ABSTRACT
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 with such speculative, philosophical research about things, arguing how it might be generative for particular forms of ‘object-orientation’.
