Moving Image and Institution: Cinema and the Museum in the 21st Century

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moving Image and Institution: Cinema and the Museum in the 21st Century seeks to establish a new international forum for discussion of the physical and theoretical intersections between cinema, screen media and the moving image, and the museum and institutional art space. This international, interdisciplinary conference will run alongside a range of public events in and around Cambridge in early July, to draw attention to the converging interests of both Cinema and the Museum.

The conference itself aims to bring together academics, museum curators, museologists, architects, filmmakers and artists of national and international standing to discuss emerging issues in this field. Attracting delegates across the spectrum of the Arts and Humanities from a range of disciplines and sectors including film studies, museum studies, architecture, history of art, modern languages, cultural geography, anthropology, ethnography and archaeology, the conference will offer an exceptional environment where cross-connections can be fostered between these fields, in order to interrogate the future shape of the very cultural institutions in which they are so heavily invested.

Cinema and the Museum have a shared heritage of historical and socio-cultural development. Both emergent in the late 19th century as public institutions, but with very different infrastructures, the public concerns of the cinema and the museum have established them firmly within the cultural imaginary of many of the key dynamics of the 20th century – from popular spectacle to Futurism, from Surrealism to the emergence of the post-colonial world, from the avant-gardes to the aftermath of total war, from the information network to the cusp of the virtual world. Both Cinema and the Museum share an ambivalent relationship between the past and the future: while safeguarding, documenting and archiving the past is a part of their shared role, the shifting technologies and modalities of cinema and the museum are also instantiating fundamental changes to what constitutes the very concepts of ‘Cinema’ or ‘The Museum’.

In the 21st century museums have become extraordinary 'laboratories of change'; audio-visual media have permeated the museum space: from handheld devices to large screen projections, to interactive technologies at the intersections of material and digital culture. Cinema is entering the Museum, and the Museum is disseminating itself within the cinematic as a means of expanding its engagement with the public on multiple levels, including but certainly not limited to notions of viewing experience, immersion and object-interaction.