ABSTRACT
Museum architecture and curatorial exhibition designs structure the experiences and social relations associated with museum visits. Such experiences and relations are generated and qualified by movement. While patterns of movement and social relations in museums are richly studied in configurational research and museum studies respectively, qualitative aspects of movement remain to be more deeply understood – especially in relation to museum configurations. In this chapter, four museums – the Asakura Museum of Sculpture in Tokyo, Artipelag in Stockholm, Kiasma in Helsinki, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum – are put in dialogue to investigate the qualitative aspects of movement. In the investigation, movement is considered individual, collective, communicative, and performative acts, recognising the entanglement of the observer, the observed, and the participant. Working from the point of view of architecture, choreography is used to qualitatively differentiate types of movement and enrich our understanding of the role of bodies and embodiment by discussing path, figure, and gesture. This is further extended into dramaturgy by investigating rhythm, co-presence, and configurational staging. Choreographic and dramaturgical aspects are important parts of the holistic experience of the museum and exhibition narratives. Fundamental to the visitor reconstruction of museum narratives is the retrieval of synchronic configurational meaning from the sequential patterns in which museum space is initially perceived and experienced. This chapter concludes by making the case for the development of a notational language for describing and designing movement both in its local, directly perceived aspects and its emergent configurations.
