Information Age, Science Museum, London
This permanent gallery about communication technologies does a lot with the materials at its disposal, but Danny Birchall wanted to hear a wider range of voices tell the story
London’s Science Museum is permanently in transition. As temporary exhibitions open and close, as old galleries are mothballed and new ones inaugurated, each visit is likely to reveal something new.
Nowhere has this change been more apparent recently than on the second floor of the museum, where the past three years have seen the Oramics to Electronica exhibition on the history of electronic music, the opening of Media Space, which is devoted to the museum’s photographic collections, and a display about the interdisciplinary maverick James Lovelock.
Joining them now at the other end of the floor is the first new permanent gallery opened as part of the museum’s five-year, £60m masterplan. Occupying the space where the shipping gallery once sat, Information Age: Six Networks That Changed Our World, is devoted to making sense of the material history of modern communications technology.
The design of the gallery is gratifyingly light and airy. Many exhibitions about information technology attempt to impart the urgency of a connected society through intense, crowded design. By contrast, Information Age gives the objects room to breathe and visitors space to reflect.
The six “network” sections into which the gallery’s story is broken down are clustered around six tall “story boxes” containing interactive content, linked by an elliptical balcony. In the centre of the gallery is a six-metre-tall copper and wood aerial tuning inductor from Rugby Radio Station, looking more like a work of art than a technological artefact.
Victorian internet
The story opens with Cable, the invention of telegraph networks, and the birth of the “Victorian internet” girdling an imperial globe. Displays of valves, cables and morse tappers are supplemented by elegant and simple interactive models in brass and white.
Broadcast tells the story of the evolution of radio, and then television, from hobbyists to national broadcasters. Models of the Post Office Tower and the 160-metre-tall Russian broadcasting transmitter, the Shabolovka Tower, emphasise the physical scale of the infrastructure that was needed to enable broadcasting networks.
The growth of telephone networks is explored in Exchange. A section of the Enfield telephone exchange with its rows of jackplug sockets illustrates the amount of (mostly female) labour that went into keeping people connected before automated exchanges did away with operators.
Constellation introduces the next generation of communication technologies linked by satellite. An incongruous Tomahawk missile hanging from the ceiling is a grim reminder that the GPS technology on which our smartphones routinely rely was only opened up to the public as a result of the US army’s need for civilian equipment in the first Gulf war.
Web brings us to the era of the modern internet, from dial-up connections to broadband, and the personal computers that connected individuals to the internet, including the NeXT computer on which the world wide web inventor Tim Berners-Lee created the first web server.
The final network, Cell, is the one that supports our ubiquitous mobile phones. A display of also-ran technologies (remember Rabbit phones?) reminds us that technology does not always proceed in a straight line.
A mobile phone call box acquired in Cameroon and reassembled for the gallery illustrates how, in the developing world, mobile networks now reach areas landlines never did.
Royal tweet
As with any major new gallery, the experience is of course extended and expanded digitally. The Science Museum website provides background with commissioned films and the opportunity to explore objects from the collections, as well as an online game.
The InfoAge+ app provides gallery-based challenges for family and school groups, and the ubiquitous digital artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has created a light and sound installation in the gallery itself.
With the help of another app, Fiducial Voice Beacons allows you to explore the voices of the information age embedded in light “beacons” in the ceiling of the gallery, and to add your own voice.
Participatory moments such as this are the best part of Information Age, where social and cultural history shows how telecommunications technology has been used by real people. A collection of actual telegrams, selected from a public project, is a human counterpoint to a story about technology.
The story box for Broadcast displays televisual moments embedded in our collective memory, including England’s World Cup victory in 1966 and the 1953 coronation. (In a corresponding PR coup, the Queen sent her first tweet at the gallery’s official opening.)
The most moving, perhaps, is a cubbyhole devoted to the early history of the Samaritans charity. It shows how a small group of volunteers saw the immense potential of the telephone as a therapeutic tool, a telling counterpoint to the organisation’s recent problems with a Twitter app designed to alert people when their followers are “struggling to cope” or suffering a depressive episode.
Gender stereotypes
But these moments are spread too thinly in a gallery dominated by more than 800 objects and artefacts, where, for the most part, technology tells the story. And the story that the technology tells is a British one, of the BBC and British Telecom.
Though this is undoubtedly shaped by the Science Museum’s own collections, it’s hard to escape the imperial overtones in an exhibition about global communications networks.
It is also a story mostly told by men. Although the participatory voices are often female, the story of the technology itself is led by male voices, in labels, panel texts and on explainer video screens.
In the interactive cube devoted to the internet, a conversation between Berners-Lee and the comedian Josie Long in particular feels depressingly like yet another example of a clever man explaining to a perplexed woman how “complicated” technology functions.
A permanent museum gallery such as Information Age is not to be taken lightly: as a multi-disciplinary project years in the making, it has to inform and entertain visitors for a long time, and appear up-to-date while not obviously of its time.
Information Age does a lot with the materials at its disposal and is far from exhausted in a single visit. And yet it is a gallery that, with its dependence on narratives of technology and slender connections between objects and experience, seems to be looking into the Science Museum’s past rather than its future.
Next in the masterplan is a new mathematics gallery designed by Zaha Hadid, scheduled to open in 2016. We should hope that its content will be as forward-looking as the reputation of its big-name architect.
Danny Birchall is the digital manager at the Wellcome Collection
Information Age combines innovative digital interpretation, immersive environments and more traditional showcase displays to engage visitors with over 800 objects that illustrate 200 years of communication and information technology.
In a Science Museum first, the gallery features a suite of transparent interactive LCD screens that sit in front of significant objects from our collections. These innovative displays allow visitors to discover more about each object through elegant animation and storytelling while using creative lighting to retain the object in central view.
It took several months of research and collaboration between the exhibition and conservation teams to make sure this type of display was able to meet required standards of conservation while supporting audience enjoyment of the collections.
Several showcases have been engineered to include video screens. This enables important archive films to be presented alongside related objects and to form an integral part of the narrative within each case.
A series of interactive replicas of historical objects also give visitors hands-on experience of how each one received, sent or processed information. These electromechanical exhibits use sensors to track visitor interaction. As a visitor uses the model they can see in real time how the information is transmitted.
At the heart of each Information Age “network” sits a story box, a large semi-enclosed space that brings the six gallery themes to life in surprising and creative ways.
Each story box was developed in collaboration with leading artists and thinkers, and utilises different technologies to deliver each creative idea, from LEDs and video environments to multiple screen projections, mobile phone-controlled animations and even a mechanical puppet theatre.
Anne Prugnon is the new media manager of Information Age
Nowhere has this change been more apparent recently than on the second floor of the museum, where the past three years have seen the Oramics to Electronica exhibition on the history of electronic music, the opening of Media Space, which is devoted to the museum’s photographic collections, and a display about the interdisciplinary maverick James Lovelock.
Joining them now at the other end of the floor is the first new permanent gallery opened as part of the museum’s five-year, £60m masterplan. Occupying the space where the shipping gallery once sat, Information Age: Six Networks That Changed Our World, is devoted to making sense of the material history of modern communications technology.
The design of the gallery is gratifyingly light and airy. Many exhibitions about information technology attempt to impart the urgency of a connected society through intense, crowded design. By contrast, Information Age gives the objects room to breathe and visitors space to reflect.
The six “network” sections into which the gallery’s story is broken down are clustered around six tall “story boxes” containing interactive content, linked by an elliptical balcony. In the centre of the gallery is a six-metre-tall copper and wood aerial tuning inductor from Rugby Radio Station, looking more like a work of art than a technological artefact.
Victorian internet
The story opens with Cable, the invention of telegraph networks, and the birth of the “Victorian internet” girdling an imperial globe. Displays of valves, cables and morse tappers are supplemented by elegant and simple interactive models in brass and white.
Broadcast tells the story of the evolution of radio, and then television, from hobbyists to national broadcasters. Models of the Post Office Tower and the 160-metre-tall Russian broadcasting transmitter, the Shabolovka Tower, emphasise the physical scale of the infrastructure that was needed to enable broadcasting networks.
The growth of telephone networks is explored in Exchange. A section of the Enfield telephone exchange with its rows of jackplug sockets illustrates the amount of (mostly female) labour that went into keeping people connected before automated exchanges did away with operators.
Constellation introduces the next generation of communication technologies linked by satellite. An incongruous Tomahawk missile hanging from the ceiling is a grim reminder that the GPS technology on which our smartphones routinely rely was only opened up to the public as a result of the US army’s need for civilian equipment in the first Gulf war.
Web brings us to the era of the modern internet, from dial-up connections to broadband, and the personal computers that connected individuals to the internet, including the NeXT computer on which the world wide web inventor Tim Berners-Lee created the first web server.
The final network, Cell, is the one that supports our ubiquitous mobile phones. A display of also-ran technologies (remember Rabbit phones?) reminds us that technology does not always proceed in a straight line.
A mobile phone call box acquired in Cameroon and reassembled for the gallery illustrates how, in the developing world, mobile networks now reach areas landlines never did.
Royal tweet
As with any major new gallery, the experience is of course extended and expanded digitally. The Science Museum website provides background with commissioned films and the opportunity to explore objects from the collections, as well as an online game.
The InfoAge+ app provides gallery-based challenges for family and school groups, and the ubiquitous digital artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has created a light and sound installation in the gallery itself.
With the help of another app, Fiducial Voice Beacons allows you to explore the voices of the information age embedded in light “beacons” in the ceiling of the gallery, and to add your own voice.
Participatory moments such as this are the best part of Information Age, where social and cultural history shows how telecommunications technology has been used by real people. A collection of actual telegrams, selected from a public project, is a human counterpoint to a story about technology.
The story box for Broadcast displays televisual moments embedded in our collective memory, including England’s World Cup victory in 1966 and the 1953 coronation. (In a corresponding PR coup, the Queen sent her first tweet at the gallery’s official opening.)
The most moving, perhaps, is a cubbyhole devoted to the early history of the Samaritans charity. It shows how a small group of volunteers saw the immense potential of the telephone as a therapeutic tool, a telling counterpoint to the organisation’s recent problems with a Twitter app designed to alert people when their followers are “struggling to cope” or suffering a depressive episode.
Gender stereotypes
But these moments are spread too thinly in a gallery dominated by more than 800 objects and artefacts, where, for the most part, technology tells the story. And the story that the technology tells is a British one, of the BBC and British Telecom.
Though this is undoubtedly shaped by the Science Museum’s own collections, it’s hard to escape the imperial overtones in an exhibition about global communications networks.
It is also a story mostly told by men. Although the participatory voices are often female, the story of the technology itself is led by male voices, in labels, panel texts and on explainer video screens.
In the interactive cube devoted to the internet, a conversation between Berners-Lee and the comedian Josie Long in particular feels depressingly like yet another example of a clever man explaining to a perplexed woman how “complicated” technology functions.
A permanent museum gallery such as Information Age is not to be taken lightly: as a multi-disciplinary project years in the making, it has to inform and entertain visitors for a long time, and appear up-to-date while not obviously of its time.
Information Age does a lot with the materials at its disposal and is far from exhausted in a single visit. And yet it is a gallery that, with its dependence on narratives of technology and slender connections between objects and experience, seems to be looking into the Science Museum’s past rather than its future.
Next in the masterplan is a new mathematics gallery designed by Zaha Hadid, scheduled to open in 2016. We should hope that its content will be as forward-looking as the reputation of its big-name architect.
Danny Birchall is the digital manager at the Wellcome Collection
Focus on... display
Information Age combines innovative digital interpretation, immersive environments and more traditional showcase displays to engage visitors with over 800 objects that illustrate 200 years of communication and information technology.
In a Science Museum first, the gallery features a suite of transparent interactive LCD screens that sit in front of significant objects from our collections. These innovative displays allow visitors to discover more about each object through elegant animation and storytelling while using creative lighting to retain the object in central view.
It took several months of research and collaboration between the exhibition and conservation teams to make sure this type of display was able to meet required standards of conservation while supporting audience enjoyment of the collections.
Several showcases have been engineered to include video screens. This enables important archive films to be presented alongside related objects and to form an integral part of the narrative within each case.
A series of interactive replicas of historical objects also give visitors hands-on experience of how each one received, sent or processed information. These electromechanical exhibits use sensors to track visitor interaction. As a visitor uses the model they can see in real time how the information is transmitted.
At the heart of each Information Age “network” sits a story box, a large semi-enclosed space that brings the six gallery themes to life in surprising and creative ways.
Each story box was developed in collaboration with leading artists and thinkers, and utilises different technologies to deliver each creative idea, from LEDs and video environments to multiple screen projections, mobile phone-controlled animations and even a mechanical puppet theatre.
Anne Prugnon is the new media manager of Information Age
Project data
- Cost £15.6m
- Funders and sponsors Heritage Lottery Fund; BT; ARM; Bloomberg Philanthropies;Google; Garfield Weston Foundation; Wolfson Foundation, Bonita Trust; Motorola Solutions Foundation; Accenture
- Design Universal Design Studio
- Graphic design Bibliothèque Design
- AV Spiral
- Principal contractor Beck