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Media archaeology is inexorably an effect and a strategy of/in the museum, subject to a post-scarcity culture which is ushering in both a digital revelation/revolution of the past and an astonishing connectivity in and of the present. The post-scarcity museum offers a new archival regime that can more easily track the history of events that are still unfolding, as part of a longer trajectory of time.

Yet, the museum’s increased capacity to be responsive to the events of the day, as well as recent and more distant histories, presents both a media archaeological tension and an opportunity. Technologies and media of the day have long developed modes of representation and mediation. But the advantage and the challenge of pervasive digital media networks and connectivities is their terrific temporal force. Connective culture fundamentally reconstitutes the past but digitally bleeds more of the present into all of the museum’s fissures. The result is a pressure pot in which the media of this day have not only become irresistible to shaping curatorial strategies but inexorable in pushing a connective present into representational spaces, and in pushing the museum’s objects and artifacts outward as part of the emergent “Internet of Things.” In these circumstances, containment and scarcity are no longer workable as curatorial strategies: cultural memory is well and truly out of its metaphorical box made transparent through post-scarcity culture. The digital present inexorably disinters the past of, and the past in, museums, and new curatorial imaginations are required to make a greater play for the memory of the future (as with the ICA’s Memorial to the Iraq War).

And yet the very challenges of the temporality and pervasiveness of museum and media content can be seized and reimagined as strategy: to redeploy and reimagine museum artifacts as part of the “Internet of Things,” for example, makes the museum a centrifugal dynamic of the connective turn, rather than being merely its subject, and in effect networks the “canon” and the “archive” in Aleida Assmann’s (2008) terms.¹⁰ The new temporal and memorial paradigm of the third memory boom can be harnessed as a rampant media archaeology which turns the museum inside out and (re)creates it anew.