(Dis)playing the Museum: Artifacts, Visitors, Embodiment, and Mediality

Abstract

This chapter develops ideas about learning and knowledge appropriation by visitors using museum media, and discusses methods for studying these processes. It is based on research into children's use of interactives and hands‐on objects in exhibitions. In particular, it addresses the widespread paradigm of playful learning, the modes of subjectivization and learning connected with such objects, and the kinds of knowledges at stake. The chapter considers how exhibitions are structured, how visitors appropriate exhibitions, and the relation between displays and the actual and embodied micro‐practices of visitors, using insights from the work of Michel Foucault and from actor network theory. Following the discussion of central concepts and two case studies, the chapter addresses more general questions about how interactive media transform museums, and how and to what an extent museums can be conceived as media.

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