Museums today find themselves within a mediatised society, where everyday life is conducted in a data-full and technology-rich context. In fact, museums are themselves mediatised: they present a uniquely media-centred environment, in which communicative media is a constitutive property of their organisation and of the visitor experience. The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication explores what it means to take mediated communication as a key concept for museum studies and as a sensitising lens for media-related museum practice on the ground.Including contributions from experts around the world, this original and innovative Handbook shares a nuanced and precise understanding of media, media concepts and media terminology, rehearsing new locations for writing on museum media and giving voice to new subject alignments. As a whole, the volume breaks new ground by reframing mediated museum communication as a resource for an inclusive understanding of current museum developments.The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication will appeal to students and scholars, as well as to practitioners involved in the visioning, design and delivery of mediated communication in the museum. It teaches us not just how to study museums, but how to go about being a museum in today's world.

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While the impetus towards decolonization presents significant issues for more institutionalized forms of curating and how they attend to Indigenous cultural content, equally, this situation presents distinct opportunities to establish alternative forms of curatorial practice that engage with inter‐cultural knowledge exchange through collaboration with Indigenous communities. We offer here a contextual framing of a series of interconnected design events and exhibition outcomes that originated from an invitation to creatively ‘map’ an Aboriginal owned station property in southern New South Wales, Australia. Curatorial Design will be used to encompass the mix of disciplinary knowledge that this creative research project calls upon along with interdisciplinary approaches employed that draw from (but are not limited to) practice‐based methods from art and design, especially spatial practice, as well as archaeology, anthropology, cartography and ethnography. This overarching term has been adopted in an effort not to pigeonhole the nature of thinking or doing that the creative curatorial practices detailed in this article entail, either of the participants involved in the project or outcomes resulting from the collaborative processes discussed herein. As the opening, scene‐setting entry of the Interpretive Wonderings Portfolio*, this article identifies the contexts within which the project situates itself – between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems; disciplinary and interdisciplinary “know‐how”; theory and practice – in order to establish the positions of the four chief protagonists directly engaged in the project in relation to this ‘cultural interface’. It sets out some of the shifts in understanding of these positions and in particular the ways that the original project’s framing through critical cartography was both facilitated and transformed in turn through consideration of Aboriginal ontologies. These evolving positions and their relationships to each other are articulated in a series of abbreviated individual reflections provided at the conclusion of this project overview. *The Interpretive Wonderings portfolio comprises a set of interrelated writings that attempt to provide a distinctive, multi‐perspectival account of this creative research project. In addition to this contextual piece, other articles include: a compilation of short texts that offer reflective analyses from the different perspectives of the project’s curatorium and principal researchers, Sophia Pearce, Campbell Drake, Jock Gilbert and Sven Mehzoud (Drake et al. 2019b, this issue), and individual research‐led articles by Gilbert (2019, this issue) and Mehzoud (2019, this issue). Read individually, each designated article presents a focused inquiry (depth); taken together as a curated series, they provide the reader with the opportunity to gain a comprehensive overview (breadth) and appreciation of the project’s guiding aspirations, objectives and outcomes that amounts to more than the sum of its discrete parts.

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Drawing inspiration from New Materialist philosopher Karen Barad's challenge to read "diffractively" by experimenting with different patterns of relationality, this article sets out a course of speculative inquiry inspired by the contemporary fascination with digital light-based installations. Taking the UN's designation of 2015 as the "International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies" as its point of departure, a subset of mediated environments are identified that transcend the distinction between physical and digital; materiality and immateriality; invisibility and presence. Employing new technologies to create deeply sensorial and highly participatory forms of aesthetic engagement, the selected examples offer a compelling indication of the post-digital aesthetics that arise from the interrelationship of art, design and computation. Its investigation is structured as a montage of two parts: following an introduction that surveys an illustrative sub-set of contemporary digital light-based art works drawn from the 2014 INST-INT conference, the second half of this text will speculate upon the "dynamic-constructive" relationship between digital media and the form-making processes associated with "practices of light" (Cubitt 2014). The implications of "post-screen media" for curatorial practice is explored in relation to the mediating function played by modes of exhibition and other program architectures. Volume