Sensory Archives of the Future: From Arms Fairs to Museums

This paper presents a methodological exploration of two ostensibly divergent field sites, arms fairs and the museum, and the curious sensory overlap that exists in these spaces of speculation, future-making and power. Museums and fairs share historical roots in world expositions and their representational logics, what Timothy Mitchell describes as a regime of perceiving the world; “a rendering up of the world as a thing to be viewed,” the idea that the world could be represented through objects such that we are convinced that the representations are truthful (Mitchell, 1989). At both sites, practices of collecting, curating, and exhibiting take a sensory turn, using gamefied, tactile multimedia exhibits – in the case of arms fairs in the UK, to showcase the latest policing and military commodities, and in ‘Museums of the Future’ to present speculative futures of society with technology. While both spaces constitute discrete institutions that hold different positions in public consciousness, this paper resists this division and thinks about these institutions together as ‘archives of the future’. At our field sites, the museum and the arms fair, the body is a site for meaning-making. Interactive activities require visitors to touch, listen, and move, often carried by affective first-person storytelling. Domínguez Rubio argues exhibits do not simply display, they make particular ideas legible and therefore meaningful. We argue that if the sensory experience is a core part of what is mobilized in making particular futures legible, then our methods should also take this into account. Exploring the political potentials of emotions and in the activation of senses, this paper explores the limitations when our methods fail to capture such elements from official records and research.