From Object to Environment: The Recent History of Exhibitions in Germany and Austria

Abstract

More and more, museums and exhibitions are drawing on the immersive strategies refined and professionalized by theme parks and shopping centers over the last decades – visualization and materialization, the creation of three‐dimensional environments, the blurring of lines between reality and fiction, the leveling of time and landscapes, personalization and personification, and the atmospheric use of light, tone, color, smells, and architectural features – as ways of attracting a larger audience. There are two reasons for this. First, museums and exhibitions have begun to address new, more abstract themes and areas of the sciences, the present and future which are not represented by classical museum objects. Second, the aesthetic and medium of the museum exhibition has been redefined and inspired by artists, filmmakers, cartoonists, designers, and choreographers using new media, and by the incorporation of related professions into the field of exhibition design. Drawing on examples from the German‐speaking world, this chapter will investigate what these developments mean for the traditional museum medium (objects, texts, architecture) and how they can be assessed in a museum historical context.

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