Digital mediation and museum space

This article discusses the addition of digital exhibition platforms to the interior environment of museums, considering their implications for notions of interior space and for the museum visitor. To begin to unravel their electronically charged spatial orders, the article explores the complex technological features of some platforms (referred to here as "digital containers"), linking their characteristics to associated dimension of visitors' experience and response. Digital containers offer new modes of engagement for audiences, curators, designers, and content developers. They appear to satisfy many pressures facing contemporary cultural and knowledge institutions, but their effect - including their interplay with the physical space of the museum interior - is not well understood. This article argues that they cannot be addressed as an abstract, technological category of things, no matter how much the museum sector might like to idealize their nature and purpose. Institutions need to address the complexity of each platform as it really is in itself, in time and in the space of the museum, especially by understanding what visitors' experience in them. © Berg 2012.