Assembling Arosenius–staging a digital archive

Abstract

Starting from the theoretical literature on narratives in archives and exhibitions this article investigates pedagogical approaches to letting museum visitors establish meaningful narratives through digitised archive material. The aspect of activating the audience in a museum exhibition is tightly linked to the curatorial approach and aims with an exhibition, but also to the possibilities that arise from the archival material and its digital form. As a case study, the project has focused on a painting by the Swedish artist Ivar Arosenius (1878–1909), exhibited in the Gothenburg Museum of Art. It has been associated with four different sets of digitised material from the Arosenius Archive, each made available through a distinct Augmented Reality interface. The different types of archival items contribute in different ways to the purposes of contextualisation and activation and have various affect values. An employment of archival material may contribute to creating affect by taking away the intermediary. The audience can naturally connect with the archive, thus providing it with a perceived direct contact to the artist. As the archival material, that is the original voices, is left uncommented, the audience can form its own conceptions of the treated aspect.