Media archaeology of/in the Museum

Screen media are increasingly a pervasive feature of our new memory landscape. Inside the museum the screen has moved from being supplementary to artifacts, to becoming a museal object in its own right, to being removed altogether (through the use of projections onto surfaces and architecture). But what do the media of memory reveal about curatorial assumptions as to both the representation of the media of the day and the everyday media practices of the visitor? This chapter interrogates the shifting value and uses of the media of memory in museums in the context of the conflict-induced memory boom. For example, Erika Doss has written of a “memorial mania” whereby the anniversary of almost anything and everything is marked through a variety of memorial sites – from saturating news coverage to museum exhibitions. What we have today is a stacking up of these markings of events, from the catastrophic and nodal, through to the most banal, which are churned through commemorative cycles and seem to spin ever closer to the present. While, from a memory studies perspective, the relationship between media memory and the museum as part of this mania is outlined, the role of artistic interventions in challenging dominant modes of exhibition and commemoration in contemporary memorial culture is also investigated