This article explores how individuals, both alone and together, examine exhibits in museums and galleries. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, it focuses on the ways in which visitors encounter and experience exhibits and how their activities are organized, at least in part, with intimate regard to the actions of others in the domain, both companions and “strangers.” This study contributes to the long‐standing concerns of symbolic interactionism with (mutual) attention and involvement, materiality and social relations, and interpersonal communication. The data consist of video recordings of naturally occurring action and interaction in various museums and galleries.

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There is a growing interest amongst both artists and curators in designing art works which create new forms of visual communication and enhance interaction in museums and galleries. Despite extraordinary advances in the analysis of talk and discourse, there is relatively little research concerned with conduct and collaboration with and around aesthetic objects and artefacts, and to some extent, the social and cognitive sciences have paid less attention to the ways in which conduct - both visual and vocal - is inextricably embedded within the immediate ecology, the material realities at hand. In this article, we examine how people in and through interaction with others, explore, examine and experience a mixed-media installation. Whilst primarily concerned with interaction with and around an art work, the article is concerned with the ways in which people, in interaction with each other (both those they are with and others who happen to be in the same space), reflexively constitute the sense and significance of objects and artefacts, and the ways in which those material features reflexively inform the production and intelligibility of conduct and interaction.

Abstract. This paper examines the use of a series of three low tech interactive assemblies that have been exhibited by the authors in a range of fairs, expositions and galleries. The paper does not present novel technical developments, but rather uses the low tech assemblies to help scope out the design space for CSCW in museums and galleries and to investigate the ways in which people collaboratively encounter and explore technological exhibits in museums and galleries. The bulk of the paper focuses on the analysis of the use of one interactive installation that was exhibited at the Sculpture, Objects and Functional Art (SOFA) Exposition in Chicago, USA. The study uses audio-visual recordings of interaction with and around the work to consider how people, in and through their interaction with others, make sense of an assembly of traditional objects and video technologies. The analysis focuses on the organised practices of 'assembly' and how 'assembling' the relationship between different parts of the work is interactionally accomplished. The analysis is then used to develop a series of 'design sensitivities' to inform the development of technological assemblies to engender informal interaction and sociability in museums and galleries.