Inter Culture 6-1 2009 -- Visual Display and Media Ecology

InterCulture 6.1 (February 2009)

Saindon, “Visual Display…”

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Visual Display, Media Convergence, and a Reconsideration of Media Ecology: The Jewish Museum Berlin as a Site of Interactive Technological Integration

Brent Saindon This paper considers the contribution that the media ecology tradition can make to contemporary scholarship on media convergence. Using the Jewish Museum Berlin as a case study, it is suggested that media convergence scholarship remains too focused on the development of new technologies and the consolidation of the media industry. Displays in the museum integrate the message encoding practices of digital audio, film, installation art, oblique architecture, oral delivery of public address, photography, television, and video games. In order for those messages to be decoded, viewers must both perceive and know how to navigate these integrated texts. Using the insight of McLuhan on the relationship between technological development and humans’ perceptions of their surroundings, the paper argues that media convergence is not a new phenomenon and that current convergence scholarship should be supplemented with research into forms of perceptual convergence as experienced by media consumers.

In 1988, the Board of Directors of the Berlin Museum in West Berlin invited a group of world-renowned architects to submit designs for an extension that would house the Jewish Heritage Department. As a response to almost 30 years



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of pressure by the leaders of West Berlin’s Jewish community, the extension solidified a commitment to display prominently the influence of Jewish citizens on the culture of Berlin. Daniel Libeskind, an architectural theorist and professor, was among those invited to submit a design for the Berlin Museum extension. Libeskind, although known for his radical sketches and theoretical leanings in academic circles, had, at that point, very little experience in practical architectural design. However, his proposal for the Jewish Department extension for the Berlin Museum won the favor of the competition selection committee, despite its unorthodox presentation. In almost every aspect of the design, Libeskind broke all the rules of the competition. Yet, the selection recognized that he provided such a powerful response to the dilemmas of the competition that they could not ignore it (Young 8-10).

After ten years of planning and construction, the museum was completed in 1999. As per the requests of Libeskind, the building was opened to the public while empty, so that the architecture could be appreciated on its own. During those two years, over 350,000 visitors toured the museum (Lapp 13). Toward the end of 2001, the fully-curated Jewish Museum Berlin was finally open to the public. The displays, designed by a team that included Michael Blumenthal, Tom Freudenheim, and Shaike Weinberg (formerly of the United States Holocaust Museum), follow a chronological narrative in the permanent exhibition, while other special exhibitions highlight a particular time period, such as Weimar Germany or the activities of German-Jewish soldiers during World War I (Freudenheim 40-41). A lower-level exhibition confronts the near erasure of Jewish culture from Germany through emigration and violent persecution during the Third Reich. Rather than focus on the Holocaust in particular, the museum tries to tell a broad story of the relationship between German and Jewish culture, in which the Holocaust was an important element. Part memorial architecture, part history museum, the Jewish Museum Berlin synthesizes authentic artifacts, artistic expression, fabricated period displays, and interactive multimedia technologies in order to inform its audience of the importance of Jewish culture to the development of Germany, particularly its relocated capital of Berlin.

Several important scholars, including Jacques Derrida (“Response”), James E. Young, Anthony Vidler (235-42), Andreas Huyssen (49-71), and Terry Smith (67-94), have commented previously on the architectural design of the Jewish Museum Berlin. News writers and art critics have offered their views of the significance of the museum for the city, the nation, and the world (Patterson 66-75; Russell 76; and Spens 40-47). However, previous work has focused on the symbolism of the architectural design, rather than treating the building in conjunction with its displays in order to understand how the exhibition encourages viewers to make meaning in the museum. As a result, commentators have treated the displays as a distraction from the architectural design, emphasizing the vision of the creator over the social use of the museum (Klein B15-17; Newhouse 69; and Smith 87-88). As a corrective to these perspectives on the Jewish Museum Berlin, this paper thinks about the practices of display deployed as part of the educational mission of the museum. The desires of the architect do not necessarily determine what the museum does, or how it creates



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a structure of meaning for an audience. My goal is not to perform a hermeneutic reading of the Jewish Museum, Berlin to get back to the psychological intent of the artist, but to understand the museum as a text that incorporates both the vision of the architect/artist and the “re-vision” of others, including project coordinators and curators.1

Traditionally, the study of museums has been considered the purview of architectural studies or visual studies, not media studies proper. Of course, in some sense, all visual culture can be considered as a form of media, insofar as a physical object provides a “medium” for communicating ideas to an audience and a foundation for articulating shared values. In essence, any study of symbolic forms circulating in a culture can be considered a form of media, including speech, writing, and other forms of creative expression (Cassirer 213-17). However, in practice, most media studies focus on the use of specific technologies, such as radio, film, television, and the internet.2 In particular, contemporary discussions of media convergence, defined as “a jointly shared, ‘wired’ future…the conflation of those competing and previously antagonistic institutions that defined the twentieth-century mediascape” (Caldwell, “Introduction” 7), are narrowly focused on the development of new media technologies and industry conglomeration. By fetishizing institutional integration and technological development, convergence scholars do not attend to the experience of living in an increasingly integrated media culture.

This essay suggests that the displays in the Jewish Museum Berlin can be read as a form of perceptual convergence. Beginning from the assumption that the development of certain visual technologies has an impact on the modes of perceiving available to an audience, the incorporation of several types of visual technologies, as well as the blending of display strategies developed in other visual practices into traditional museum displays, reveals the extent to which media convergence is an integral part of the lived experience of contemporary life.3 Experience with new media technologies, photographic reproduction, film, television, and radio enable the viewer to decode messages embedded in the displays in a reasonably predictable fashion, though some ambiguity for divergent readings exists (Hall 129-30). As such, it provides a practical bridge in the gap between industry production, message content, and the social/psychological impact of media forms (Leverette).

Thinking about the exhibitions of the Jewish Museum Berlin as a form of contemporary media, one that can speak to the phenomena of media

1 Rather than declaring the death of the author, as Roland Barthes (Rustle of Language 49-55)

attempts to do, my reading of the museum treats the architect’s vision, particularly how it is made available to the museum visitor, as an important imposition of interpretation on parts of the text. But other elements also impose upon the viewer (such as the choices of display), limiting the range of interpretations available to an audience (Foucault 113-38). 2 For representative examples of this phenomenon, see essays in Holmes and Jermyn; Holmlund

and Wyatt; and Munt. 3 For studies on the relationship between specific visual technologies and the development of

human perception, see Arnheim 135-52; Griffiths 53-84; and Panofsky.



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convergence, has a couple of benefits.4 First, such a view recognizes the extent to which multimedia presentational strategies have been incorporated into new museum spaces.5 Second, reading the museum as media form displaces the emphasis on technology in favor of the relationship between media and users. “Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world” (McLuhan and Fiore 41). A technological perspective on media should be broadened from a focus on specific electronic developments to think about them as techniques of expanding spheres of influence and shared experience, recognizing, as Marshall McLuhan did, that the newest developments of media are related to the techniques of speech and writing and are a necessary element for the extension of self (Understanding Media 57-63). As Faye Ran argues, even internal developments in the arts are produced from the integration of different previous media, making a more interactive human learning environment (“Media Ecology”). As a result, research in media convergence should reconsider its declaration of a massive epochal shift in media production and move toward a historically specific investigation of the different, continual convergences in media technology. The latest version of media convergence should not be read, as Caldwell defines it, as a massive break with twentieth century media culture, but as a continual extension of ever evolving media forms into both personal and public life.

This essay is divided into two main parts. The first section reviews the current literature on media convergence and explains the shortcomings in that scholarship. The second section performs a reading of the museum displays in the Jewish Museum Berlin, described in the general order that a patron would experience them. The conclusion uses the second section to think about theories of human perception and how such perspectives affect current constructions of media convergence. In addition, the conclusion will offer some insights for future research and discuss the impact of this case study for both museum and media scholars. Convergence Scholarship Since at least the beginning of the twenty-first century, media theory has been fixated on a series of technological developments associated with media convergence:

The American media environment is now being shaped by two seemingly contradictory trends: on the one hand, new media technologies have lowered production and distribution costs, expanded the range of available delivery channels and enabled consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate and recirculate media content in powerful new ways; on the other hand, there has been

4 For another, brief example of reading the museum as a space of convergence, see Jones 36-

39. 5 For some examples of criticism that emphasizes the incorporation of media into museum

displays, see Bergmann 427-48; Hoskins 7-22; Legett 175-86; Noakes 89-104; and Reading 67-85.



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an alarming concentration of the ownership of mainstream commercial media, with a small handful of multinational media conglomerates dominating all sectors of the entertainment industry. (“Cultural Logic” 33)

Jenkins isolates two contradictory tendencies that comprise media convergence: the proliferation of new technologies available to media users and the integration of several media sources into larger companies that control huge portions of the media market. One can use these two seemingly contradictory tendencies to map the major contours of convergence scholarship. Those scholars that emphasize the proliferation of new media technologies in the era of convergence paint a reasonably optimistic picture about reaching new markets and the increased consumer choices available to the public. Rather than technologies that produce passive consumers of media materials, mobile media technologies, such as MP3 players, mobile phones, and video games involve the user as an active agent in media selection and production (Jenkins, Convergence Culture 3-10). Mobile phones, in particular, provide a place for thinking about the libratory possibilities of new technologies. Users “act as transformative agents of these cultures by affording a new sense of publicness: the users are at once in public and a (potential) public, they claim public settings while forming communicative networks on issues and interests that they may relate to other potential publics” (Drotner 60). For media producers, technological diversity broadens the audiences available to receive messages in a few ways. Multi-platform publishing allows news media to develop higher quality journalism through timely publication, immediate feedback, and revision. Multi-modal forms of presentation allow journalists to craft messages more precisely, while simultaneously engaging audiences (Quinn 31-33). Convergence also gives news media a wider access to source materials, potentially increasing the quality of research and reporting (Dupagne and Garrison 247-49). Finally, the development of information technology allows for information sharing across media platforms and delivery systems (Erdal 58). On the other end of the spectrum, scholars emphasizing the consolidation of media channels under a few large conglomerates tend to view media convergence as a negative outgrowth of deregulation and corporate exploitation of the communicative commons. The integration of multiple media platforms into a single corporate organization helps to maximize profits through increased efficiency and smaller pools of competition (Chon et al 154-55). In response to the proliferation of new digital technologies that lower barriers of access for marginalized voices, capital and the state have been engaged in a struggle to re-regulate the flow of digital information in ways that force a higher price of entry for those groups (Silverstone 24). At the same time, the global reach of capitalist media production has the power to alter the relationship between production and consumption in order to maximize market efficiency (Schiller 63). In essence, the repeal of nation-state based regulations of telecommunications material has been necessary to grease the wheels of the market (Schwoch 138-39).



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Convergence, as an institutional and technological phenomenon, also circulates positive representations of itself in the public sphere. Media conglomerates appropriate difference in order to re-present it as an exotic benefit of media consumption. “Now, with change and fashion-trend obsolescence as obligatory industrial factors, a semiotic of localism has emerged as the very marketing fuel that drives globalism onward” (Caldwell, “Introduction” 8). Media markets its convergent status, branding itself in different outlets and putting its capital accumulation on display for the viewer to decode and respect. “Textual production – and the analysis of texts by industry – stand simultaneously as corporate strategies, as forms of cultural and economic capital integral to media professional communities, and as the means by which contemporary media industries work to rationalize their operations in an era of great institutional instability” (Caldwell, “Critical” 102). The materialization of media convergence, understood by critics in negative terms, is joined with the representation of media convergence as a cultural condition in order to make it seem like a desirable, inevitable phenomenon that the passive, contented citizen-consumer learns to accept. Another set of scholars mediate between positive and negative spins on media convergence. They accept that the consolidation of media production and integrated technological consumption occurs, but suggest that this condition engenders the possibility of creating a new public sphere within the limits imposed by convergence. The goal of scholarship becomes outlining the relationship between new media technologies in a convergent world and the process of identity formation of media consumers (Haggins 177-79).

Ultimately, our media future could depend on the kind of uneasy truce that gets brokered between commercial media and collective intelligence. Imagine a world where there are two kinds of media power: one comes through media concentration, where any message gains authority simply by being broadcast on network television; the other comes through collective intelligence, where a message gains visibility only if it is deemed relevant to a loose network of diverse publics. Broadcasting will place issues on the national agenda and define core values. Grassroots media will reframe those issues for different publics and ensure that everyone has a chance to be heard. Innovation will occur on the fringes; consolidation in the mainstream. (Jenkins, “Cultural Logic” 35)

Cultural Studies is well situated to navigate this terrain between consolidation and innovation, both of which exist in the convergent media context. Critics must work to unlock the potentials available to people through the structures of the media environment, and use the range of options available to make the mediascape serve public purposes. Two shortcomings of scholarship on media convergence seem obvious. First, by focusing on the development of new media technologies, convergence scholars become fixated on the contemporary period as a radical break with previous eras of media production and technological development. As a matter of historical fact, as Winseck argues, the development of the telephone also raised



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similar concerns about convergence, insofar as it developed in conjunction with news agencies and information services, while also changing the regulatory landscape to accommodate its relationship with other technologies. Thus, new concerns about media convergence ought to be construed as a matter of degree, rather than a major epochal shift in media institutions. Second, the convergence literature seems too focused on the development of institutions and technologies, rather than how those technologies are experienced and decoded. Even when discussing patterns of consumption as libratory (for example, Jenkins), consumers are largely determined by institutional factors, or at least direct their energy toward institutional and technological changes, associated with media production.

Instead, the structural elements of different media can converge into particular works of art, creating a truly “intermedial” text (Speilmann 55). Such texts use different modes of message encoding in order to create an experience of living in convergence. At the same time, these convergent texts are dependent on the increasing media literacy of consumers in order to decode messages that mix the interpretive strategies of several different media forms. Traditional disciplinary divides based on the development of a specific technology, such as film, dissolve in favor of a disciplinary division based on the modes of perceiving objects through the visual field (Cartwright 22).

The next section develops the concern about perceptual convergence through an extended discussion of the display practices in the Jewish Museum Berlin. I provide a narrative of reasonable movement through the museum for a viewer, but my analysis slips between the voice of the visitor and that of the critic. In so doing, I want to provide perspective for the reader regarding the context of meaning reception, while also offering reflections on the theoretical significance of each element that I choose to isolate in the museum display. While the basement exhibition fuses the techniques of message encoding associated with photography, oblique architecture, and installation art, the main exhibition uses a conglomeration of different analog and digital media technologies to educate its audience. Mediated Convergence in the Jewish Museum Berlin One cannot enter the Jewish museum from the street; it has no public doors to tarnish its shiny zinc-plated surface. Instead, one must enter through the “Collegienhaus” next door, a Baroque style building that used to house the Berlin Museum prior to German reunification. This building now serves as an office space, an entrance, a coatroom, a research library, and a visitor’s center for the Jewish Museum proper. Visitors descend a long staircase and walk over to the museum underground, symbolizing the connection between official Berlin history and a hidden Jewish history. The connection exists, but has been submerged in the depths of collective memory (Jencks 240-48). The peripatetic visitor, in moving from one to the other, performs the memory work of re-establishing it. Once to the end of the path linking the two buildings, visitors encounter a plaque that explains the plan and symbolism of the ground floor. One can follow the main path, labeled the “Axis of Continuity,” across the basement, up a large



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staircase several floors to the main exhibition gallery. However, at two points, other paths intersect the axis of continuity: the “Axis of Holocaust” and the “Axis of Exile.” Each of these intersecting halls discusses the fates of Jewish people during the Third Reich. The authorial voice emerges in the plaque description, helping to orient the memory work of the viewer, since one is encountering a unique spatial configuration that might prove otherwise difficult to decode. ”Architect Daniel Libeskind asks us to think about the Holocaust and those people deported to their deaths; Exile and those able to escape; and Continuity – those that live on.”6 In a very real sense, the viewer must “choose with their feet” the fate they wish to follow and contemplate.7 The nearest and sharpest angular severance of continuity occurs with the Axis of Holocaust. Displays embedded in the walls of the hall are viewable as one walks upward toward a large, black door. In each display, one encounters a small item placed behind tinted glass heavily darkened around the edges. Most items are personal and unique to particular individuals, from letters for loved ones to a set of spectacles. Some of these mundane objects may identify the individual or family as active practitioners of the Jewish faith—for instance, a menorah—but in every other sense, the items seem like the types of things that anyone might own. The choice of objects in conjunction with the tinted glass gives one the sense of possessing a personal memory object, a relationship made even more apparent by the need to stand close to have a clear view of it. In much the same way that old photographs create an intimate connection between the memory of an individual and a seemingly insignificant object, these materials create the sense of personal connection to the memory of another. Roland Barthes elegantly describes the psychological impact of sorting through personal photographs, searching for the memories of his deceased mother:

According to these photographs, sometimes I recognized a region of her face, a certain relation of nose and forehead, the movement of her arms, her hands. I never recognized her except in fragments, which is to say that I missed her being, and that therefore I missed her altogether… Photography thereby compelled me to perform a painful labor; straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false. (Camera Lucida 65-66)

Barthes, as a coping mechanism during the death of his mother, fights against pain and the experience of loss to recover her “essence” through a personal photograph collection. He eventually finds her in an old photograph. “The corners were blunted…the sepia print had faded, and the picture just managed to show two children standing…in a glassed-in conservatory, what was called a Winter

6 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations taken from the displays of the Jewish Museum Berlin

have been transcribed from photographs taken by the author on a visit to the museum in February 2005. 7 The interactive nature of memory work is certainly not a unique feature to the Jewish Museum

Berlin, or even to museums generally. For scholarship about active viewer participation, see Carlson and Hocking 203-15; Hasain Jr. 64-92; and Pezzullo 345-65.



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Garden in those days” (67). At the time the photo was taken, his mother was five years old, an age at which he would have never known her. However, the photo captured something of her gentleness and innocence that Barthes considered to be her essential characteristics, no doubt influenced by his life experience with her.

The intimate displays in the Axis of Holocaust mimic the psychological impact of Barthes memory recovery project. Each display has a story that contextualizes and humanizes the previous owner of the object, explains how they died, and how the object entered the museum (usually a private donation or loan from a family’s personal collection). In this way, the museum display becomes the intermediary of a gift of memory to the public viewer. In their intimacy, the objects confer a very small aspect of a person’s life: a life that can never be fully understood, but one that deserves public recognition as a significant loss. The viewer accepts that gift, retains that memory, internalizes the story (though not in any literal way) in order to complete that process of exchange between the past and present (Derrida, Given Time 13). The item carries something of the essence of its previous owner, and the viewer is situated with the burden of recovering their memory from the scraps and fragments of material made available to them.

The trauma of loss during the Holocaust does not get reconciled and eventually forgotten. Instead, the display reproduces the trauma of loss in a viewing generation that did not experience it firsthand. Working through these scraps of memory takes the form of a traumatic production, much like Barthes’ search for his mother intensified the trauma of a personal loss, a painful process put on display for a literary audience. Contrary to practices of a traditional art museum in which one views at a distance, frequently noticing the company of others, one must instead get close to an exhibit, shutting out the view of other museum patrons to focus entirely on each memory object. One does not participate in the spectacle of people watching, in which museum visitors are in attendance to see and be seen (Bennett 87-91), but one concentrates on the spectral “ghosts of the past” conjured to haunt the present (Derrida, Specters of Marx 216-21). One repeats the gesture of looking into displays and taking in the partial memories of others as one walks the Axis of Holocaust. The viewer knows that what is retained in memory cannot account for the richness of life lost. After all, how much can one learn about a life from one artifact and a small caption of the story? The repetition of these particular stories, in conjunction with the everydayness of the objects presented, provides evidence for the typicality of these partial life histories and develops a sense of empathy for each life lost in this immense human tragedy. Moreover, the inclined planes of the walking paths make the viewer aware of their own movement in the repetition of these stories. The “oblique” style of the floors disrupts the expectations of the viewing body; it makes one feel out of place, and consequently, gives one a heightened consciousness of the physical proximity to each memory object (Virilio 20-24). The visual displays synthesize the familiar tactics of closeness in personal photographs, the seriality of traditional museum displays, and the oblique angles



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of experimental architecture into a complex environment for viewers to have a personal memory experience. These displays culminate with an installation art piece that attempts to recreate the typical experience of the Holocaust common to both survivors and those that died. At the end of the Axis of Holocaust, the aforementioned large black door opens into the “Holocaust Tower”:

a very tall and empty space in raw concrete, into which visitors are led alone or in small groups by a gallery assistant. In the tower they experience the loneliness and the solemnity of the space after a heavy entrance door shuts behind them. The only light comes in through an opening high up on the wall, which also lets in some of the noises from outside. (Lapp 12)

The barren walls leave much to the imagination. While seeming to symbolize the lost memories of the Holocaust, viewers also physically experience confinement. The inaccessibility of social life, the natural environment, or means of escape gives the viewer a sense of complete loss of control over one’s life (Isenberg 168; Stein 91). The second path, the Axis of Exile, repeats the modes of display used in the Axis of Holocaust, only the stories of people’s lives end with emigration to another country. After the viewer again travels an inclined plane, the end of the hall provides passage outdoors to the “Garden of Exile,” another piece of installation art. Right before exiting the basement, a plaque describes the design and purpose of the garden:

Here, architect Daniel Libeskind asks us to think about the disorientation that exile brings. The 49 pillars are filled with earth in which willow oaks grow. Forty-eight of the columns contain the earth of Berlin and stand for 1948 and the formation of the state of Israel. The central and 49th pillar is filled with earth from Jerusalem and stands for Berlin itself.

As one walks outside, a path leads over to a boxed concrete garden with giant pillars piercing the sky. Though the pillars are perpendicular to their concrete and stone grounding, the base has an inclined plane that makes them seem tilted. The bottom surface has enough of an incline to make walking upward or sideways difficult; gravity pulls the body in certain directions, forcing the viewer to be conscious of the force they exert in response. The willow oaks, firmly rooted and flourishing in the grounds of nations, remain inaccessible to those in the garden, with no way to scale the pillars. Metaphorically speaking, trees allowed to take root in the soil seem to grow, while those caught in between homelands occupy a precarious space fraught with forces outside of one’s control. Proceeding to the top of the long stairwell connecting the Axis of Continuity to the top of the three level building, one emerges into the main exhibition, designed to tell the story of Jewish identity not only in Berlin, but also in other parts of Germany. The museum displays unfold according to a linear, historical narrative, one enabled directly by the building design (Spens 40). The displays are divided into the following periods: the beginnings; the medieval world of Ashkenaz (10th-15th century); Glikl das Judah Leib (1646-1724); Rural



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and Court Jews (16th-18th century); Moses Mendelssohn and the enlightenment (1740-1800); tradition and change; in the bosom of the family (1850-1933); identical duties—identical rights? (1808-1900); the emergence of modern Judaism (1810-1930); modernity and urbanism (1890-1933); east and west (1914-1933); German Jews—Jewish Germans (1914-1933); persecution, resistance, extermination (1933-1945); and the present (1945-today).8 Frequently considered the weakest part of the museum, commentators have characterized the main exhibition as hurried (Lapp 12), cluttered (Klein B15), and juvenile (Stein 90). By appealing to the popular culture sensibilities of its audience, it contrasts with the high art aspirations of the architecture.

Throughout the main exhibition, interactive learning stations help to tell a broad history of settlement and perseverance in the face of constant discrimination and exclusion. As a printed book detailing the exhibition makes clear: “we are making appropriate use of the most modern interactive and digital exhibition technology alongside more traditional forms” (Discovering 3). One watches videos that, for example, give the general background to Jewish life in Europe, detail the lives of specific historical figures, provide original footage of important contemporary figures, or document the propaganda distributed during the Third Reich. Audio stations allow users to select pre-recorded versions important speeches, much like one would channel surf through television or radio. Question and answer stations, in both analog and electronic forms, encourage audiences to internalize information while mimicking the dialogic interaction of conversation and classroom discussion. Small video games seemingly provide relief from the rest of the exhibition, while still fulfilling an important educational function. In one that documents the life of court Jews during the Renaissance, visitors are allowed to role-play as a Jewish citizen and to make a series of simple life decisions, such as choice of work or whether to pay appropriate tribute to royalty. In nearly all cases, the visitor loses at this game, suggesting that the conditions of Jewish life at the time were very difficult. All of these interactive exhibitions work together to build a dialogic learning experience, while requiring knowledge of the message encoding and consumer choice particular to each medium (film, speech, television, and video games). Conclusion: Perceptual and Technological Convergence Museums, from even the time of the 19th century, have been considered a composite space of display, incorporating art, cultural objects, and even human guides in order to shape the perceptions of the viewer (Zboray and Zboray 273). Text, visuals, and audio stimulation intermingle as strategic moments of the visitor’s experience.9 The Jewish Museum Berlin integrates a number of different media technologies in order to educate visitors about both the difficulties of the Holocaust and the history of Jewish-German relations. The use of new media

8 The order of the displays is explained in an exhibition book printed by the museum, Discovering

the Jewish Museum Berlin. 9 For representative examples of discussion of museum displays in both and artistic and

educational context, see essays in Karp and Lavine; and Sherman and Rogoff.



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technologies and the techniques of other media methods (like photography) only demonstrate that museums are a composite medium. The design of the Jewish Museum Berlin’s exhibitions also confirms the global trend toward a form of technological convergence. As a museum that evolved from an extension to a city museum to an international tourist destination in Germany’s newly relocated capital and flagship city for cultural development, the choice of such a composite display seems appropriate. In one sense, one could read the museum as just another in a long list of texts that put convergence on display, even if in a less conspicuous way, as Caldwell’s commentaries ask critics to do. However, in another sense, the museum uses different media technologies to reach an audience diverse in age, nationality, ethnic identity, and language (nearly all textual displays are in both English and German). The diversity of technological developments and consumer products not only makes new technology available for use in the museum, but consumers must also know how to interact with these devices in everyday life. As my discussion demonstrates, the Jewish Museum Berlin encourages scholars to think beyond technological convergence to theorize perceptual convergence. The use of smoked glass and intimate displays to replicate the visual feel of personal photographs puts the techniques of visual coding of one medium into another. The combination of traditional serial display with oblique architecture makes viewers aware of their role in remembering the “typical” losses to German culture from both the Holocaust and forced exile. Culminating the viewing experience of the Axis of Exile and Axis of Holocaust with installation art designed to reproduce the bodily experience of living though those events, if only in the most indirect of ways, blends the coding practices of contemporary art with traditional visual modes of education in museum exhibits. In the main exhibition, video and audio consoles allow one to replicate the behavior of media consumption promoted by commercial resources while providing an educational experience for a diverse audience. Finally, the role-playing function of most video games is used in order to emphasize the hardships of Jewish life in Renaissance Germany. Each of these techniques of display works to create an interactive, integrated media environment that requires viewers to decode complex messages built from the encoding practices of several different media forms. Without viewers perceiving these different ways of encoding and their creative synthesis, the Jewish Museum Berlin would fail in its educational mission. Often forgotten in the technological and institutional discussions concerning convergence is the impact on the forms of consciousness from technological development on the media user/consumer. While I do not suggest that scholars supplant current discussions of media convergence, I do argue that this case study makes a strong argument for supplementing them with theories of human perception. The insights developed by Marshall McLuhan in particular, though also active in other scholarship associated with media ecology, might provide a useful starting point for the discussion:

Art, or the graphic translation of a culture, is shaped by the way space is perceived. Since the Renaissance the Western artist perceived his environment primarily in terms of the visual.



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Everything was dominated by the eye of the beholder. His conception of space was in terms of a perspective projection upon a plane surface consisting of formal units of spatial measurement…Primitive and pre-alphabet people integrate time and space as one and live in an acoustic, horizon-less, boundless, olfactory space, rather than a visual space. (McLuhan and Fiore 57)

It would be appropriate for one to be suspicious of some of the essentialism in McLuhan’s writing, but one ought to not disregard his insights entirely. For McLuhan, technological developments have an important relationship to perceptual developments of human beings, and as such, any discussion of technology must also incorporate an account of human inhabitation of the world, theories of spatial relation, and their impact on practices of perception and message decoding. Finally, the consideration of the Jewish Museum Berlin as a space of media convergence ought to suggest cautiousness regarding some scholars’ presumption that this period is unique in media development. Other media historians, such as Winseck, have already argued that concerns about convergence and branding are not new. The study of museums as a mediated space highlights the extent to which they have always been a place of media convergence. These insights offer an opportunity to develop a more subtle and sophisticated scholarly literature on the subject. If convergence is not just a technological condition but also a perceptual one and if convergence is constant and ongoing phenomenon, then scholarly questions should shift from the identification of a new convergence culture to a discussion of how new forms of media convergence operate at a particular moment in time and how current media relate to previously existing technologies. Such a critical move requires assessing the specific qualities of a moment’s difference and making careful conclusions that refuse to overstate the uniqueness of the contemporary media context. Works Cited Arnheim, Rudolf. New Essays on the Psychology of Art. Berkeley: U of California

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Howard. New York: Hill and Wong, 2003. Bennett, Tony. “The Exhibitionary Complex.” Thinking About Exhibitions. Ed.

Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne. London: Routledge, 1996. 81-112.

Bergmann, Teresa. “A Critical Analysis of the California State Museum’s Railroad Films.” Western Journal of Communication 67 (2003): 427-48.

Caldwell, John T. “Introduction: Cultural Studies and the Global Political Economies of Television and Digital.” Emergences 11 (2001): 5-11.



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Caldwell, John T. “Critical Industrial Practice: Branding, Repurposing, and the Migratory Patterns of the Industrial Text.” Television and New Media 7 (2006): 99-134.

Carlson, A. Cheree and John E. Hocking. “Strategies of Redemption at the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial.” Western Journal of Speech Communication 52 (1988): 203-15.

Cartwright, Lisa. “Film and the Digital in Visual Studies: Film Studies in the Era of Convergence.” Journal of Visual Culture 1 (2002): 7-23.

Cassirer, Ernst. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Human Culture. Garden City: Doubleday, 1953.

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Documents

Inter Culture 6-1 2009 -- Visual Display and Media Ecology