War at Home, respectively). More recent commissions offer a focus on the memorialization of war (Remembrance), conflict resolution (Build the Truce), the experiences of a nurse in Afghanistan (Service and Separation), a creative response to a street bombing in Baghdad in 2007 (Al-Mutanabbi Street: A Reaction), and a Horrible Histories take on rationing during World War II (Rotten Rationing). Each foregrounds specific curatorial themes and emphasizes the museum’s remit as a war museum rather than as a military museum.² This distinction highlights the museum’s specific focus on people’s experience of war, for example, as the male British voice that speaks out of the darkness at the beginning of Al-Mutanabbi Street: A Reaction, makes evident: “Every image, every document, every voice is part of someone’s story.” The museum website describes the “Big Picture Show” as

FIGURE 2.4 A precursor to the “Big Picture Show,” main exhibition hall, Imperial War Museum North, Manchester, UK.

Photo: Andrew Hoskins, December 22, 2011.

an award-winning 360-degree experience unique to IWM North. Using surround sound, projected digital moving images and photographs, the show brings to life people’s experiences of war. It immerses you in the heart of the action, creating a complete sensory experience which is totally involving, and often very moving.³

Enabled by developments in digital sound and image projection, and certainly a distinctive exhibition strategy, the “Big Picture Show” must also be placed within a longer history of the relationship between the museum artifact and the moving image. The use of screen media in museum exhibitions is commonplace. Often acting as a supplement to object displays – documentary footage, archive film, or television operates as an additional layer of contextualization and narrativization, animating and bearing witness to the images, objects, and stories recounted. The work of Alison Griffiths (2002), Haidee Wasson (2005), and Michelle Henning (2006) reminds us that this use of moving images to supplement artifact-based exhibits dates back to the 1920s and 1930s.

Henning has also usefully sought to connect and establish continuities between “new media” and earlier technologies of visual display. She writes of the parallel between the organization and modes of address of analogue and digital media, employing an example from the American Museum of Natural History in New York where the

famous halls of dioramas, dating from the 1920s to the 1940s, the darkened spaces recall cinema auditoriums. The backlit habitat dioramas are breathtakingly naturalistic. Taxidermy, painted backdrops, and wax modeling, through “multimedia,” are combined to give the organic coherence of narrative cinema, inviting us to momentarily forget their status as representations and imagine they are more than skin deep. (Henning 2006, 304)

Here the “spectacular mise-en-scene” of the museum and the cinema coalesce and both must be seen as part of an “exhibitionary complex” where technologies of display developed in circulation across a number of exhibitionary sites and institutions (Huyssen 1995, 34; Bennett 1995, ch. 2).⁴ The “Big Picture Show” is part of a continuing relationship between the museum and the moving image that evokes persistent tensions between the stillness and movement of artifacts, images, technologies, and bodies.⁵ These tensions reveal the temporal and spatial characteristics of the “Big Picture Show” exhibition strategy as a media archaelogical intervention.

On every hour the exhibition hall of IWM North plunges into near darkness to be lit only by the bright red lights illuminating the bases of the static exhibits (a theatrical flourish that is no doubt a product of health and safety regulations). The visitor is enclosed within the darkness, to some extent hostage to the sights and sounds of the film. The six architectural silos which intersect this permanent exhibition space are independent of the “Big Picture Show” and are still navigable during each performance. The projection itself is not cast on one fluid 360 degree screen but is pieced together over a series of disjointed walls that fragment the large cavernous space of the main hall. The experience is spectacular, cinematic, yet verisimilitude is not its aim. It neither evokes the naturalistic dioramas of Henning’s description nor the simulation of “total cinema” (Bazin 1967) offered by the IMAX experience (which accompanies many contemporary science museums). It is an example of an immersive exhibition strategy, as discussed by Habsburg-Lothringen in this volume (see Chapter 15), in both its scale and the ways in which it organizes the movement and attention of the visitor.

We have already seen the tension between stasis and movement at play in the interruptive nature of the works previously discussed. However, in contrast to the temporal uncertainty of these artworks, the “Big Picture Show” returns us to the “punctual” media of the second memory boom, programmed to “interrupt” the visitor’s time with a different film on each hour of the museum’s day (the schedule itself is projected onto one of the white walls of the main exhibition space). While the visitor is perhaps less likely to become a victim of its timing, the “Big Picture Show” is still a time-based installation with distinctive temporal and spatial characteristics. Elizabeth Cowie, while arguing for the specificity of digital media in the gallery, writes that “each place of viewing a time-based installation is not only a context – geographical and social, public or private – but also an architectural place, organizing the spectator’s access to mobility and stillness” (2009, 124). Here, the stillness of the museal artifact and the movement of the film are reflected by the spatial configurations of stillness and movement enacted by the visitor.

Whether the visitor has planned the show into their visit or are taken by surprise, the temporal darkness of the exhibition hall necessitates the interruption of movement. Most sit against the walls/screens or stand still; a few others continue moving through the space with added care. Architectural and space syntax approaches to museum studies remind us how, “like any spatial layout, a museum or gallery will generate and sustain a certain pattern of co-presence and encounter amongst visitors through the way it shapes movement” (Hillier and Tzortzi 2006, 299). The Daniel Libeskind-designed architecture of IWM North already affords the exhibition space a fragmentary and chaotic character within and onto which the “Big Picture Show” is projected. Jonathan Shaw, Ben Squire Scholes, and Christopher Thurgood, for instance, writing on space and place at IWM North, argue: “As an example of deconstructivist architecture, which is a subset or development of post-industrial architecture, a sense of controlled chaos is conveyed through architectural forms” (2008, 227). Here then, the combined temporalspatial ecology of the museum mediates visitor experience to a unique event.⁶ The deconstructivist architecture and scattered artifacts produce a fragmented screen, but one which is further disjointed by the movement of visitors onto whom the film also projects and distorts, affording another level of random mobility to the “Big Picture Show.” In this latter instance, there is a certain media-visitor coconstruction in that media interrupt the churn of visitor patterns to produce a time-based “integration core, where congregation takes place” (Hillier and Tzortzi, 2006, 299).⁷ These congregations, however, are relatively dispersed and not really crowd-like: affected through the location of the seating and visitors’ sense of the best advantage points for viewing and being immersed in the spectacle.

There is another temporal element to this experience and that is duration. If visitors are patient enough (and/or aware of the schedule) then they will experience the full 25 minutes of each performance. Otherwise, they will be subject to the same temporal uncertainty of beginning, end and duration, of looped and other video/filmic screenings in museum spaces.

So, the space and time of the museum is wrapped in the immersive strategies of the projection. In its play with the built environment, and its kinesthetic and sensory staging of bodies, to what extent does immersion, as Margaret Morse (1990) and Elizabeth Cowie (2009) have argued, give way to reflection? Once again, the organization of stillness and movement is central and draws on the performative characteristics of commemorative practices.

In their introduction to the edited collection Still Moving, an interrogation of the relationship between photography and cinema, Karen Beckman and Jean Ma argue that “the hesitation between stasis and motion actually produces an interval in which rigorous thinking can emerge” (2008, 5). In contrast, social psychologist Steven Brown’s discussion of the two-minute silence as a commemorative practice offers an alternative perspective. Brown usefully challenges some of the assumptions about the commemorative or reflective functions/experiences of silence and, by extension, stillness, as he questions the “modes of access to the past [that] are opened up through public silence and the forms of experience that are thereby afforded” (2012, 239). Here, public silence becomes a spectacle, a performance of empathy and sorrow where those commemorated are doubly absent. But the commemorative silence remains a particularly powerful social force, dictated by an enactment of remembrance and dominated instead by particular behavioral expectations around the stillness and silence of our bodies. As an experiential form it evokes the “scopic reciprocity” (Bennett 1995) of the museum. While the behavioral expectations of visitors within this hybrid museum/cinema space are arguably less clear, the sense of copresence maintained throughout the “Big Picture Show” insists on a peripheral awareness of the bodies of the other visitors.

Sat against screens, or moving through the projectile stream, bodies, disruptive or compliant, also become part of the surface of the projection, made over as “temporary monuments” and integrated into the exhibition space. Brown argues that

to stand still, to make oneself into a temporary monument, is to have accomplished the act of making the past relevant without words. Again this is not so much as “overmastering of self” as allowing one’s own bodily substrate to temporarily become a vehicle for the performance of the past in the present. (2012, 248)

And, when the show is over, the congregation departs, as the “instant community” dissipates throughout the museum and the museum reverts to its recognizable self.

While the “Big Picture Show” can be seen to choreograph bodies and a performance of remembrance in a similar vein to Brown’s argument, the interruption of time and the transformation of space in it invite reflection in specific ways: on the curatorial themes and messages, on the films as memorials and the experience as commemorative, and also on the different and various strategies of mediation and the use of media within the museum. Morse, writing on video installation in the gallery, argues that “installation art in this setting reinvigorates all the spaces-in-between, so that the museum visitor becomes aware of the museum itself as a mega-installation, even to the point of self-critique” (1990, 166).

The collection, Susan Stewart writes, is often about containment as a mode of control and confinement in which it strives for the closure of all space and temporality (1993, 151). While this is perhaps not a fair interpretation of all contemporary curatorial practices, it is precisely through an aesthetics of immersion and enclosure that the world of the exhibition at IWM North is self-reflexively thrown open. The curators and visitors’ mastery over the world of the collection is tested by both the dramatically shifting scales of the exhibition and the challenges of an emergent post-scarcity culture.

The nature and development of the “Big Picture Show,” projected against and on the artifacts and the architecture housed in and constitutive of the space, reveals the upgradable form of this kind of intervention. For example, this exhibition strategy was originally composed of 60 slide projectors to showcase the museum’s photographic archive; digital projectors were installed in 2011, allowing greater flexibility and creativity in the commissioning of audiovisual presentations. The “Big Picture Show” has also upgraded from an original three to its current eight shows. This, as we have already observed, reflects IWM North’s focus on people’s experience of war. However, the increased flexibility that came with the projection of media content into the void, so to speak, enables the museum to be more responsive to understandings and representations of more recent conflicts (e.g., Al-Mutanabbi Street: A Reaction). But this also opens the potential for the museum space to become more of a mutable medium in its own right, being liberated “from archival space into archival time” (Ernst 2004; see also Hoskins 2009).This is how even static architecture and artifacts – and their impression of permanence – suddenly seem vulnerable to the more fluid temporalities and dynamics of “permanent data transfer” (Ernst 2004, 46) as their surfaces and fissures are increasingly employed as, and connected to, screens. In this way, IWM North reveals its media archaeological tensions. Although IWM North is an artifactually and architecturally determined space, it is also fundamentally mediated through the smothering immediacy and pervasiveness of post-scarcity media.

Whereas the ICA’s Memorial to the Iraq War exhibition, discussed above, sought (in part at least) to wrest a separate and distinct time and space in contradistinction to the flux of the new media ecology, IWM North exposes itself to the data-driven extended and immersive present of post-scarcity culture. While the aesthetics of immersion in the “Big Picture Show” operate as a particular exhibition strategy, the space and times of IWM North and other museums are being more radically thrown open and diffused through the inexorable penetration of digital and social media. For example, Huhtamo (Chapter 12 in this volume) argues that an “exhibition anthropology” approach is needed to take account of the new permeability of the museum’s walls, while other contributions to this volume envisage the museum as “diffused” (Bell and Ippolito, Chapter 21) and “elastic” (Wasson, Chapter 26). As an example of this, as part of a Social Interpretation project, IWM London and IWM North have developed mobile applications through which visitors can scan objects’ Quick Response (QR) codes to access the “story” of each. This enables the visitor-as-curator to “share stories of their own memories and experiences about War and the IWM collections.”⁸ And the IWM blog claims that, via the IWM website, they have “added social interpretation elements to over 750,000 collection objects!”⁹ This development is part of the “Internet of Things” linking the material and the Internet, whereby objects are embedded with sensors to produce a sophisticated network of traceable items. In this context, the museum is newly extended, networked and diffused, plugged in to a distributed sociality of its objects and their ongoing trajectories of connections. This challenges its principal authority of containment and closure (in Stewart’s terms: see above) but also gives its objects new temporal momentum and new status as media archaeology.