Exhibiting Cultures Through Multimedia

model. This is one of a number of features of what Marcus (1998) promotes in his treatise on multisite ethnography. He writes: The most common construction of holism in contemporary realist ethnography... is the situation of the ethnographic subject and scene as a knowable, fully probed micro-world with reference to an encompassing macro-world –the "system"– which, presumably, is not knowable or describable in the same terms that the local world of the ethnographic subject can be. The political discourse of multisite ethnography is built partly on an awareness that the tools of research and representation can be used to impose authority; uses of multiple views and voices and of syneasthesia return agency and individuality to the subject of research and to the viewerreader as well. The methods parallel a number of other politically oriented discussions of culture, language, and power (i.e. DeCerteau 1984, Deleuze & Guattari 1987, Rabinow 2003) that also explore relationships between power and modes of discourse. If there were dialogs in the exhibit to be uncovered, they were not in the relation between cultures or between the speaker and viewers but rather between the dozen or so participants and the primary museum curator. In this relationship, the curator remained the authority; there was little room for an alternative structure to emerge through collaboration and interaction and few ways to gauge the exchange between cultures. It was a picture of how a museum negotiates its relationship to the process of exhibition in the context of contemporary cultural debates about presentation. As the Philadelphia curator, John Zarobell, explained to me, whatever you see out here in the exhibition hall is not what happens in the offices up stairs where all there materials are put together in fixed structures because, "that's what we do in museums; like it or not, we are in the business of categorizing." The voices did provide a way of contextualizing some of the presented objects and, syneasthetically, of relating them to a voice. The use of multiple voices fell short in providing dialog and counterpoints to the expression of the meanings of objects; the problem is no less a problem for websites that offer definitions of the meanings of cultural objects without juxtaposing views or placing them in evolving associative structures – or juxtapositions – and dialog. And, the same is true of syneasthetic aspects of the presentation. In African Art, African Voices, voices helped to describe the objects. in turn, and more interestingly perhaps, the objects help describe the speakers by functioning as calatysts in the memory-recall and storytelling process. Where there grew gaps between the storytelling and the objects, the viewer is implicated in the linking process. Departing from the object to hear about a persona dn place, then returning to the object now reframed. But what of the sensorium of which both the objects and speakers were at sometime a part? Doesn't it also have a temporally evolving character? Sounds of traditional music are only a fragment of the audible experience of cultural life in an African – or any– community. This was related partly through the videos included in the show. Websites driven by text and HTML or Marcromedia design tools and by the agenda of conveying information share this dilemma of the exhibit; presenting the sensorium risks muddying the neat presentation of objects, the categorizations, and spatializing of works out of time. A sensorium, one for example, alive with the mixing sounds of the street blends the sounds of differing times and cultures showing how they living in actuality. They are not distinguished by terms such as "tradition" and "modernity" except through convention. And what do those terms distinguish; aren't they artificial categories themselves introduced by the West? African Art, African Voices aimed for polyvocality and syneasthesia butreenforced authority, excluding exhibition materials from positions of flux anddiscourse, while also reenforcing geopolitical categorizations; missing werethe characteristics of time – of objects and events and people's liveschanging meaning through dialog, shifting contexts, and time itself, such asthrough growth and decay. The nature of a hidden authority such as thecurator is no less present in Webworks, where the hand of the designer isconcealed in code, spatializing link structures, and categorizing indexes. Thechallenge for the use of polyvocality whether in the physical museum exhibit,or virtual ones, is a challenge of time: creating interactive works thatintegrate flux, genuine dialog, and a discourse that does not subject ongoingcultural practices to the objectifying timelessness of the "traditional". ReferencesBarrett, E. and M. Redmond (1995). Contextual Media: MultimediaAnd Interpretation. 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