Lives on shelves
Simona Casonato · 2024
The history of information processing and computing is a natural interest of science and technology museums. In these institutions, that are general in their scope, a whole range of artefacts, from ancient models of early calculating machines to cutting-edge digital devices, have been gathered as a result of a variety of circumstances, to become formally part of the national cultural heritage. A common assumption is that the musealization of an object leads to its exhibition, considering the first purely instrumental to the second. However, these processes are often conceptually and practically separated. Just like many other objects in museum collections, most computing artefacts in science and technology museums spend more time in storage than under the light of exhibition display. Thus, narratives of scientific and technological histories based on museum objects do not emerge only from galleries but are also shaped by the repertoire of non-exhibited objects. Drawing on examples in the storage of Study Collections at the Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, this chapter takes into account both the effects of the storage turn in museums and the history of digital culture. It argues that stored objects, although unexhibited, ‘live’ on shelves and actively contribute to the history of digital culture, provided that we consider them in their specific individuality and look to them as socially constructed historical sources. By following each artefact’s own biographical vicissitudes, we can illuminate the stories of its donors and users, as well as the role of the infrastructure of a museum in the social construction of historiography, by entangling biographies of things and people.