The multisensory museum

Traditionally, museums have been visual - ‘Do Not Touch’ - spaces. However, interactive and multisensory media are increasingly being used to help pursue wider democratic goals of appealing to new and more diverse audiences. This essay examines how one museum, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow (Scotland), has sought to reconfigure its sensory regimes of display. It discusses the incorporation of multiple sensory logics and queries whether one potential result of such mixings is a kind of sensory disorientation.