Stranger Technologies
by Marina Gross-Hoy
Marina Gross-Hoy, Étrangère, digital photograph (Auguste Rodin, Assemblage: Mask of Camille Claudel and left hand of Pierre de Wissant, circa 1895, plaster, Musée Rodin), 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Stranger Technologies
Marina Gross-Hoy | Sept 2024 | Issue 37
The audioguide tells me to look through a hole carved into the wooden window shutters where a German soldier had spied down on advancing French resistance fighters during the Liberation of Paris. I edge over to peer onto the view of rue de Rivoli and the Tuileries Garden, careful not to whack the king’s old furniture with my bag. Early evening traffic circulates below: buses crammed to capacity, pedestrians walking with baguettes poking out of grocery caddies, streams of bicycles carrying commuters across town to their Friday evening apéros. There are so many bikes on the streets now. My friend says the numbers have surged since lockdown, but the infrastructure hasn’t changed to accommodate them. She grips my arm every time I step out to cross a street without looking carefully enough for cyclists.
“They’re crazy,” my friend warns. “They think they are invulnerable to crashes.”
The voice in my audioguide headset — the imagined royal intendant from a time when this building was not a museum or a Resistance asset or the headquarters of the Navy, but a stockroom for the monarchy’s surplus furniture — invites me to keep moving along, the device’s motion sensors tattling on my pause at the window. I am here tonight to be moved by this audioguide. I had heard that the binaural sound technology is supposed to make you feel like the building’s previous inhabitants are personally guiding you through the space. If you turn toward a fireplace in one of the freshly restored period rooms, the sound of crackling flames is triggered as if there is a fire blazing in front of you. The sensory immersion in another time promises to be total.
I am almost out of time in Paris. I have squeezed in this visit during the museum’s Friday nocturne — late night opening — before going back to Montreal on Monday. An hour ago, on the opposite side of the Tuileries Garden from where I am standing now, I handed in my school ID badge and walked out the doors of the Louvre’s Museum School for the last time, again. The last time before this last time, the woman who walked out those doors was not a PhD candidate on a doctoral residency or a Canadian or a mother; she was a trembling American who had just graduated from Museum School with a master’s degree, an élève étranger discovering that her strangeness might be mitigated by inserting herself into foreign environments. On that last last time, she had sipped champagne with professors, performing her belonging in a mask of accented French, gripping a diploma earned from a thesis about introducing discourses into exhibitions — the case of audioguides et applications mobiles. Her body had been shaken by the grinding gears of this familiar place, receding from the present to her past, closing itself to her. She slipped out into the dark gardens through doors flanked by bronze lions.
Now, standing in this museum, I turn away from the window overlooking the edge of the garden. I do not look more closely to see if she’s still walking out of those school doors into the night, or if she’s sitting in one of the garden’s green metal chairs next to a man she will later marry, or if she’s taking pictures of the women-holding-fish fountains on the walk home from her first museum job. There are so many of her on the streets here. I want to take all these hers in my arms and soothe their quivering, assuring them that in the future we find our own way, but I hesitate to make promises I cannot keep.
The audioguide demands my attention, pulling me into the next room, conspiratorially whispering stories into my ears about the layers of people who have walked this squeaky parquet. A film explains the history of the Place de la Concorde, the massive square stretching out between this building and the river Seine, now visible through a long wall of windows. I follow along with the shifting identities of this square over time: a marshy floodplain, a royal square for monarchic pageantry, a stage for revolutionary guillotines. The stories stream along in attractive paper doll animations; playing out like a song and then neatly looping back to the beginning. The rich voice in the audioguide oozes with the anticipation of giving pleasure as it pushes me into yet another room: a long and ornate ballroom that is dripping with crystal chandeliers and wooden carvings on the walls covered in gold leaf. Life-size spinning mirrors fill the room with videos of dancing actors dressed in period attire, ghosts of the age of empire, reflections of the age of digital museum projects. There are no other living bodies in the room with me. I let my spine sway with the spectors in this gold gilded room, imagining how it might have felt to be alive here then, trying trying trying to feel my solidity here now.
The audioguide urges me to keep moving. I give myself over to the voice who twirls me around a corner for its grand reveal. I am now standing outside on a stately portico with stone columns that looks down over today’s iteration of the Place de la Concorde. This is the elevated vantage point of a king, a minister, a soldier with a gun, a museum ticket holder. The evening air is chilly as I look straight across to the bridge that connects the square to the imposing Assemblée nationale on the other side of the river. People are already starting to gather on this side of the bridge in small clusters, a handful of news cameras are stationed at the edge of the square. The energy still reads as evening commute, Friday night in the capital, mid-March leaves freshly unfurled on the chestnuts and plane trees. The flashing blue lights of parked police vans blink staccato in contrast to the unmoving gold light beginning to fill in the metal contours of the Eiffel Tower’s silhouette in the distance.
I remove my audioguide headset and linger on the portico. The square is full of the movement of bicycles and buses and pedestrians and taxis and double decker tourist buses driving past the police vans barricading the bridge. The sun gets lower in the sky and more people congregate in the square, more police vans gather at the perimeter, more officers appear in seemingly strategic locations, a curve of the garden’s stone wall, the entrance of the metro.
Something is building. My mind does not know how to understand the action in the street as discrete from the animated timeline on the screen in the room behind me. The city has been simmering in agitation about the pension reform bill for weeks, in newspapers, on social media, across the zinc countertops of cafés, over rerouted commutes during metro strikes, past the mountains of garbage uncollected on the sidewalks, sticky bottles of champagne, empty Chanel bags, wilted arugula. Someone below starts blaring a trumpet, a chant starts up. The mass of people becomes so dense that the double-decker buses have to move slowly through the narrowing street, the protesters so close that tourists on the buses could reach out their hands and touch this moment unfolding. I smile, putting my headset back on, and let myself be led to the next room, savoring this night where the audioguide is powerful enough to immerse the whole city.
My visit is finished, but I want more. Darkness has fallen and I am hungry to see how the simulated candlelight will glimmer the historic rooms into even more aliveness. I am almost out of time in Paris. I keep my headset on and loop around back to the beginning of the museum, eager to see how big the crowds will have grown by the time I get back to the portico. It is when I am in the old drawing room, antique clocks and gold gilded moldings quivering in the firelight, that I start noticing the bleep bleep of walkie-talkies and the hushed exchanges of guards. My body registers this shift, mutating the space from museum to city building. I quickly move to a window facing down into the courtyard and see bulky men dressed in security uniforms huddled in conversation. The fake candlelight flickering around me feels real, melting the waxy layers of this room’s stories into something porous. Bleep bleep, more radio scratches.
I go up to a young woman with a walkie talkie and ask, “Is something happening?”
“The protests are picking up,” she tells me. “The museum has closed the front doors.” She seems calm. I wonder if the employees have a room of their own to ride out nights of unrest.
“Is it safe? Will I be able to get out?”
“Oui, oui. For now.”
I am trying to stay immersed in the reality of the audioguide as I wind my way through the museum, past the clawfoot bathtub and the dining room laid out as if the guests had just left the room, and then a twinge in my stomach makes me turn around. I am back at the hole carved into the window shutter from the war. Visible now through the circle are van-fulls of police in riot gear, positioned as intentionally as a tableau vivant, machine guns down but eyes aimed toward the square. The pulsing of angry voices outside permeates the room, whipping my heartbeat into manic thumps that drum my ears. A museum guard is starting to close the wooden shutters protectively over the glass of the windows that stretch out across the dark square. I rush to the last window on the edge of the room before it is covered, just able to glimpse the tall flame of a bonfire illuminating the dark figures in the square. Time becomes hazy in the smoke; it is a protest in 2023, a battle in 1944, a revolutionary mob in 1789. It is the conflagration of harm imposed and resisted.
My stomach twists in punishment for wanting more immersion, for thinking that danger could be contained in the boundaries of an animated timeline. The guard briskly closes the last shutter as the flames reach into the black sky. I ask her what I should do, the crowds are surging as they are denied access to cross the bridge to the Assemblée nationale, their globular form reaching back towards the doors of the museum, the doors that I must cross to get out and get home.
“If I were you,” the guard says, “I would leave now.” She turns back to her whispered walkie-talkie conversation, unmoved by the fear of an anxious museum nocturne visitor who has only ever learned history in the past tense. Bleep bleep.
The other museum visitors do not seem bothered by the protests outside; they continue on with their visits as calm as the dancing figures in the spinning mirrors. But I can see that the anger in the looping animations has burst out of the screens and the audioguide’s stories are burning with real flames. I rush through the rest of the visit path — I do not run because I will follow museum rules even by firelight — until at last I am burped out of the museum into the night. The sidewalk is clogged with rows of policemen in riot gear pointed towards the noisy mass behind my back as I rush away from the square. I keep my head down, my body screaming at me to undo our proximity to unrest. When I am past the men with machine guns, I start running. On the sleepy rue Saint-Honoré, lined with luxury boutiques closed up for the night, I run away from the crowd raising their voices loud enough to be heard through thick stone walls, the anger that burns, the history being woven fresh on the loom.
Rain begins to drizzle as I pass the Louvre and slow to a brisk walk. The buzzing panic dissipates. In its void, flashes of the evening overtake my body, zapping my brain with evidence of my discrepancies. No one else left the museum early, no one else was running through the streets. I try to understand this woman who flees as me. Running from anger has become, after so many years, an instinctual response. I have run so far away from the unrest in my body that I spend most of my time three feet beyond myself, tethered and awkward like an astronaut afloat.
What must it take to move in the direction of one’s own pain?
I try to lift a foot and turn back around, all the way back to the quivering hers, but desire is not enough to overcome the physics of estrangement. I am crossing a bridge now, the Pont Neuf, and I stop to look out at the river in the direction of the barricaded bridge. There is nothing of this night left to see beyond a curtain of rain distorting the lamplight reflected on the surface of the Seine. The whole world is wet and blurry, camouflaging the tears on my cheeks, dampening the bonfires across town, dissolving the boundaries between bridge and self.
Marina Gross-Hoy is a scholar, writer, and speaker who lives in the Eastern Townships of Québec. She is completing a Museum Studies PhD dissertation at the Université du Québec à Montréal on the development of digital interpretation projects for visitors. She holds degrees in History of Art from the University of Michigan and muséologie from the École du Louvre in Paris. Marina writes about playing with new ways of paying attention to embodied experience. By subverting the gaze honed through looking at art in museums and turning it onto the ordinary and natural world, her essays explore how engaging with life through this 'museum gaze' can open us up to wonder, compassion, and empowerment.