Snap, Hiss, Crackle, Pop: Counter-factual Conservation as Attentional Practice

Abstract

This essay emerged through a counter-factual approach to institutional documentation, repurposing conservation-based practices (specifically the Museum's Activity Log, officially termed the “Activity Snapshot Module”) from a time-tracking tool into a creative archival practice. This unofficial experiment, straddling the pandemic and its lockdowns, became a way of attending to what goes unmarked: the textures and rhythms beneath institutional accountability. It manifests sonically and materially: field recordings of the canteen's afternoon clamour—voices, clattering dishes, the sounds of a museum in full operation—mingling later with the eerie quiet of pandemic lockdown; the mechanical hum of building systems in emptied galleries, security radios crackling through vacant corridors; surfacing digital images; objects and the conditions of care; voice notes whispered in the darkroom's red glow. The soundscape shifted from institutional din to ghostly stillness, revealing what the everyday cacophony had masked. Reclaiming this administrative tool, I sought to create a space for temporal drift, to breathe, where the liveliness of conservation work might surface beyond quantified metrics. This reclaimed space extends beyond the written page, finding a dynamic, activated form in Museum Soundings, an online archive (museum-within-museums) that invites readers to experience: What does it feel like to hear a museum thinking? How does it feel to be up close to an object and in doubt? The archive houses the acoustic emissions recordings discussed here, sound walks from my wanderings through institutional spaces, and the Activity Log itself. This growing polyphonic space invites readers to move between textual analysis and embodied listening, between the essay's theoretical framework and the lived textures it describes, making the 'lived' experience of duration central to the work's unfolding.