Ambient Aesthetics: Altered Subjectivities in the New Museum

Abstract

Abstract This chapter focuses on the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) as a case study for the emergence of hybrid subjectivities within the new museum. Fueled by an optimistic idealism about how technology might transform everyday life, ACMI was conceived as a catalyst for new forms of cultural consciousness. The chapter casts ACMI's initial willingness to experiment with innovative representational technology as a strategic attempt to position itself as a pioneering new media institution, and to engage in alternative forms of cultural citizenship. Its early public exhibitions, for example, often eschewed chronological histories of the moving image in favor of phenomenological displays of visual knowledge and embodied new media “experiences.” In tracking ACMI's changing curatorial, architectural, and experiential directives, this chapter foregrounds the significance of the museum as a producer rather than distributor of stories, experiences, and objects. The argument proceeds with close reference to empirical audience experience research data collected from ACMI visitors, and is situated in relation to historical transformations of pedagogy as a driver for museological display. The concept of “ambient aesthetics” is, finally, proposed as a key conceptual framework for evaluating how contemporary museums might articulate a new kind of “flexible” citizenship in a transnational public sphere.

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