September 2009

In the last ten years or so, in the wake of the renewed interest in protein research and proteomics after genomics, we have seen more and more artists making protein sculptures. See, for example, Graphic Thought Facility’s neon protein artwork, or Colin Rennies glass sculpture of ATP synthase, or Julian Voss-Andreae’s wood and steel sculpures of proteins, just to mention a few.

Here’s another recent example. Herwig Turk sent me these images from his current exhibition gaps (with Paulo Pereira and Johannes Hoffmann) at the Museu da Ciência, Coimbra, Portugal (the museum of the Universidade de Coimbra):

Made by ropes and epoxy and coloured with red ship paint, gaps is based on a 3D-model of connexin43 drawn by PhD-student Steve Catarino at Universidade de Coimbra in connection with a research project supervised by Paulo Pereira.

Cx43 is one of the several specific proteins that form so called ‘gap-junctions’, i.e., channels that allow signal molecules to pass the membranes between cells. Intercellular communication by means of ‘gap-junctions’ is vitally important for many bodily functions; best known is the gap junction signalling responsible for the coordination of heart beat.

Herwig explains the background for the artwork:  [Steve] did a sketch to explain it to the students and we build a sculpture after that sketch”:

My stomach rumbled with excitement when I read the call for papers for a workshop titled ‘History, Digestion and Society: New Perspectives’ at University College Dublin, 30 April – 1 May 2010, organised at the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland.

As the organisers (Ian Miller and Mike Liffey) point out, diet and digestion are neglected in histories of the body, health and medicine. And diseases of the digestive system, like dyspepsia, peptic ulcer disease, vomiting etc., are not properly historically contextualised:

(image of knitted stomach from Strange but Trewe)

Meanwhile, historical analysis of issues related to food and eating often reveals a tendency to stress the political elements of historical events at the expense of the biological and medical. Topics such as hunger strikes, and the rise of organised movements such as the Temperance movement and organised vegetarianism have complex medical and biological aspects which are worthy of serious analytical attention.

Possible topics include:

• Refusal to eat food (e.g. hunger strikes)
• Dietary movements (e.g. temperance societies, vegetarianism)
• The development of related technologies such as frozen food and processed food.
• Historical concepts related to understandings of nutrition
• The history of individual digestive organs such as the stomach
• Medical issues related to digestion (e.g. gastric ulcer disease, indigestion)
• Socio-cultural issues related to obesity and anorexia.
• Surgical and medical intervention in the digestive system.
• Human and animal digestive habits
• Digestion and criminal activity (e.g. poisoning)

Send a 250 word abstract to Ian Miller (ian.miller2@ucd.ie) no later than 30 November 2009. For further info: Mike Liffey (michael.liffey@ucd.ie)

If the colour of medicine is green — what is (are) the colour(s) of the biomedical laboratory? And how have these colours shifted over time?

I’m asking, because David just sent this image of a “gorgeous MacBeth densitometer” (cat.nr. 1998.0174) telling me he’s now looking around for “space age blue” in his museum’s collection.

I guess the biomedical laboratory is a more rainbowish affair. Consider this awesome Sartoblot:

(see earlier post here)

Rose Sherman (Director of Enterprise Technology at the Minnesota Historical Society) is circulating a survey about how museums are engaging their communities through social media technologies — blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.

Rose asks a lot of relevant questions, like:

• How frequently, on average, are your social media web sites updated?
• What function(s) in your organization has staff assigned to use social media tools to engage communities?
• How many full time equivalent (FTE) positions are assigned to use social media tools to engage communities?
• What function in your organization is primarily responsible for actively using social media tools to engage communities?
• On average, how many hours per week do staff spend on actively using social media tools to engage communities, e.g. they Tweet, update Facebook pages, post photos to Flickr, post videos to YouTube, etc. ?
• Do you have a full time position(s) assigned to engaging with your social media networks?
• Do you have a social media policy? (e.g. http://sites.google.com/site/wharman/social-media-strategy-handbook?

Thought-provoking questions which remind me that the function of such surveys is sometimes to make you aware of what you haven’t done yet. A small museum like ours is particularly provoked by questions like “How many full time equivalent (FTE) positions are assigned to use social media tools to engage communities?”.  I would rather have preferred: “How many infinitesimal part time equivalents …”.

So we’ve got lots to do on the social web media side.

You can fill in the survey here.

Later today, the art exhibition SK-INTERFACES — originally displayed in Liverpool in 2008 (see earlier post here) — opens in “extended continuation” form (what others would call perpetual beta 🙂 at Casino Luxembourg in Luxembourg.

The opening event features Kira O’Reilly (inthewrongplaceness), Yann Marussich (Bleu Remix), Paul Vanouse (Relative Velocity Inscription Device) and Jun Takita (Light, only light!). The show, which is curated by Jens Hauser, is running until January 10, 2010.

Contributing artists include: Art Orienté objet, Maurice Benayoun, Zane Berzina, Critical Art Ensemble, Wim Delvoye, Olivier Goulet, Eduardo Kac, Antal Lakner, Yann Marussich, Kira O’Reilly, Zbigniew Oksiuta, ORLAN, Philippe Rahm, Julia Reodica, Stelarc, Jun Takita, The Office of Experiments, The Tissue Culture and Art Project, Sissel Tolaas, and Paul Vanouse.

Here’s the perpetual beta flyer:
Skin is our natural “interface” with the world – more and more, however, technological extensions are taking over its role; “interfaces” create both new freedoms and new constraints. In the cross-disciplinary exhibition sk-interfaces, twenty international artists reflect on how modern technosciences have altered our relationship with the world: telepresence, digital technology, speculative architectures, bio-prostheses, tissue culture or transgenics – for the artists, they are not mere topics but tools, methods and media to appropriate. They test the permeability of the borders between disciplines, art and science. Their interfaces connect us with other species, put satellite bodies up for debate, destabilize our conception of what it means to be human today, and create evolutionary scenarios confronting the technological pressure to adapt and its socio-political implications. As a natural inventor of the artificial, Homo Sapiens compensates for its imperfections through the use of technology. Arguing for the naturalness of the media created to this end, theorist Marshall McLuhan once suggested that they be understood as bodily extensions per se – something not unlike an electronic skin spanning the world in which inner and outer were no longer clearly distinguishable. Yet, these prosthetic extensions come at the high price of “auto-amputation”, for each prosthesis permits other senses and states of consciousness to be numbed and to atrophy. Today, in the context of the so-called Life Sciences, media and technological interfaces can no longer be considered merely as telecommunicative, digital, or human-machine interfaces; in the age of bio-facticity, even that which apparently grows naturally is now technologically induced, producing biological artefacts. In view of the utopias and dystopias this inspires, it is no surprise that artists take up the material, function and metaphor of skin as the original, semipermeable and active membrane. They contest the predominating utilitarianism with subversive alienation, aesthetically, poetically and provocatively. Sometimes they wrest from the technological a holistic impulse, sometimes an ecological illusion in which humans admit their responsibility rather than isolate themselves in their alleged superior status. Hence, sk-interfaces examines above all the “ – ”: the in-between-space of our contemporary ontological grey zones.

Dansk kunstlivs enfant terrible, Uwe Max Jensen — som laver kunst bl.a. ved at pisse skulpturer af — er pissesur på dagbladet Politiken fordi en af deres kunstanmeldere brugte så meget onlinesværte på ENDO-ECTO:

I Nordjyske i går skriver UMJ, at ENDO-ECTO har “kastet hele 10 (ti!) artikler af sig i Politiken (i den skrevne avis og på nettet)”. Det er sådan set OK, synes UMJ, som også finder ENDO-ECTO “interessant og spektakulær” — men, og nu kommer det store men — “Politikens ekstreme fokus på Phillip Warnell’s tarmkunst afslører en ganske tydelig diskrepans i Politikens forhold til kunst, der berører det anale tema”.

UMJ minder om, at han allerede i juli 2007 placerede en lort på byggegrunden af kunstmuseet Heart i Herning. Men medens Politiken altså har givet Phillip Warnell optimal opmærksomhed, så har avisen valgt fuldstændig at fortie tilstedeværelsen af UMJ’s lorteværk i Herning:

Dermed gør Politiken sig skyldig i at forskelsbehandle danske og udenlandske kunstnere, der arbejder med anale tematikker. Det skyldes sandsynligvis, at avisen på provinsiel maner snobber for det internationale.

UMJ har bare misforstået en ikke helt uvæsentlig ting. ENDO-ECTO handlede ikke om lort og anal kunst. Dels er det pågældende pillekamera designet til at affotografere tolvfinger-, tynd- og tyktarmen — men ikke de rektale dele af fordøjelsesapparatet — og dels kom kameraet under seancen her på Medicinsk Museion ikke længere ned i Phillip end til mavesækken. Så UMJ’s status som Danmarks ledende analkunstner forbliver uanfægtet.

Yuwei Lin and Christian Greiffenhagen are planning to organise a panel on ‘video methodologies and STS’ at next year’s EASST (European Association for the Study of Science and Technology) meeting in Trento (September 2-4, 2010), and want to know if others are interested.

As they rightly point out, despite the rapid technical developments and a general turn to the visual in the social sciences, “video methodologies are still not widely used within STS, and most researchers continue to rely on ‘traditional’ ethnographic or other qualitative research methods using other means, such as talk or writing.

However, video technologies clearly offer exciting possibilities of capturing the dynamics and complexities in the field. Video constitutes a new form of evidence that can be exploited by researchers. Not only can it be used for the purposes of observation and documenting, video can also be used for ‘action research’ as a research tool through which field participants could represent their experiences through new media production and exchange (e.g., de Block and Sefton-Green 2004). When applied in STS, video helps to understand the complexities and multi-modalities in scientific and/or technical development and implementation processes more fully.

Would everyone agree with these arguments? What are the challenges of applying video-based methods in STS-like research (e.g., nuisances of using video technologies, field workers’ informed consent, interaction with the field workers, ethics of publishing video data)? How have video-based methods been applied in different types of research? What are the implications of video-based methods to STS research? Is it possible to capture ‘where the action is’ on video, or is scientific and technological work too distributed, both spatially and temporally, to allow such capture?

Interesting initiative! Anyone who would like to get involved in the panel should contact Yuwei (yuwei@ylin.org) before 5 October.

The other day photographer Mads Ljungdahl visited us — and took this romantic picture in one of our reconstructed early 20th century dentist’s clinics (it’s the building of the High Court of Eastern Denmark in the background):

(credit: Mads Ljungdahl, http://www.madsljungdahl.dk and  http://www.artreview.com/profile/Mads_Lj)

A couple of months ago I advertised David Pantalony’s forthcoming article on the colour green in medicine. Just want to add that it was published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal last week (Sept 15, pp. 402-03). Read the full online text here.

A couple of weeks ago, I noted with some innocent pleasure that this humble blog was listed among the 100 Best Blogs and Websites for Innovative Academics. Pretty nice, I thought!

Then it turned out we’re also selected for the 100 Best Curator and Museum Blogs. Pretty nice too, I thought!

A couple of days ago, a service called The Daily Reviewer told us we’ve been selected for their Top Museum Blogs list. But now I’m not so innocent any more. Here’s their message:

Congratulations! Your readers have submitted and voted for your blog at The Daily Reviewer. We compiled an exclusive list of the Top 100 museums Blogs, and we are glad to let you know that your blog was included!

It’s the same kind of rhetoric you recognise from spam mails. The introductory “Congratulations!” tells it all. You can also acquire an ugly little yellowish badge to put on your site. Classical vanity fair methodology.

I mean, they probably don’t list blogs with Technorati authority below a certain point; they probably take advantage of blogs with a certain readership and utilise our vanity to sell advertisements. Parasites on our egos.