This thesis describes research into the creative use of digital three-dimensional (3D) technologies in museums. It examines how digital 3D reproductions of museum artefacts support creative engagement and enhance museum experience. Digital 3D models of museum artefacts are malleable; they allow users to create new artworks through digital manipulation and transformation. 3D printing technologies enable users to translate digital 3D models directly into physical forms. This research investigates how these technologies can impact on museum engagement and makes recommendations for museums exploring the possible uses of digital 3D technologies. A contextual review, informed by ongoing developments in the field of digital heritage and a critical review of published literature, identifies key issues examined in the research. These include the ways in which reproductive digital 3D technologies can foster unprecedented audience access to museum collections, democratise art interventions in museums and engage with the museum ‘dream space’. The rationale for the use of qualitative research methods in the study is explained and the case studies undertaken during the research are described. The investigation of artworks created by participants in the case studies; data from interviews with artists, museum staff and museum visitors, provide insights into how digital 3D reproductions foster new experiences with museum artefacts. In this research, reproductive digital 3D technologies are shown to support creative forms of museum engagement, to democratise museum interventions and increase public access to museum collections. They engage users with personal and subrational forms of museum experience. Furthermore, the use of digital technologies in museums has been shown, in this research, to trigger learning experiences and increase historical awareness and digital literacy. Recommendations are made for institutional approaches to the use of digital 3D technologies and for future research in the area of creative engagement with digital heritage.

This research analyses peoples’ historical consciousness (how they make sense of the past) in relation to their visit to two history museums in Mexico City. Through the combined use of interpretative qualitative visitor studies and a historical perspective it was possible to identify five different approaches or ways in which people made sense of the past in the museum (remembering, imagining and empathising, explaining and interpreting, believing and belonging, and perceiving and experiencing the material). This finding will help broaden current debates about historical consciousness, which have tended to focus mostly on explanatory patterns developed through school history education. Furthermore, the research argues that although there is individual variability depending on how people use those five approaches, there is still an intimate connection with the historical culture (broader social patterns of history-making specific to the way people relate to the past). Through a holistic analysis that placed the museum within a social environment, coexisting with different agents of history-making (for example the State, school, family, the historical discipline and the media), the research shows how those connections impacted on peoples’ interpretation of the past in the museum. It also shows the pervasive influence of present conditions on peoples’ historical consciousness as they visited the museum. Thus, by bringing together theories and methodologies that had not been used together in this way, the research has contributed to the historical discipline, and to museum and visitor studies alike. The contribution is enhanced by addressing a particular context – Mexican museums – that is currently underdeveloped in both Spanish and English literature. Finally, the thesis allows further reflection on issues such as State intervention, family socialisation, nationhood, and knowledge and trust building.

Performing Building Sites is the formulation of one of many possible critical strategies for curating. Performing Building Sites are approached as subject, site, and/or metaphor, proposing an understanding of architecture and construction as processual and hybrid fields of material and spatial practice. The project aims to explore methods for curatorial analysis and intervention on space, spanning from theoretical to practice oriented approaches. The Thesis is developed as both an academic research and as a curatorial project, extending the new research field of Curatorial Knowledge. The curator is proposed as a field practitioner, studying and intervening in existing spaces, and, sometimes, creating space. Central to this argument are theoretical and empirical knowings acquired through fieldwork. Situating the curator in space, producing research on spaces, suggests an implicated position for curating, and researching: in/on/through space. The academic research closely articulates with questions from a personal body of work developed by the author along a decade as an architect/researcher/curator. The images accompanying the study are (mostly) originals generated from fieldwork by the author and partners. Mostly set for curators, researchers and other spatial practitioners.

My research intends to critically expose the political, economic, and ethical conditions in which curatorial practice is operating in the current context. I attempt to examine the question of authorship within curatorial practice, in order to challenge the distinction between an administrative, scholarly practice carried out in the name of an institution and an authorial and entrepreneurial practice that is exemplary of late capitalism. I thus intend to challenge the figure of the curator that has been disciplined by and is expected to function within current political and economic conditions. I will endeavour to disrupt the stable roles and functions associated with the figure of the curator and instead uncover multiple subject positions, which collapse professional templates and fail traditional oppositions between activity and passivity. I therefore begin with a reflection on the condition of spectatorship inherent to curatorial practice, and propose that the curator is the quintessential spectator. This is outlined in order to dispute the ideological deadlock regarding spectatorship and to address fundamental notions of vision and attention within curatorial practice. I will then propose to re-evaluate the notion of passivity in order to question assumptions regarding power and activity, putting forward examples that show the paradoxical qualities that passivity encompasses in the context of curatorial practice. Spectatorship and passivity fundamentally contribute to reconfiguring the possibility for a different approach to the production of subjectivity within and through curatorial practice. Through the notion of fabulation I finally intend to redefine the production of subjectivity in the context of curatorial practice. Fabulation stages an inquiry into the differentiation between artistic and curatorial practices: not to erase differences or flatten out competencies but to rather affirm a different distribution of positions, and inhabit a multiplicity of figures.

Based on theoretical research (for example Fried 1967; Krauss 1979; Graham & Cook 2010; Mondloch 2010; Trodd 2011) and five distinctive art case studies (Videographies: The Early Decades [2005], China Power Station: Part I [2006]), performance ( ... some trace of her [2008]) and public spaces (Under Scan [2008] and Temenos 2012 [2012]) this thesis traces the interrelation between curating, institutions and exhibition practices through screen-based works, specifically using the term to denote screen media in physical space and within an arts context. The field of curatorship in relation to the above is foregrounded, paradigm shifts explored, and changing relationships between audience and display examined. In the five case studies, the curator is respectively a member of the permanent museum staff, a theatre director in collaboration with a video artist, an artist in collaboration with a team of assistants and technicians, and a filmmaker who re-enacts the vision he shared with his long-term partner. I argue that the role of the curator has moved away from being the solely the keeper of a museum to a more complex range of public activities and promotions just as screen media operates within an interdisciplinary field of practices. The thesis claims that the different spaces in which screen-based habitus operates need to be renegotiated. Blurring the boundaries between disciplines, I provide a conceptual framework and a rationale for analysing how screens can be curated by emphasising the challenges that arise when screens are no longer contained within a museum space. New juxtapositions between work, audience, and context emerge, which I question and place under scrutiny.

Betrayal is proposed in this dissertation as a concept that is informed by political theory and by curatorial concepts. Betrayal is conceptualized here as an entanglement of antagonistic relations. It is proposed as an engagement with an antagonism while withdrawing from its underlying logic. Betrayal is presented as a variety of approaches through a set of proposals which include exhaustion, anachronism, fictionalism, demonstration and acting. Written in the context of curatorial work in Israel-Palestine, this dissertation proposes several qualities of the field of the curatorial and applies them to political theory. Betrayal is considered operational through the field of the curatorial as the curatorial provides a setting for activating potentialities. In the three chapters of this dissertation, Betrayal is developed through an active reading of the lives and work of several figures as method: Alcibiades son of Cleinias, a fifth century BC Athenian politician; the last book published by Sigmund Freud during his lifetime: Moses and Monotheism; and Bertolt Brecht’s notion of Acting in relation to Hannah Arendt’s political Action. Informed by the curatorial ability to articulate connectedness and activating potentialities, this dissertation deploys Betrayal as a set of strategies that include formation, narrative and agency. The way these entangle antagonisms involves different ways of articulating practices that can move inside-out, can destabilize inwards and can shift the site of articulation of politics itself. The curatorial and Betrayal are thus the centre of this dissertation as it aims to provide a tool for operating in politics.

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The study of religious dimensions of visitor experiences in public museums is an under-researched area, partly because of assumptions of the secular nature of the museum space, the dominant assumptions and methods of museum evaluation studies and the relative lack of study of material religion in public spaces not intended to be devotional. This project addresses this by examining the processes through which visitors experience sacred presences in the museum. This research employed Actor Network Theory (Latour 2004) in order to decentre the more prominent components within visitor studies and evaluations (such as the visitor). Using ANT, this study conceives religious interactions as networks that combine objects, people and divine/supernatural presences, all of which have the capacity to affect the network. This network approach was then used to explore and analyse interactions at two religious-themed exhibitions at the British Museum, and the religious tour groups that visit its permanent galleries. The study found that the sacred was evoked in a number of ways in the museum; through embodied interactions with artefacts, as memories, and through engagements with scripture. Each encounter had to negotiate an array of actors that were both present and absent within the museum space. These actors, which had the ability to facilitate and inhibit visitors' religious experiences, included elements often overlooked by museum professionals and within visitor studies (such as overheard comments and glass display cases). The findings also revealed how perceptions of the museum as secular shaped visitor norms and thereby influenced whether the museum became a site of conflict or opportunity for sacred encounters. Furthermore, the research demonstrated the limited capacity of museum staff to influence visitors’ interactions as, irrespective of the museum’s intentions, the commingling of certain objects, spaces and visitors can facilitate experiences of the divine.

Although there are many studies on interactivity in museums in terms of enhancing learning, achieving educational objectives, structuring and orchestrating visitor engagement, democratising knowledge, exploring social interaction and bringing more audiences in to the museum space, they often do not take the multifaceted nature and context-dependency of interactivity into account. Throughout the thesis, I argue that the practice of digital interactivity in museum spaces should not be fetishized, but it must be examined and understood, depending on the context and the setting it takes place in. The approach undertaken in this study brings philosophical and theoretical perspectives on physical, emotional and technological interactivity and its multiple threads into dialogue with ethnographic research in two exhibition spaces: the permanent Galleries of Modern London, at the Museum of London, and the temporary High Arctic exhibition, at the National Maritime Museum, London. The study extends existing literature in two respects. First, attention is paid to the concerns reflected in different approaches to the digital interactivity in museum spaces: I term factual and poetic interactivity as two techniques and forms directly related to the empirical examples. The analysis and this distinction offer a platform to theorise and discuss nuances and tendencies of digital interactivity in museum spaces. Second, it identifies the multiplicity of modes of interactivity as perceived by visitors and museum professionals in and around two museums, foregrounding not only the technological aspect, but also the content and the processes of interaction through sensorial and embodied means such as touch, play and immersion. Together, the findings foreground and engage with an approach to digital interactivity, which discusses how a complex assemblage of institutional practices, multisensory experiences, and affective and cognitive dimensions are at work and at play in digitally mediated environments.