March 2007

The Science Communication group at Imperial College, London, are inviting to the annual “Science & the Public” conference on Saturday 19th May 2007. General info here.

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The Danish National Hospital (Da. Rigshospitalet) became world famous outside the clinical research community with Danish instructor Lars von Trier’s creative and celebrated TV/video series The Kingdom (Da. Riget, 1994). Riget was a somewhat creepy but hilarious story that questioned the higher rationality in this Danish bastion of high-tech medical science. The ghosts that reigned in the labyrinthic basement hallways were guardians of reminiscences of the dark sides in the hospital’s history.

Now Lene Galsgaard who coordinates the hospital’s 250 years anniversary activities in 2007 has initiated a “memory blog” called “Riget husker” (The Kingdom remembers). The aim of the blog — which is aired today, two weeks before the offical opening of the festivities — is to collect a spectrum of reminiscences from present and former staff, partners, and patients about how they experienced the hospital. Hopefully their reminiscences will be less uncanny than those displayed in von Trier’s version.

A great initiative — will be interesting to see how it will work out.

Today, the Department of History of Science and Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm had invited to a discussion seminar about Isabelle Dussauge’s final draft for her doctoral dissertation, Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Technomedical Gaze in Sweden (1980-2000+). I had been asked to open the discussion with a summary of the pros and cons of the draft manuscript and then we had a lively two-hour exchange about Isabelle’s theoretical perspective (foucauldian MRI-‘gazes’) and her rich empirical material on the historical actors’ narratives. Watch out for the announcement of the public defence later this year.

Isabelle Dussauge contemplating a comment from the room

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Tomorrow, Tuesday 13 March, John Pickstone from CHSTM, Manchester University is giving a seminar at Medical Museion. The title is “Ways of Knowing and of Working with the Artefacts of STM” — i.e., John is going to apply some of the ideas from his book Ways of Knowing to the material artefact world of science, technology and medicine museums. We start at 2pm, and turn over to the wine-and-popcorn postseminar around 4pm. Everyone is welcome. If you write to Sniff Nexø (s.nexoe@mm.ku.dk) you can get a predistributed paper for the seminar.

The Bio-Genica company website is worth an extended visit:

It’s brilliant, hilarious — and somewhat scary. Artist Adam Brandejs has constructed the perfect biotech company website look-alike, complete with product catalogue, service & support pages, etc.

The company’s major product is the Genpet, a “pre-packaged, bioengineered pet”, not a toy or a robot, but a “living, breathing” genetically engineered animal with “fully functional heart rate monitor and Fresh Strip to better gauge the state of each pet while it lies in its hibernation state”. It has in-built feelings, of course.

The FAQs-page tells prospective customers that the little creatures breathe and shit and form strong personal bonds with their care-taker. They surely feel pain, but “have limited vocal chords so they will not create a large amount of noise when disturbed”. A Genpet will normally not bite, but if it does, one can buy a extra Tooth Remover Kit.

Adam Brandejs Genpet raises lots of disturbing questions about the future of biotechnology. It’s one of the most humorous and intelligent artistic comments to postgenomics I’ve seen for a long time — neither naïvely endorsing biotech development, nor against its future possibilites.

By the way, Genpets come in two basic versions, one with a one-year life span, the other with a three-year life span (with different price tags, of course) — an oblique commentary to the Nexus 6 generation of replicants in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (who had a four-year life span).

If you happen to pass by the gallery at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Mass., don’t miss their new exhibit “It’s Alive! A Laboratory of Biotech Art” which runs another three weeks, until 7 April 2007.

Biotech art is an emerging and diverse field that is still in the process of defining itself. This exhibit is an investigation of the current intersections of biology, technology, and art. In a world rapidly transformed by science and technology, it is proving difficult to keep up with current developments. With news of genetic engineering regularly making headlines, a growing number of artists have perceived the cultural and aesthetic significance of biotechnology. Artists play an important role in our understanding of the biotechnological world, making it emotionally and intellectually accessible enough for discussion or debate. Participating artists are Adam Brandejs (Toronto, ONT), Shawn Bailey (Montreal, QC), Brian Burkhardt (Boston), Jennifer Hall (Boston), Blyth Hazen (Boston), Steve Hollinger (Boston), Kevin Jones (New Orleans), Brian Knep (Boston), Hunter O’Reilly (Chicago), Tanit Sakakini (Boston), Jennifer Willet (Montreal, QC).

See also the review of the exhibition in The Scientist’s on-line issue, March 8.

Medical Museion is arranging a cross-disciplinary workshop on ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context’, Copenhagen, 30 August – 1 September, 2007.

The conjuncture of biomedicine and aesthetics is a rapidly growing field of artistic practice and academic reflection, dealing with an array of issues, from the public engagement with current biomedicine to methodological overlaps between the practices of artists and laboratory researchers. Museums are key institutions for this hybrid field of inquiry.

The aim of this closed workshop is to help forge new strategies of making sense of and presenting recent biomedicine in museums, especially taking into account the unique difficulties of rendering visible material biomedical practices in their social, cultural, political, aesthetic and scientific complexity.

The workshop will bring together key practitioners from a range of methodological approaches, including artists with a firm understanding of biomedical practice, museologists and material culture scholars, historians of science, art historians and aestheticians, biomedical practitioners with a knowledge of contemporary bioart, and visualisation specialists.

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We installed Google Analytics tracking code last Sunday to follow the traffic on this blog. Here the “executive overview” of the last four days (~100 visits and ~250 pageviews):

Most visitors are from Europe and Eastern US — but there are also IP-numbers from Madras, India; Muscat, Oman; and Federal, Argentina. 35% of the visits are returnings, but only 11% are in-house. 56% are visiting via Google. We’ll be back with more self-indulgent observations later!

(Semi-internal discussion in Danish:)

Jeg synes diskussionen om Sørens plan for indsamlingsprocedurer på seminaret i går var meget interessant, og Ion og jeg snakkede lidt opfølgende om det her i formiddags.

Som flere var inde på, så kredsede diskussionen mere eller mindre direkte omkring integrationen af forskning, indsamling og samlinger.

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In co-operation with BioCampus, University of Copenhagen and the Schools of Visual Arts, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Medical Museion is arranging a free public conference “Art and Biomedicine: Beyond the Body”, Monday 3 September, 2007.

Confirmed speakers include:

Ingeborg Reichle, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (www.kunstgeschichte.de/reichle)

Ben Fry, MIT Media Lab (http://benfry.com)

Wolfgang Knapp, Art in Context, University of the Arts, Berlin (www.kunstimkontext.udk-berlin.de/lehrende/knapp/knapp.html)

Steve Kurtz, Critical Arts Ensemble (www.critical-art.net)

Richard Wingate, UK Medical Research Council Centre, King’s College, London (www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/biomedical/mrc/index.php?page=http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/biomedical/mrc/Researcher.php?PersonID=19)

Ken Arnold, Wellcome Trust, London (www.wellcome.ac.uk/node6510.html)

James Elkins, Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism of the Art Institute of Chicago (www.jameselkins.com).

A detailed program has been posted, see www.ku.dk/satsning/biocampus/artandbiomedicine

 For inquiries, contact Monica Lambert, mbl@mm.ku.dk

See also the workshop ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context’, Copenhagen 30 August – 1 September, 2007.