Digital ghosts in the history museum: the haunting of today's mediascape

Abstract

In 2005, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum opened in Springfield, Illinois, offering a new-media-driven ghost show as its museological mission statement. Catalyzed by an innocent peek at the journal of a soldier in the 33rd Illinois Regiment, the show follows a researcher's quiet evening at the library as it turns into a phantasmagoric visitation by harrowing battlefield acoustics and ghosts of fallen soldiers. In a deft – and problematic – manipulation of the audience's assumptions about display technologies' capacities, the show puts digital media to the task of resuscitating the otherwise lifeless artefacts and positing history as a constructionist, adaptive pursuit. In this capacity, Ghosts of the Library helps us to address two interrelated issues critical to contemporary media studies: museology's debates about remediating historical artefacts via digital media and film theory's debates about the uncertain digitized future of cinema.

Notes

^1. “Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum Video Preview” is available at http://www.alplm.org/museum/ALPLMvideo_preview.html.

^2. All transcripts of the show's dialogue are my own. I viewed the show multiple times in the spring of 2005 and the summer of 2011. The show's script was identical on all occasions.

^3. Bob Rogers elaborates his role at the ALPLM in Bob Thompson's review of the museum: “History and Histrionics: Lincoln Library's High-Tech Exhibits Have Scholars Choosing Sides” (Washington Post, February 15, 2005).

^4. Scholarship on spirit photography includes the following: Gunning (1995, 2007), Leja (2004) and Chéroux (2005).

^5. Corresponding to Ghosts of the Library's participation in this media genealogy is its participation in the history of what Stephen Bann identifies as ‘technical surprises’ in museums (Bann 1984). So too does the museum's invocation of death and of reanimating life reveal its commonalities with a long line of museums and museum discourses. A museum historian wrote in 1939: ‘One purpose animates museums of history. This is to recreate the past in the minds of the living. Any history museums that are themselves dead are victims not of their concern with the past but of their unconcern about the present’ (Coleman 1939, 60).

^6. Alison Landsberg (2004) has dubbed this mediated experience ‘prosthetic memory’.

^7. Rogers's two patents are US Patent nos. 4,736,214, ‘Apparatus and Method for Producing Three-Dimensional Images from Two-Dimensional Sources’, and 4,805,895, ‘Image Forming Apparatus and Method’. Holavision's connection to ‘Pepper's Ghost’ was also posited in a newspaper article published around the time of the museum's opening: Jason Piscia, “A Clue from the Past” (The State-Journal Register, April 14–19, 2005). Rogers stops short of admitting outright that the ‘Pepper's Ghost’ technique is similar to his own.

^8. On the concept of remediation, see Bolter and Grusin (2003).

^9. The best scholarship on the phantasmagoria includes the following: Warner (2006), Heard (2006), Mannoni (2000), Gunning (2004), Barber (1989) and Castle (1988).

^10. Those who question digital inscription's status as a Peirciean index include Rosen (2001), Rodowick (2007) and Andrew (2010). For a healthy check on the relevancy of the index in these matters, see Soderman (2007).

^11. For these museological debates, see especially Parry (2007), Hein (2000), Henning (2006) and Roberts (1997).

^12. On the status of objects in museums, also see Kavanagh (2000, 98–103).

^13. Michelle Henning likewise argues that ‘new media is best thought of as a means to organize and structure knowledge and visitor attention, not as a means of communication or set of devices’ (Henning 2006, 303).

^14. Gaskell's discussion centres on the afterlife of art objects in particular: ‘… we must take account not only of the iconography and physical characteristics of the unique art object, but also of its afterlife, including its reproduction and incorporation within the art museum’ (2000, 14).

^15. Wolfgang Ernst has this to say: ‘Jules Michelet, historian of the French Revolution, believed he heard hallucinatorily the murmuring of the dead in the archive, as if documents were already the logocentric derivative of a gramophone. By his writings, he himself became a resonant body, a medium for the voices of the dead’ (Ernst 2006, 112).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ivan Ross

Ivan Ross is a filmmaker and film and media scholar with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His work is available at ivanross.com.