Smokingboot

Its a fair point about children learning (and adults) - but thats only a fraction of any museums function and I feel they have got the balance wrong with it these days. Its fine to have some interactivity with exhibits, but its actually getting damn hard to find the exhibits!

Its increasingly all about interacting with multimedia displays so the exhibit is no longer the actual artifact, but a copy, or worse still an image of the artifact. I would have thought there is an argument for the creation of interactive learning centres, but these are not museums, whose main remit is the preservation and display of the artifacts themselves.

As an example- the Tutankhamen exhibition has to tour because the artifacts are actual, physical objects that are unique. You can only see them at the museum that holds them or when they are loaned out to other museums for display. You could, however, create an interactive 'mummy' exhibit about Tutankhamen and have it replicated in interactive learning centres around the world. So why have the actual exhibits tour? Because the artifacts themselves have a presence and power, and you can observe them without the process being edited by an interactive designer. People queue not to play with them, but to be in their presence because artifacts have a reality of their own, and you can learn from that.

Surely history IS almost completely dead. Unless it is contemporary history about living memory it is 100% about the dead. We can play pretend and 'bring them to life' from time to time to time, but the originals are past and we can only communicate with them authentically through 'relics' and artifacts they have left behind. 'Living' history is simulation. I am not arguing that we should not have living history simulations-I like them and they have great value. But would it be right to take a castle and deny people access to it, forcing them to go see a new version you built down the road for living history with people in period costume? (Famous cave paintings in France have done just that-you can't see the real thing anymore).
Museums are opportunities to be in the presence of the relics of the past surely? Now there's nothing wrong with having theme days in a castle, playing a bit with display cases in a museum by having interactivity adjacent to them, but some museums are increasingly replacing the original artifacts on display with virtual experiences and locking the original items in a vault. Maybe I would feel better about it all if museums got grants to build annexes for learning centres-that would be great.

Besides, you could create a single interactive learning centre in every city (maybe even every town) in the world if you had the money and will for it, which would be great as a learning opportunity. They would not actually have to be connected to any museums at all except to gain media resources for the interactive exhibits and some expertise. I don't think the museums which have a legitimate activity with the actual artifacts of the past should be taking up significant amounts of space that was once used for this to host virtual exhibits that could be seen anywhere.

Its perhaps worth taking into account that our view of the past and death, of tradition and history is very different these days, and perhaps not in a good way- most people are scared of it, or removed from it, when in the past they were intimate with it. Roman families had the spirits of their ancestors as protectors, medieval tombs showed effigies of the departed crawling maggots. More recently you have Victorian photographs of dead children. Most people find these hard to relate to- my feeling is that this is almost 100% because we live in simulations not reality. It is a part of a spiritual death we are now facing- in denying death we are becoming undead.