How (repeat) museum displays are always experimental: (re-)making MUM and the city-laboratory

Abstract

In this paper, I present a case for understanding exhibitionary practices as always experimental. I discuss here a study conducted on the McCord Museum’s MTL Urban Museum App, a digital display that was (re-)made based on the Museum of London’s Streetmuseum App. Drawing on the notion of ‘remediation’ and actor-network theory, I consider the display as formed through the refashioning of an ‘actor-network’, or what I refer to in this paper as an experimental assemblage. This allows me to trace the processes of transformation that brought heterogeneous actors together and into novel arrangements in re-making the App and how such processes resulted in the generation of novel experiences, practices and knowledge. Thus, this study shows that even ‘repeat’ mainstream displays involve experimental processes, or ‘exhibition experiments’. The implication for practitioners in museums, galleries, libraries and other cultural heritage institutions is that decision-making processes must always account for the experimentality of all display practices, ‘new’ or ‘old’.

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