Museum displays convey to the visitor intellectually and socially distilled knowledge, emotions and experience. They are furthermore crafted to present a set of narratives that organize information into digestible portions. These story-threads are often linear, are meant to be experienced in predetermined orders and are politically driven. These politics may be financial (e.g., stories influencing purchases) or social (e.g., organizing information to raise awareness of an issue) or otherwise.

At the same time museums attempt to prescribe a narrative via a physical display, interactive technologies are emerging that allow more fluid, and perhaps subversive, wayfinding methods for visitors. As Andrew Barry argues in his article On Interactivity, "Interactivity promises ... to turn the museum visitor into a more active self." With the aid of new technologies, then, the visitor may alter the museum from an experienced narration to a stochastic experimentation.

However, Barry also posits that some so-called interactive technologies may not be anything more than novelty items. "Many ... interactive ... computers ... ," he writes, "merely serve to create the illusion of choice." Indeed, it may be that far from allowing visitors to subvert or circumnavigate primary narratives, interactive technologies merely augment a priori configurations.

Do interactive technologies fundamentally alter a visitor’s experience? To attempt to answer this question I spent one afternoon at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art observing the use of two systems: the digital audio tour provided for a fee at the Ansel Adams special exhibit, and the handheld PCs available at the Points of Departure gallery.

From my observations I gleaned that visitors using interactive technologies peruse exhibits in a depth-first manner (Fig. 1). That is, while other visitors usually looked briefly at each and every work, those with interactive devices tended to visually search for, and spent most of their time in front of, pieces discussed on those devices, while passing over other works. In this way, the interactive device acts as a secondary filter by indirectly indicating that some of the works on display are somehow more important than others.