Communication Interrupted: Textual Practices and Digital Interactives in Art Museums

Abstract

Since the 1970s and ‘80s, innovations in museum communication have been driven by trends in digital technologies and more recently, social media, spearheaded by curatorial and marketing departments and their respective interests in engaging publics through new forms of dialogue and participation (Heusinger, 1989; Pierroux, Krange, & Sem, 2011). From stand-alone multimedia kiosks to mobile tweeting, tagging and posting on Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, digital and social media have interrupted the external fl ow of information from museum to visitor and world at large but also internal communication among museum professionals: curators, educators, new media specialists, exhibition designers, marketing and public affairs departments (Gates, 2010; Kelly & Russo, 2008; Pierroux, 2001). Importantly, as social media and diverse types of digital interactives have been increasingly introduced alongside traditional textual practices in art museums, they have also entered into the larger, enduring discourse regarding the relationship between text, image, gallery space, and work of art in meaning making processes (Adams & Moussouri, 2002). The use of text, mainly in the form of object labels, is intertwined with the history of museums dating back over 400 years (Parry, Ortiz-Williams & Sawyer, 2007). Therefore, while gallery labels and wall texts are for curators a presupposed ‘communicative genre’ (Linell, 1998) when mounting exhibitions, digital interactives in gallery spaces may be viewed as an interruption in existing textual practices. Moreover, there are long-standing tensions regarding the types and uses of textual means to enhance visitors’ meaning making, and the role of the museum in balancing these views. At the crux of these tensions are differing perspectives on what constitutes an art experience, ranging from an emphasis on curatorial ‘hangs’ that attend to the aesthetic and formal qualities of each individual object (Cuno, 2004), to art historians’ narrative interests in connecting the dots and explaining relationships between works, artists, and stylistic trends (Bann, 1998; Preziosi, 2006), to education curators’ concerns with visitor-centered interpretation and learning experiences (Czajkowski, 2011; Soren, 1992). This chapter explores analogue and digital multimodal textual practices in art museums beyond the object label, focusing on the disciplinary work