Discursive versus Immersive: The Museum is the Massage

Abstract

We live in an age in which everyday life is suspended within countless overlapping flows of information. Each of these overlapping flows operates as an immersive environment and as a discursive system of detection, analysis and visualization. To put it simply: all Google users, which is to say all users or all humans, since we have been redefined as users and we’re only valuable in as much as we are users, are treated simultaneously as researchers and consumers. Perhaps it is time to rephrase Barbara Kruger’s truism I shop therefore I am, into I research therefore I am.