The multimodal multiverse of museums:
meanings, practices and wormholes

Museums, whether large or small, public or private, are multimodal constellations par excellence. As museum practitioners have always known, and as scholars of museum studies have long established, a museum is never only about the gathering of an object, it is also about its display and hence, its engagement with the public. The activity of gathering is already a meaning-making one, involving identification and selection of some objects rather than others, but the activities of display and engagement introduce a raft of other meaning-making processes. On a plinth or in a glass box? On its own or with other similar objects? Or different ones? With a label or without? An identifying label or an interpretative one? Should the audience be challenged in their interpretation? Are they allowed to touch it? In which room should it go? In which gallery? Is a new museum needed to house this? And so it goes on. Countless decisions, explicit and implicit, go into the multiverse that makes up a working museum.

In many ways, these are self-evident facts. Recognising the complexity of these decisions is one thing, but accounting for them with an overarching theoretical framework is another. In terms of disciplinary developments, we are only just beginning to understand the diverse communicative practices which make up a museum, be these in the form of long-studied resources such as language, in appreciating the semiotic role of diverse resources which would once have been ignored, such as placement, or in understanding new resources afforded by digital technologies. In terms of practice, museums today are under particular pressure to be hyper-aware of the implications of all of their multimodal resources, and of what meanings can be made when they come together.

To contribute to this field, it is essential to prioritise questions of meaning. It is too easy to get stuck on questions of form, such as whether the right word, font or colour is being used, as fundamental as these can be. Rather, we need to understand at a deep level how a museum’s decisions tell us about who and what the museum is, how it connects with us, and how it works as a whole. As researchers, we must work in partnership with these organisations, rather than seeing them just as objects of study. And it would help to find the wormholes which interconnect the many layers of this multiverse. I believe that researchers of multimodality have the tools to do this. In this presentation, I highlight recent and interesting work that addresses these questions, from the points of view of multimodal study and museum practice (Ravelli et al, in prep), and I identify just one of the challenges that remains for scholars of multimodality: intersemiosis, aka one of the wormholes of the multiverse.

Reference

Ravelli, L.; Diamantopoulou, S.; Blunden, J.; Proctor, S.; and Wu, X. (in prep) Museum Communication in the 21 st Century: Diversifying voices, practices and reach. Routledge.