On the morning of last Friday we were cast out from the sanctuary of St. Deiniol’s and sauntered over to Manchester, where the Museum of Science and Industry (rather wonderfully acronymed MOSI) kindly took us in for a few hours and gave us some behind-the-scenes insights. Of particular interest for me was doing some of the activities they normally give kids – we were invited to hold pieces from the museum’s collection blindfolded and try to identify them by touch. The rationale was that this gives a clearer insight into the ‘object-ness’ of the exhibits, and gets you thinking about them as material things rather than as othered exhibits.
Initially, I was sceptical – but this raised a lot of questions in my mind about how museums in general, and science museums in particular, work. Is their purpose simply to induce a reverence for the past, for example? Visiting immediately after the catastrophic failure of Copenhagen, it was difficult to see no thought-provoking, let alone negative, signs about the consequences of industrial revolution anywhere. This line of thinking suggests another – and one much more connected to the themes we’d been discussing that week: how do museums function as a site for the cultural production of science? Surely, even more so than the humble ‘text’, the museum is the fault-line for all sorts of interesting cultural happenings.
This has, alas, little directly to do with my Ph.D – it’s a Ph.D in itself, probably several, and I’m sure they already exist. But it’s nice to think that pieces of work like that and pieces like mine can bear on each other, and this week was proof of that kind of thing. It was certainly interesting to hear MOSI employees talk about the extents to which their agenda is variously determined by footfall, economics, aesthetics, object-ethics, politics, and so on and so forth. I wish I could marshall these thoughts into something more interesting, but it was certainly a great new series of ideas to be exposed to, however briefly, and I shall keep mulling away…
Will Tattersdill