February 2008

Apropos earlier posts (here and here) about the posthumanist movement:  The Forschungsmuseum Alexander Koenig in Bonn (Germany) will soon open an exhibition by artist Reiner Maria Matysik called ‘Biofakte–Organismen der Zukunft’ (Biofacts–Organisms of the Future’).

Matysik’s project takes it point of departure from the notion that gene technology will eventually lead to a radically new evolutionary stage which he calls ‘post-evolutionary’—in other words, that we can begin actively to design organisms. Matysik creates models of imagined future synthetic organisms, so called ‘Bionten’, which he believes will wipe out the differences between plants, animals and human beings.

(We are still speaking of art, of course. Even if the Craig Venter Institute say they are soon going to be able to do it, others, for example, Drew Endy in the newly formed Biological Engineering Department at MIT, believe this is a pretty difficult task.)

Anyway—the exhibition will open on 8 May and will run until 10 August. More info (in German) here.

For an earlier videodokumentation of the production of these artworks at Matysik’s institut für biologiske plastik (Institute for Biological Sculpture) at the Technical University in Braunschweig, see here.

(thanks to Ingeborg for the tip about ‘Biofakte’)

Medical museums do not necessarily need to be in dialogue with contemporary science and technology; they can remain safely embedded in the past. But if they have the ambition—like we do—to contrast possible biomedical futures with the medical past (so as to be able to create some really engaging exhibitions), medical museums are well advised to make some educated guesses about what these futures might be.

One source to such guess-work is the National Academy of Engineering‘s list Grand Challenges for Engineering. The current list of 14 challenges includes blockbusters like making solar energy economical, providing energy from fusion, providing access to clean water, securing cyberspace, preventing nuclear terror, and restoring and improving urban infrastructure. And there are, of course, medical and health challenges on the list as well: advancing health informatics, engineering better medicines, and reverse-engineering the brain.

But hey, something’s lacking!? As Partial Immortalization (Attila Csordas) points out, life extension is not among the 14 frontrunners of NAE’s grand engineering challenges. Disappointed, Csordas seems to have given up on government and academy committees ability to lobby for human enhancement. He thinks life extension should be a private business instead, “not something left to governmental policies and think thanks”.

So he puts his hope on the Google founders. When Brin and Page grow older, he thinks, they will hopefully get tired of personal genomics and 23andMe (see earlier post here), and begin supporting “everything healthy and biotech”, and thus become “the decisive player in life extension technology”.

The rest of the argument hangs in the air, although Csordas promises to get back to this story later. I can hardly wait, because his hint of a new chapter in the contemporary history of converging technologies—that is, the fusion of Google and transhumanism—would in my mind be the perfect topic for an exhibition of a sublime medical future. Unless Michel Houellebecq comes first!

I’ve just stumbled upon The Museum Detective, a website/blog dedicated to finding stories “from behind the scenes of the museum world”, edited by museum advisor/consultant Joanna Cobley in Christchurch, NZ.

Particularly noteworthy is the large number of posts with podcasts. For example this interview with Conal McCarthy, Director of the Museums and Heritage Studies programme at Victoria University in Wellington, NZ, who “takes us into the world of over-crowded display cases, ferocious custodians and sparse museum labels”. The perfect companion during my 25 min bike trip between home and work!

Joanna has also added a guide for podcast-beginners, including seven good reasons why museums should podcast:

• It can help build more audiences (especially the digital native generation).
• Extend the virtual museum visitor’s experience (which we know is growing).
• Enhance existing educational resources.
• Extend the reach of the museum’s public programmes e.g. lecture webcasts.
• Disseminate research undertaken by museum staff.
• It’s a relatively low cost, low risk venture.
• It’s fun.

(quoted from here)

A crew from Swedish Television (SVT) has just been visiting Medical Museion. They spent a full 10 hour day walking around the whole museum, from the golden lion on the ground floor to the syphilitic skulls on the third. Here they are focusing on one of Niels Finsen’s (Nobel Prize 1903) original lenses for light therapy of skin tuberculosis:

Bente kept track of everything

and I had to take the role of interviewee (because I speak Swedish 🙂

They will send 4-5 episodes in the weekly ‘Fråga doktorn’ [Ask the doctor] show in late March and April. Watch it on Mondays at 66.15pm — or see the show on-line here afterwards.

Two days without posts, because we’ve been discussing the next exhibition after ‘Oldetopia‘ which closes in December 2008. It will be based on the subprojects in the ‘Biomedicine on Display’-project and the working title is (surprise, surprise) ‘Biomedicine on Display’; but don’t be surprised if the final title turns out to be different. Yesterday we laid the frame budget and today the group discussed the budget experiences of ‘Oldetopia’. We’ll be back with more details about the next exhibition after having met with the prospective exhibition curator in late Febraury. And tomorrow we’ll be back with postings again.

Yesterday, our own Adam Bencard defended his Ph.D.-thesis — ‘History in the Flesh: Investigating the historicized body’; for a resumé, see here — in the old anatomical theatre of Medical Museion.

Adam started with a 40 min long presentation about the basic idea of the thesis — that the notion of ‘presence’ (Gumbrecht, Runia) might be a way out of the impasse into which the linguistic turn, cultural history and especially New Historicism has led the historiography of the body:

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Then Roger Cooter (historian of medicine at Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, UCL) started the opposition, praising Adams’ erudition but also asking some difficult questions about the historical situatedness of this kind of historiographical intervention:

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followed by literary scholar Knut Stene-Johansen (University of Oslo) who, among other things, went into the poetic qualities of the thesis:

and finally Dorthe Gert Simonsen (historian at the University of Copenhagen and chair of the committee), who questioned some aspects of the basic structure of the work:

(I hope to be able to get back with more details about what the three opponents said.) Needless to say, Adam passed with flying colours after two hours of intense dialogue. 

By the way (and apropos the topic of the thesis): as the discussion proceeded, it seemed to me that Adam’s body language shifted from cautionary to engaged,

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thereby adding an extra layer of presence-effects to the meaning culture that otherwise use to dominate these kinds of academic rituals.

Camilla (here) and I (here) have earlier brought up the relation between exhibitions and the blog medium. Now Dave Johnson (Blogging Roller) reports from the 2nd annual North Carolina Science Blogging Conference a couple of weeks ago:

The last session I attended was devoted to helping the Museum of Life and Science (Durham, NC) figure out how to use blogs to engage and educate the public about nano-technologies (they’ve got an NSF grant to do things like that).

I have tried to find more info about the project on the Museum of Life and Science’s website: Are they working with the two media separately? Or do they somehow integrate them? I guess we have to write directly to Troy M. Livingston, the museum’s Vice President for Innovation and Learning, who gave the talk.

Otherwise I haven’t found any place that experiments with mixed blog-exhibition media. Anyone out there who can help?

Mia Ridge, a database developer for the Museum of London, asks some interesting questions on her blog Open Objects about how museums and cultural heritage institutions relate to the ‘participatory web’ (web 2.0, social networking sites, user-generated content etc).

Mia’s (perhaps not very unsurprising) impression from speaking with colleagues is that museums are pretty conservative in this respect. But also that there may be differences depending on what kind of institution we’re talking about. (Maybe art historians are more resistant than social historians?) She also wonders how the resistance to the participatory web is expressed. Is it active or passive? And a lot of other interesting questions: “At this point all I have is a lot of questions”.

Note that the resistance Mia has found doesn’t seem to be against the digitalisation of collections or web-presence as such, but specifically against the participatory web.

These are interesting observations, and I wonder: Can this resistance perhaps be understood in terms of an opposition among curators against a perceived profanation of the sacred character of the museum? In the same way as Wikipedia and other user-generated content websites have been viewed with skepticism from the side of many academics — not just because they may contain errors (which encyclopedia doesn’t?), but also because it is a preceived profanation of Academia. (For earlier posts about profanation of the museum as a sacred institution, see here and here.). Any ideas?

PS (25 February): Mia answers today, here.

Even if both Adam (here) and I (here) have been critical of all these ‘turns’ that appear over and over again — and more or less mindlessly — in the humanities, I for one am nevertheless inclined to accept some ‘turns’ more than others. I’m particularly intrigued by the notion of a sensory turn (see also here).

The senses and sensory experience have recently been embraced also by historians. For example, the conference ‘The Five Senses in the Enlightenment’ at the University of Birmingham, 17-18 May 2008, will discuss multi-sensory (smell, taste, vision, hearing, touch) historical phenomena — not, unexpectedly, with a focus on how the senses have been mobilised in the history of medicine. As the organisers write:

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(In two earlier posts I discussed science communication as a field of governance (here) and the multitude of technoscience (here). Here’s the third post — about the blogging phenomenon and science communication)

Blog-savvy readers of this post hardly need to be reminded about the fact that the blog medium has grown explosively over the last ten years and is now rapidly transforming the global media ecology; in early February 2008, Technorati reported they were tracking 113 million blogs and that the number of daily posts was around 1,6 million.

The majority of these millions of blogs are pretty inactive and the majority of these in turn deal with everything but technoscience. Yet, in absolute numbers, blogs dealing with science, technology and medicine have an impressive presence on the internet.

The number of blogs dealing with science is probably somewhere between the ~28,000 blogs tagged ‘science’ on Technorati and the 1,000 or so ‘serious’ blogs that are written by, as Bora Zivkovic puts it “graduate students, postdocs and young faculty, a few by undergraduates and tenured faculty, several by science teachers, and just a few by professional journalists that deal with pressing issues or aim to engage other scientists in discussions about science practice, scientific publications or science policy”.

The number of blogs tagged ‘medicine’ is almost 6.700 (around 700 of these are ‘serious’) and the number of ‘technology’ blogs (mostly about computers and IT) is over 65,000 (all figures from 9 February 2008).

Number exercises aside, the rapid rise of blogging in these fields is important for understanding science communication today. “Because of their freewheeling nature, these blogs take scientific communication to a different level”, Laura Bonetta (‘Scientists enter the blogosphere’, Cell, 129: 443-45, 2007) points out. In my opinion, this “different level” has to do with the fact that blogging is currently more about communicatio than lectio (cf. my earlier post).

Not only is the blog medium easy to use, it also invites people to get their own voice in the global network; furthermore the functionalities of hyperlinking and comments emphasise the social nature of knowledge production and opinion making:

To define blogs as mere “personal diaries on the web” would certainly be miserly … This phenomenon should not be understood as yet another manifestation of an individualism nurtured by society in decay, but is on the contrary the result of a new technological articulation, made transparent by syndication, and taking place in between “intimateness” and “ex-timacy” – to borrow a concept of Laurence Allard. The ”blogosphere” represents not simply the juxtaposition of intimate diaries, but is a true media space which enables subjectivities to exist on a territory of their own, while at the same time “weaving threads” among each other, and which makes it possible for them to assemble around a political and aesthetic subjectivity that is at once their own and shared. It is never “me” who decides whether someone is going to “syndicate” with me. It is always for the other party to decide, and vice-versa (Olivier Blondeau, ‘Hacktivism Street protests, politics, and mobility: A study of activist uses of syndication’; originally published in Multitudes 21 (2005); read it here)

In my ‘multitudinarian’ interpretation, blogs can be seen as ‘singularities’ in the sense of Hardt and Negri: there are few group blogs, and even fewer corporate, organisational or national blogs. The large majority of blogs don’t represent any movements, parties, institutions or organisations; instead they function, in a Deleuzian sense, as “an escape from the dominant codes and majoritarian categories—including those of ‘identity politics’—that otherwise trap the singular in passive or static relations” (Simon Tormey, ‘‘Not in my Name’: Deleuze, Zapatismo and the Critique of Representation’, Parliamentary Affairs 59: 138–154, 206).

Yet blogs are not individualistic in a traditional way: many bloggers identify themselves by pseudonyms. Nor are they solipsistic: there is a high degree of cross-linking between blogs. The net of hyperlinks to other singularities stands for the network of all singularities.

The current dominant mode of thinking among bloggers is one of criticism and resistance. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Technoscience is not homogenous; in fact, the notion of an alleged ‘(techno)scientific community’ conceals the distribution of power and authority within technoscience. Younger scientists complain about their situation as a transnational ‘scientific proletariat’ who live on temporary soft money and have to move around world to get jobs. Even tenured faculty and other people with secure positions are judged largely by the amount of grant money they bring in and how many graduate students they can support. Competition for grants and publications is fierce, and the tactics used to secure them can be ugly, especially in high-profile sciences.

At the moment, as an open network of singularities, the blogosphere has a bias towards the ‘multitude’. But the blogosphere is a contested arena. More and more institutional (both national and transnational) blogs are entering the arena. There are also blogs that are run by organisations which are themselves divided between ‘Empire’ and ‘multitude’ (to continue to use Hardt and Negri’s sometimes contested binary categories; for a foucauldian critique, see here), for example, Nature.com blogs. It is an open question how biopower and biopolitical production will be distributed within the science communicating blogosphere.

(The commentator at the workshop ‘Science Communication as the Co-Production of Sciences and Their Publics’ last Friday, Sebastian Linke from the Section of STS at the University of Gothenburg, will has put his remarks to the whole paper (the last three posts) as a comment to this post)