How does it feel? Space and text as affective affordances in the multimodal museum

Museums are multimodal environments where semiotic resources including objects, space, sound, light, movement, language and the body converge. Our case study of a Taiwanese ceramics exhibition draws on the concept of ‘affective affordances’, meaning the socially and contextually informed ways that semiotic resources invite felt and embodied responses. We use this concept to investigate the ways in which texts and space co-construct affective meanings. We discuss texts and space as physical entities within the affective exhibition, each possessing intrinsic properties which can potentially stimulate certain embodied responses from visitors. Specifically, the case study addresses two questions: (1) how written texts within an exhibition interact with space to afford affective meaning potential; and (2) how museum visitors as active participants respond to space and text as affective stimuli. The study adopts a novel composite theoretical framework that combines spatial discourse analysis using the Binding framework, linguistic analysis using the Appraisal framework, and walking interviews. Our analysis provides rich empirical evidence of how space and written texts interact to create a felt sense of place for visitors.