Exhibitions as philosophical carpentry: On object-oriented exhibition-making

This chapter explores the notion of seeing exhibitions as philosophical laboratories, sites for thinking about things. It suggests that alongside the normal ‘content-driven’ research done in museums – whether that might be the history of Viking travels, 19th century developments in surgery and so on – museums are also uniquely suited for philosophical inquiry into the nature of ‘thingness’ itself, to the status and effects of the objects and the wider material world that we are a subset of. Essentially, that museums can make exhibitions which not only put things on display, but also explore ‘thingness’, the philosophical qualities of the material world. It does so through a reading of the object-oriented philosophy presented by philosopher and media theorist Ian Bogost in the book Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to be a Thing (2012). The chapter thus contributes to the nexus between exhibitions and research by suggesting that exhibition making might be sites to experiment...