Staging interactivity: platform logics at the participatory museum

Abstract

ABSTRACT In an effort to remain relevant as meaningful civic institutions under the dynamic socio-technical conditions of contemporary capitalism, participatory museums have adopted commercial technologies, embraced novel organizational models, and deployed interactive pedagogical environments to encourage innovative habits of behavior and thought as governmental imperatives. The historical formation and transformation of the Exploratorium, widely considered to be the birthplace of participatory science and technology education, lends perspective on these institutional developments as well as the politics of interactivity more broadly. What had been conceived of and built as a pedagogical space to promote a scientifically literate and politically engaged citizenry in the aftermath of the Manhattan Project and McCarthyism – the interactive technological environment – has since been taken up as a means to forge self-investing subjects on behalf of political projects of market rule. In the context of austerity politics and the rise of the digital economy, the managerial logics that animated the museum as well as the pedagogical stage of interactivity that underwrote it provided amenable grounds for market rationalities to take root and disseminate. While profit-driven digital platforms are rightfully seen today as mechanisms for the remaking of relations, activities, and subjectivities, the pedagogical stage created at the museum – the embodiment of both historical continuities and innovations in the realm of interactive exhibition – itself became reconfigured along market lines. A focus on the processes by which this reconfiguration took hold highlights how the material conditions of socio-spatial inequality continue to constitute a domain of urgent contest in the digital age.