June 2007

The 2nd International Conference on the Histories of Media, Art, Science and Technology takes place in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 15-18 November, 2007. The organisers describe it as “an international forum for the presentation and the discussion of exemplary approaches to the rapport between art, media, science and technology” – a “thematic focus on locatedness and the migration of knowledge and knowledge production in the interdisciplinary contexts of art, historiography, science and technology”. Sounds good!

Preannounced speakers include Michelle Barker (“From Life to Cognition: investigating the role of biology and neurology in new media arts practice”) and Boo Chapple (“Sound, Matter, Flesh: A history of crosstalk from medicine to contemporary art and biology”) and a so far untitled keynote by Lorraine Daston. For full programme and further info, see http://tamtam.mi2.hr/replace.

(thanks to Ingeborg for the tip)

The joint Annual Meeting of the Association Européenne des Illustrateurs Médicaux et Scientifiques (AEIMS) and the Medical Artists’ Association of Great Britain (MAA) is held 18-20 October in Antwerp, Belgium, on the theme “Confronting Mortality with Art and Science”. See detailed program here.

The signature JE has recently created “Morbid Anatomy: Surveying the Interstices of Art and Medicine, Death and Culture”, a blog that surveys museum and library websites for pictures of paintings, photos and posters dealing with post-mortems, pathological anatomy etc., with short commentaries. This could well develop into a useful ‘gatekeeper blog’ (I like the idea of gatekeeper blogs better than that of ‘web portals’) for an overview of the cultural border between anatomy and art. (But I cannot help being disturbed by not knowing who JE is. The anonymity takes my attention away from the pictures.)

Added 18 June: our anonymous but trustworthy East Coast deep throat has disclosed that the author of ‘Morbid Anatomy’ is not only a correspondent for the Athanasius Kircher Society but also responsible for the fabulous astropop-website. Enjoy these indulgements in museological and iconographical curiosities.

As one of my colleagues, Claus Emmeche at the Faculty of Science has recently pointed out, the amounts used by Danish universities on branding have tripled since 1999. The global phenomenon of ‘academic capitalism’ (see e.g., Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University, 1997) with its increasing competition between more and more business-oriented universities will inevitably also lead to the boosting of communication and marketing departments at universities.

Let’s imagine how Medical Museion could brand itself in this new global entrepreneurial environment. Here’s a humble suggestion:

The future is now — tomorrow keeps happening today at Medical Museion

The staff at Medical Museion is notoriously impatient. We keep trying to get the jump on the times through forward-looking innovations and template-busting breakthroughs. Our unquenchable thirst for improvements will transform global museology and will spawn new museum models all across the cultural spectrum. Inventive knowledgeship is fermenting at Medical Museion, from the conservator’s workshop to the postdoc’s office. And business-friendly policies are making Medical Museion’s creative gifts more available to international funding than you might have imagined. Hitch your wagon to a rising sun.

(freely adopted from an ad in the last issue of The Economist)

There are plenty of examples out there which any template-busting and breakthrough-hungry university department could use in its branding activites. Only your imagination will set the limits — hitch your wagon to a rising sun!

When I heard the news of Richard Rorty’s death last Friday (“from the same disease that killed Derrida”) I browsed through my copy of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature — and was overwhelmed by memories and associations. I remember how I experienced Rorty’s argument against the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mirroring of a world external to the mind, as so sophisticated, because it didn’t substitute representationalism with crude relativism, but steered a pragmatic middle-course. Only now do I realise how much his philosophical programme for conversationalism and edification has actually meant for my work on existential biographies of scientists.

In his beautiful short obituary, Jürgen Habermas writes:

The irony and passion, the playful and polemical tone of an intellectual who revolutionised our modes of thinking and influenced people throughout the world point to a robust temperament. But this impression doesn’t do justice to the gentle nature of a man who was often shy and withdrawn – and always sensitive to others.

The article on Rorty in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy was substantially revised and updated a couple of days ago.

You still have another two weeks left to register for what seems to become a very exciting conference on museological issues at the Manchester Museum, viz., “Nature behind glass: historical and theoretical perspectives on natural science collections”, Thursday 6th – Saturday 8th September 2007.

This international symposium aims to promote and communicate inter-disciplinary research on historical, theoretical and museological aspects of natural history museums. Bringing together a critical mass of scholarship engaged in research in this area, the conference will develop a theoretical community concerned with ‘natural museology’. Papers provide innovative methodological or reflexive insights and are based on original research.

For full programme details and booking form, see www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/naturebehindglass is invited by 30 June 2007. Full rate: £25 per day. You can also contact Sam Alberti at sam.alberti@manchester.ac.uk.

Last Friday we held a reception at Medical Museion to celebrate the completion of the moulage conservation project. Nicole Rehné has meticulously restored our collection of 70 wax models made in the early 20th century for the Niels Finsen Medical Light Institute to demonstrate the symptoms of a various skin diseases, especially skin tuberculosis (Finsen was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1903).

Ion Meyer, who has supervised the project, spoke at the reception about the history of our moulage collection and Nicole spoke about the painstaking conservation work. Then our specially invited guest, Thomas Schnalke, director of the medical history museum in Berlin and renowned specialist of wax models of diseases (see Diseases in Wax: The history of the medical moulage, 1995) gave a talk with the title “What an Object Can Tell”, in which he made a nice analysis of what a skilled curator can get out from a case-study of a single wax model.

The material wax model collection invites to historical studies of the development of dermatological diagnosis from wax moulages to teledermatology. Wax moulages were frequently used in dermatological training around the turn of the last century. Now they are museum objects only — today’s dermatologists consult instead huge digital image collections like DermAtlas.

This in turn raises all sorts of questions about the interplay between imaging and communication technologies, collection systems and medical diagnosis. It also gives food for thought about museum collection and display practices, including the relation between the use of material artefacts and digital photo collections.

Here Nicole demonstrates some of the moulages to one of the reception guests:

(photo: Martha).

The project was made possible by a grant from the Kgl. Hofbuntmager Aage Bang Foundation.

Last December Koos Boomsma and I organised a symposium on evolutionary medicine (i.e., an evolutionary approach to understanding the origin of disease) here at the medical faculty in Copenhagen, with Randolph Nesse (University of Michigan) and Steve Stearns (Yale University) as keynote speakers, followed by a panel discussion with the audience. It was a well-attended meeting (some 100 students and 25 faculty) and we were all quite happy with the outcome.

Afterwards I’ve been thinking about how one could explore this aspect of contemporary biomedicine in an exhibition setting. It’s not easy, because it rapidly becomes very abstract (and mathematical). I haven’t even seen a natural history museum that is capable of making sense of evolutionary theory, whether in terms of didactics, cultural history or aesthetics. So we lesser museum mortals are sort of excused, I think.

What no museum seems to have thought about, however, is to make sense of evolution by contrasting it with its creationist counterpart. Creationists have recently started two museums on their own: the 6.000 square meter Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky (where else?) which opened on May 28th, and the (much smaller) Big Valley Creation Science Museum in the small town of Big Valley, Alberta (Ca) which opened on June 5th (the noisy video on the Big Valley web site is much fun!).

So why don’t natural history museums make an effort to display creationism and so called intelligent design? Evolution would make so much more sense if it were contrasted with the (at least from a non-fundamentalist point of view) absurd creationist arguments and the way these people present ‘evidence’ (NO, I’m not a relativist when it comes to evolutionary theory!).

Same with evolutionary medicine. One could probably make much out of it in an exhibition context if it were contrasted with creationist medicine.

So is there, then, a creationist medicine? Well, a rapid search on the web gives almost no results. In fact, the best bid is one of Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury strips:

The whole strip is here!

So it seems like Doonesbury could be a good starting point for a museum that wants to use the creationist counterargument to make something interesting out of evolutionary medicine.

Added 17 June:  

Emm Barnes has just reminded me of the wonderful Onion story “Intelligent Falling”, see http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39512

If you happen to be in Paris on Thursday 26 June you might consider attending a roundtable discussion at the Ensba-Paris Art School in 14 rue Bonaparte on the theme “The art-science-technology relations as seen through the Leonardo Book Series at MIT Press”, occasioned by the launch of a new book, Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, edited by Eduardo Kac:

Discussants are Roger Malina, President of the Leonardo series, Eduardo Kac, and Frank Popper (author of From Technological to Virtual Art).

When new artforms emerge, what role do artists play with their theoretical books in creating a public space for discussion? What are the connections between artworks and books in the body of work of an artist? What discourses and approaches on technoscientific art are emerging from the Leonardo Book Series? What are the aesthetical, theoretical and historical issues within this collection and more specifically within the two books that will be presented and discussed?

(thanks to Ingeborg for spreading the word)

I just discovered a description of Sev Fowles’s “Thing Theory” spring 2007 seminar at Dept of Archaeology, Columbia University. It has an excellent reading list and a clever way of structuring the whole course through the themes of psychologised, sacred, socialised, fetishised, subjectivised and technologised objects. A very inspiring syllabus for a new version (?) of the “Towards a New Materialism” postgraduate seminar next year. They have also put the participants’ essays on the net. A wonderful example of intellectual generosity.