I'm used to these more in the context of gallery space - where a lot of thought has gone into designing the experience to be as full as possible. Sometimes there's a little viewing area, like in the Cornerhouse, in Manchester, with a little simple bench to sit on. At the Baltic, in Gateshead, at the moment, there's an installation by Steve McQueen where you need to get through a very large pitch black large room - one of the attendants has a torch - to enter a small space where there's a 16mm projector playing a film loop. One test of these installations are how long the images last in one's imagination and that comes down more to the power of the image rather than to the surroundings. (My lasting perception of McQueen's image of a dead horse was of being cheated - of my time and energy). We've been well trained to suspend reality, in a cinema, and can enter and leave that state quite easily. Dark spaces help to engage one more emotionally, certainly.

There was a shop in Newcastle, down a back lane, that had a blanked out window with circles cut out that people could peer through and watch short video loops. I was the only person that seemed to watch them - it was on the way to the bank - and I used to push postcards through the door telling them this. 'I am your viewer and it's crap'. The shop next door, where I've shopped for 35 years confirmed it and the Little Jewel Cinema has now closed. But it wasn't a museum - it was a video installation gallery.

In a museum there is less attention to control visitors' perceptions. The video images there are perhaps more decorative and less 'invasive'. I've never seen a prehistoric film show and the strongest moving images I can recall from a museum are in the Liverpool Maritime Museum. Are they in the lifts? Museums seem to be characterised by static exhibits - or at least those I visit. The centre for film and photography, in Bradford, is a museum, in some ways, and has a 70mm screen.

What an interesting subject to research!

Two contrasting examples linked in other ways would be the loop of Alexander Keiller in the Great Barn at Avebury, which appears to draw young people through its flickering images and sounds, plus the nearby interactive displays. The loop itself is a taster and gives a flavour of historic faces and movement, a theatre of pastness transported to the present. The screen situation is more a modern 'What the butler saw' than a cinema screen, the space around it has a cosy intimate atmosphere despite being in a huge barn. Having witnessed groups watching the show on several occasions it is reminiscent of those crowding round the only TV in a street when England won the World Cup Final in 1966.
In comparison no-one seemed that interested in the add-on 'telly' stuck on a jutting wall in Salisbury & South Wilts Museum for the recent Stonehengeania exhibition, where priceless moving images were aired at an uncomfortable height and angle on a smart modern LCD (I think), and the loop so long and laboured it was dissuasive of watching all the loop had to offer. Admittedly I only visited it once, but did watch the whole loop which no-one else did whilst I was there. Can understand why, the Orwell ‘Winston Smith experience’ TV wall didn’t work well.

That exhibition has moved to Chippenham and then goes to Devizes so it will be interesting to see if it improves depending on the surrounds.

You might contact the curators at each place and ask if they had any feedback.

BTW If you put your email address on here people might mail you with stuff they don't want to air on the web.