January 2008

Our otherwise sensitive antennae seem to be prette insensitive right now — or why else did we miss the deadline for the interdisciplinary conference ‘Transforming Museums: Bridging Theory and Practice’ at the University of Washington, Seattle, 15-16 May?

Here’s the brief for the meeting — organized by The Museology Student Committee for Professional Development at the University of Washington:

Museums are institutions steeped in tradition but surrounded by constant change. “Transforming Museums” seeks to find ways that professionals can meet these changes deliberately and thoughtfully instead of being swept along their currents. Building on the overwhelming success of last year’s “Rethinking Museums” conference, we now turn to the task of “Transforming Museums.”

And then they invite museum professionals, students, and university faculty to submit paper abstracts or workshop proposals on things like:

How do we transform museums?
Who is leading these transformations?
What recent and current work shares this aim?
How do we define transformation?
Why are these transformations taking place?
Are there discernible patterns in this change?

Great program! A must for one or two from Medical Museion who could have presented our ideas for changing the medical museum concept. But we missed the deadline — which was last Friday, January 4.

Anyway, we can always visit their website. And polish the antennae for next year’s advertisement. 

Apropos our former discussion about blogs and exhibitions — here’s another way of integrating the two genres:

In yesterday’s Material World blog, Haidy Geismar, an anthropologist at New York University, relays the experiences of teaching a class in material culture studies together with Robin Nagle, an anthropologist-in-residence at the New York Department of Sanitation (DSNY).

Titled “Making a Museum: Materializing Regimes of Value with the New York Department of Sanitation”, the class worked closely with the DSNY to collect and curate material that could be used for a future museum of sanitation.

The DSNY archive was restricted to “a series of mouldy cardboard boxes” and the artefacts were scattered all around, so the students collected archival material, interviewed managers and workers, and did ethnographic fieldwork into “the contemporary landscape of garbage in the city”. In short, they engaged in a kind of “social activism” – “to not only teach the public more about the job, about waste management and the cultural landscape of trash, but to publicly integrate the DSNY into the fabric of the city in a representational as well as practical way”.

Integral to the process was the class blog (authorized access only, unfortunately) — used to post continuous commentary on their own work, to devise key word lists for the archive, and to share media clips and articles on the subject. It was also used “to discuss issues of copyright and fair use, and to talk about the limitations of the different fields in the archive on how we were framing and presenting our newly created digital objects”.

“In this way”, says Heidy Geismar, “both blog and archive were tools in the imagination of what a museum both is and could be”.

The grand finale of the course was a small one-room exhibition which opened on December 12 in the DSNY’s Derelict Vehicles Office. They used artefacts “to recreate an old-school style locker rooms”, they put their archive on display, and they permeated the place with a soundscape “evoking the gathering of trash in the city”. For press coverage of the exhibition, see here.

Small exhibition, yes. But Heidy Geismar’s enthusiastic report is contagious — and a wonderful example of how teaching, blogging, and collective exhibition work can be integrated.

Speaking about biomedical animation and displays: iMed Studios have also just released this 2 min. holiday greeting promotional video which is useful New Year’s fuel for imagining how biomedical animations could be incorporated in future medical museum settings.

For example, I like the holographic display of the heart model. Maybe this could be done as augmented reality (see earlier post here) as well?

It’s also amazing to see how the collaborative touch screens which Tom Cruise sci-fictionally handled in Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002) has become a feature in a pharma advertising company promotional video! (They sort of exist IRL too.)

Otherwise I must admit that I’m a bit sceptical about bringing too much holography and touch screen visions into museum planning. There’s a risk that the high tech stuff will kill the raison d’etre of museums which is, after all, the good old material artefacts. True, these can be augmented by the gadgets — but one has to strike a careful balance here.

What does Charlotte and the digital museum colleagues at Museer og digitalisering think about this?

Forget about subcellular and molecular animation movies being done for research purposes or as didactic tools. The real driving force in the future will be pharma advertising.

Take a look at this demo reel from iMed Studios — a spin-off company from Engineering Animation Inc., now part of the Saatchi & Saatchi family — that “develops scientifically accurate, visually impactful, leading edge multimedia for clients in the medical and pharmaceutical industries”.

The demo has just won the prestigious 2007 RX Club Award (Vanessa at Street Anatomy explains that the RX Club Awards are “the Oscars of pharmaceutical product advertising and promotion”). In other words, the inner-life-of-the-cell kind of movies will probably become an important part of future pharma advertising. That’s where the money is, so that’s where the animation technology goes.

In Wikio‘s last blog ranking Biomedicine on Display has reached rank #73 in the health blog category. Could be worse, I guess. My favourite daily-must-read blog, Medgadget is, not surprisingly, ranked as #1. But who cares about ranking anyway 🙂