The medium is the message.

Britain's National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (NMPFT) has been exemplary, perhaps even uniquely successful in capitalizing on the natural assets of a media museum. For such a museum is especially well positioned to put itself on display: the technologies of selection, reproduction and distribution that it employs to do its work are the same ones the visitors expect to see, "experience" and presumably learn more about. The NMPFT's exhibition policies include a deep reluctance to put anything behind glass; a firm commitment to audience-interactive installations; a preference for non-linear, "enter anywhere" exhibition organization; and an outright refusal of lengthy and complex printed information (labels must be less than 50 words). As much as photographic history, television production or the triumphs and vicissitudes of British cinema, technically mediated "user-friendliness" itself is on exhibit here.

On March 13, 1996 the NMPFT embarked on a new project called "Imaging Frontiers," which advances still further in the same direction. The project has been funded substantially through the National Lottery ([pounds]7.6 million) and the European Community ([pounds]3.5 million), with additional support from the Foundation for Sports and the Arts ([pounds]150,000). The total budget of [pounds]13.25 million (about $20 million) provides for a new building and facilities for presenting new applications of digitized pictures (in medicine, physical and biological sciences, etc.), "virtual galleries," and hands-on opportunities to access and transmit visually encoded information - that information, as might be expected, concerns the museum's own collections and activities. As museum director Amanda Nevill put it at the project's formal launch, "We are in a unique position to take advantage of these new creative technologies to create a Museum of the next century." To museum-watchers of all stripes, but particularly to those who would read the museum as "a key paradigm of contemporary cultural activities,"(1) such a project - a museum of the future - must pose a challenging set of questions.

The NMPFT is the "media wing" of the London-based National Museum of Science and Industry and holds the extremely rich national collections related to media technologies. In archival storage, for example, are the research notes and experimental results of William Henry Fox-Talbot's efforts to fix the camera obscura image in the 1830s. They include the first, legendary negative of the windows at Lacock Abbey. In significant respects, nevertheless, the NMPFT is a new museum - it was founded in 1983. In keeping with the Science Museum's general move to decentralize its activities at that time, the new organization was based in Bradford, West Yorkshire, where a suitable building - a former theater - was available, and a suitable partnership with the city council had been forged. The architecture in fact still functions to insure the centrality, both functional and physical, of IMAX screenings within the museum's full range of activities.

At the time the museum was founded, there were many who doubted the wisdom of moving a significant part of the national holdings so far from the nation's economic and cultural center. For Bradford is, both physically and conceptually, far from London. Once saddled with a reputation as a particularly "tough," bleak, Northern industrial city, Bradford now boasts a gracious, busy center, with well-preserved nineteenth-century architecture and the look of secure prosperity, to which the NMPFT contributes, and from which it benefits. Still, Bradford has yet to achieve the range of international connections, the cosmopolitan sheen of neighboring Manchester or Leeds; and Bradford's status as a thoroughly "English" city is reflected in the NMPFT's attendance statistics: there are very few visitors from abroad; about a third travel 15 miles or fewer; almost all travel fewer than 60. Repeat visitorship is gratifyingly high. Admission is free, and audience surveys have shown that some kinds of visitors come on a very regular - say weekly - basis: groups of teens, for example, may spend an hour there in preference to going to the shopping mall with their parents. The museum's conspicuous success in attracting visitors has in any case effectively drowned out the dissenting voices of the early 1980s. Actual attendance (218,000 visitors the first year; over 800,000 the second; and an average of 750,000 after five years) outstripped projections (150,000 annually) by roughly a factor of five. The NMPFT has, as staff members are always quick to point out, the highest attendance figures of any museum outside London. A particularly intractable dissenter might still ask, of course, what these figures actually mean, or more precisely whether they mean anything with respect to the museum's educational mission. To put it more bluntly and set it in the context of the yet-to-be-built "virtual galleries" promised in "Imaging Frontiers," one might reasonably ask how a visitor's encounter with virtual reality inside the museum would be any different from his or her encounter with it elsewhere, say in video games at the mall?

In an attempt to grasp the broad significance of the rising popularity of museums in recent years, Andreas Huyssen has suggested a model that seems particularly helpful in considering such a question.(2) Although he acknowledges the contemporary museum's pronounced tendency to function as a mass medium - surely exemplified with particular clarity in the NMPFT's exhibition policies, its physical centering around the IMAX theater, its attraction for sheer numbers of people - Huyssen is unwilling, however, to subsume the enterprise as just one more stultifying, homogenizing practice of the culture industry. Rather, he would see the museum's possibilities in terms of an alternative, a means of resisting the "progressive dematerialization of the world" through the virtual realities of computer networking and television. "The popularity of the museum is . . ." he writes,

a major cultural symptom of the crisis of the Western faith in modernization as a panacea. One way of judging its activities must be to determine to what extent it helps overcome the insidious ideology of the superiority of one culture over all others in space and time, to what extent and in what ways it opens itself to other representations, and how it will be able to foreground problems of representation, narrative, and memory in its designs and exhibits.

Does the NMPFT offer a field for such resistances? If so, it is no one's explicit intention. The modernist master narrative of continual technological progress still organizes the stories presented here, and when choices need to be made about which contributions to stress, which artifacts to show, it is the British contributor who wins out. To judge by the highly energized language and technically sophisticated imaging used to promote it, "Imaging Frontiers" will extend this narrative further: the new imaging technologies will be cast as inspiring releasers of human potential, mediators of infinite possibility. The phrase "museum of the future" involves a certain hyperbole - we all know that both the visitors and the imaging technology exist in the present. Yet the hyperbole is not just hype. This "future" quite explicitly refers to knowledge outside the visitor's field of comprehension. This knowledge first becomes representable as "the future" when the linear narrative of technological change is accepted as fully "natural" and "inevitable," as natural as the passage of time itself. Museums have arguably always offered a glimpse of authoritative knowledge and power. But knowledge of the past, or even of the present, leaves to visitors the possibility of sharing, or gaining access to the authority. To accept some body of knowledge as actually belonging to the "future," on the other hand, is surely to recognize one's own current knowledge as a part of the past. In the Museum of the Future we, inhabitants of the present, are already obsolete.

And yet there is no particular reason to think audiences receive information as producers hope or assume they do. As recent television-audience studies have demonstrated, the way that individuals and groups actually relate mass-media representations to their own experiences is extremely varied and difficult to predict - it may precisely contradict the coded intention of media producers, and be all the more effective for its audience's having shared in the process of "troping" - turning the meaning to a distinctly different purpose. An optimist might suppose that the Bradford museum "screens down" the modernist master-narrative, the "story" of technological progress, into such small, readily interchangeable "bytes" as to actually lose comprehensibility as the story. Instead, perhaps, the museum's exhibitions deliver the ruins of those stories, bits and pieces visitors can grasp partially and personally, according to how congenial they might be to immediate local circumstances. Perhaps the "museum of the future" is what the museum calls itself in order to win an opportunity - money, space, technology, expertise - to unlearn, to forget integrating wisdoms, and make way for multiple, disparate novelties to flourish.

NOTES

1. Andreas Huyssen, "Escape from Amnesia: the Museum as Mass Medium," Twilight Memories, (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 14

2. Ibid., pp. 13-15.

NANCY ROTH is Temporary Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Manchester.