March 2010

Like most museums, Medical Museion is a member of the International  Council of Museums (ICOM). The major benefit of membership is that you don’t have to pay entrance to other member museums (and sometimes are allowed to bypass the queue by getting in through the VIP entrance, which gives a kick of feeling important).

But except for this, one doesn’t really get much out of the hefty membership fee. ICOM, with its headquarters in the UNESCO building in Paris, is just another big transnational bureaucracy.

In the good old days of Western imperialism, ICOM promoted wholesome European and American values. Not so anymore. The 22nd General Conference will be held in Shanghai in November this year on the theme ‘Museums for Social Harmony’.

Took me some time to get my memory in order. In fact, last I heard the term ‘social harmony’ was in a Xinhua news report from the Sixth Plenum of the 16th Central Committee meeting of the Chinese Communist Party, held in Beijing in 2006.

Building social harmony, said a CPC spokesperson then, “is a major strategic move taken by the Party to build a fair and just society and attain sustainable social and economic development”. And now, four years later, this strategic move has already been adopted by ICOM.

As a corollary, ‘Museums for Social Harmony’, has also been chosen as the theme for this year’s International Museum Day on Tuesday 18 May.  

Actually, when you think about it, it’s not that surprising. I don’t believe this is a specific ICOM phenomenon. Transnational bureaucracies probably have quite a lot in common with CPC’s world view of a socially harmonic, authoritarian, market economy-based society.

Som jeg skrev for et par uger siden har Arken lige lavet en lille undersøgelse på temaet ‘Fremtidens museum’.

Museerne og den kultur, som de eksisterer i, har ændret sig markant de seneste 20 år. Bevægelsen fra mono- til multikultur, nye undervisningsformer, ændringer i medievaner og forbrugsmønstre samt demokratiseringstendenser, der bringer traditionelle hierarkier og autoriteter under pres, er blot nogle af de faktorer, der stiller nye krav til museerne. De ændrede vilkår kræver, at museerne handler proaktivt og opdaterer deres selvforståelse i forhold til den omgivende virkelighed. Hvordan udnytter vi bedst de nye og fascinerende muligheder, som fremtiden vil bringe – kulturelt, teknologisk og samfundsmæssigt?

Her er spørgsmålene — og mine korte svar (der var plads til meget mere, men jeg havde mest lyst til at skrive Twitteragtigt):

Spm 1: Hvad er museumsvæsenets vigtigste opgave i fremtiden?
Svar: At medvirke til en udvidet bevidsthed om vores fælles globale kulturarv.

Spm 2:  Hvad vil være den vigtigste udfordring inden for fremtidens museumsledelse, og hvordan bør museerne agere i forhold til denne udfordring?
Svar: At opfange den skjulte kreativitet som findes uden for de traditionelle museumskredse og mobilisere den til at forandre museerne fra nationale klenodieborge til at blive aktører i en global demokratisk kulturarvsforståelse

Spm 3: Hvad er den vigtigste udfordring inden for indsamling og bevaring i fremtiden, og hvordan bør museerne agere i forhold til denne udfordring?
Svar: At udvikle ’museum 2.0’-metoder og logistikker til ’distribueret kuratering’.

Spm 4: Hvordan ser du forskningens rolle på fremtidens museum, og hvad kan museerne gøre for at styrke deres forskning?
Svar: Museerne skal udvikle strategiske relationer med universitetsinstitutionerne, gerne inden for tilsyneladende ’ikke-museologiske’ forskningsområder.

Spm 5: Hvad er museumsinstitutionens største potentiale i forhold til publikum og formidling, og hvordan udnytter museerne bedst dette potentiale?
Svar: ’Publikum’ er en enestående ressource til at udvikle museernes kreativitet og ansvarsområde. ’Formidling’ må grundlæggende forstås som inddragelse af ’publikum’ i kulturarvsarbejdet.

Spm 6: Hvilke fremtidige udviklingsmuligheder ser du inden for kuratering af særudstillinger, og i hvilke retninger bør museerne nytænke deres udstillingsformater?
Svar: Alle udstillinger bør være særudstillinger – eller snarere, udstillingerne skal være i ’perpetual beta’, dvs. under konstant forandring, i dialog mellem de professionelle kuratorer og brugerne. Udstillingsformaterne behøver nytænkes radikalt. Hvad med alter-realistiske udstillinger?

Spm 7: Hvad er den vigtigste fremtidige udfordring i forhold til økonomi og administration, og hvordan bør museerne agere i forhold til denne udfordring?
Svar: Der vil altid mangle penge. Men den som laver noget interessant og vedkommende er ikke fattig.

We have a old and pretty dysfunctional website. Shall we rebuild it (using the university’s system) or not?

All other great museums have fancy, big websites with lots of rich media functionalities. They cost hundreds of hours and enormous sums of money to build and maintain. Are they worth it? Or are the days of big websites numbered?

Mitch Joel (TwistImage) believes so (March 6), and I think he has a good argument.  If you think about how people find and connect to brands, they don’t necessarily do so through Google or other search engines anymore: “In fact, more and more people are having their first brand interaction on their mobile device. There are many people who are also connecting to brands for the first time in spaces like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean that website is about to become extinct. But it means that institutional branding is much more than one, big and centralized website:  “it is more than likely that we’re going to see more and more brands create multiple spaces and platforms to ensure that they’re connecting with the right people in the right communities”. And even if institutions use microblogging and other platforms, they usually think about them as instruments to drive people back to their own, controlled, website: “The truth is that the more vibrant community for a brand may be happening more through a mobile app or online social network platform… or something else or something in addition to it”.

Worth some thought.

The recently published Technology and Medical Practice: Blood, Guts and Machines, edited by Ericka Johnson och Boel Berner (Ashgate), might be interesting reading for medical museum curators. Says the blurb:

The advanced technologies being used in diagnosis and care within modern medicine, whilst supporting and making medical practices possible, may also conflict with established traditions of medicine and care. What happens to the patient in a technologized medical environment? How are doctors’, nurses’ and medical scientists’ practices changed when artefacts are involved? How is knowledge negotiated, or relations of power reconfigured? Technology and Medical Practice addresses these developments and dilemmas, focusing on various practices with technologies within hospitals and sociotechnical systems of care. Combining science and technology studies with medical sociology, the history of medicine and feminist approaches to science, this book presents analyses of artefacts-in-use across a variety of settings within the UK, USA and Europe, and will appeal to sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of science and technology alike.

For contents, see: http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=9922&edition_id=12413

Just learned from Beth how to embed a YouTube video  into a powerpoint slide — see this screencast. You need Powerpoint 2007 (and of curse a live Internet connection). Beth wants to put this trick into the Trainer’s Bag of Social Media Tricks.

We have just started a search for 1-2 positions at the level of Associate Professor (alternatively Assistant Professor).

As readers of this blog probably knows, Medical Museion is an integrated research and museum unit for promoting medical science communication based on the material and visual medical heritage. The research profile is centered around the contemporary history of the biomedical sciences, medical science communication studies, and studies of the production of the material and visual medical scientific heritage. We have a world-class collection of historical medical artefacts and images, an active program for the acquisitioning and preservation of the contemporary biomedical and biotechnological heritage, a permanent medical-historical public gallery, and an innovative temporary exhibition program.

We are looking for two new members of faculty to contribute to our integrated research, teaching, heritage and outreach programme focussing on late 20th century and contemporary medical and health sciences in a cultural, aesthetic and historical perspective. The aim of the programme is to develop new modes of research-based collecting, exhibition making and web-based outreach by combining scientific content, cultural interpretation and aesthetic expression in innovative ways.

On the outreach side, we are developing research-based science communication practices for a variety of audiences – spanning from health professionals to the general public – in the form of exhibitions and web products, and with special attention to the aesthetics of science communication.

On the acquisition side, we are in the process of developing research-based curatorial practices (heritage production) in close cooperation with research institutions, hospitals, pharma, biotech and medical device companies, and patient organisations in the region (‘museum 2.0’) .

The appointees are required to do research at an international level and research-based teaching, however most of teaching obligations are substituted with museum work.

Read the official full job description below.
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In the early morning — just before Johanna began to make the usual noices to indicate she wanted to be transferred to our bed for a last cosy hour of sleep — my eyes fell on this sentence in a piece by Douglas Haddow in Adbusters (‘The coming barbarism’):

Rather than Bourriaud’s altermodernism, we should pursue an alter-realism: dispense with the art gallery altogether and make reality our experimentation lab.

I admit it’s taken out of context. Nevertheless, try to translate the sentence into the domain of science/medical museums and sci- and bioart, as represented by, for example, the Wellcome Collection:

Dispense with the sci- and bioart gallery and make scientific reality our experimentation lab.

In other words, don’t move the aesthetic out of the laboratory into galleries and museum exhibitions (this is what all sci- and bioartists so far have been doing). Go to the lab instead, do some real experiments and re-frame this practice into an aesthetic experiment within the walls of the lab itself. The lab is your art gallery.

All of us who have been following Nina’s blog about museum 2.0 are happy to hear that her book project about visitor participation in museums, science centers, libraries and art galleries has come to a temporary end.

She describes The Participatory Museum as “a practical guide to visitor participation … the nuts and bolts of successful participatory projects” in cultural institutions. The first half of the book focuses on principles, the other on practice, mission and staff culture. It’s available both in paperback and as a PDF/ebook, but Nina is also about to publish a free online version later this month.

True to the participatory spirit of her blog and book project (she has involved hundreds of volunteers in the writing and production process) Nina will continue to make the website for the book a place for continued discussion and debate.

Nina’s visit here at Medical Museion in Copenhagen in October was inspiring and I’m looking very much forward to reading her book — and to see the reviews and the comments on her website.

When I opened my mailbox this morning I found the following enticing message:

Hello Thomas
I’m writing this to let you know about a brand new featured post we just made over here at Medicareer entitled, “Top 50 Biotech Blogs.” I thought that you and your readers over at Biomedicine on Display might find it to be an interesting read. Please do let me know if you have any feedback — http://phlebotomytechnicianprograms.org/2010/top-50-biotech-blogs/
Warm Regards,
Emily Johnston
Medicareer

Tired as I always am seven o’clock in the morning when I’m preparing breakfast for Johanna I clicked on the link and found a site with a nice long list of blogs — with ours at the top, fairly decently described. But, of course, the site has no contact address, no link to a main site, and no “Emily Johnston” at a company called Medicareer exists on the web. So what do these guys actually get out of bringing all this blog information together? Have I installed malicious code now by clicking on their site? Anyone who knows?

A recent call for submissions to the journal Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies makes me think (again and again and again) about the unfathomable gulf between on the one hand biomedical practice and on the other hand literary and cultural studies about biomedicine.

Concentric asks for papers for an issue on ‘bios’ — i.e., the old Greek word for ‘life course’ which has been used by post-thinkers since Foucault (Agamben, Hardt, Negri and others):

How then are we now to rethink human life in terms of our increasingly intimate relations with machines, perhaps even our posthumanity? How are we to evaluate our “prosthetic life”? How are we now to define, interpret, understand concepts of law and polis (government, nation-state), state power, capitalism and globalization, in relation to human­ and also earthly plant and animal­ life (bios, ecos)? What new and unforeseen power struggles, perhaps even conflicts between human and non-human, life and death, might now be coming into play? In this era of the new bios, and new ecos, must we establish a new bio-(eco-)ethics, construct a new bio-(eco-)subjectivity?

We must ask once again, as philosophers asked thousands of years ago, “What makes us live?” “What ensures our existence?” “What is it that we call human life?” Can we look at (our own human) life anew and write about it afresh? How may the traditional literary genres, and specifically those concerned with life-writing, the writing of memoirs, biographies, autobiographies, be changing in terms of their form and content and their media of expression? What is the significance of “life-writing” at this particular historical moment?

This is all very mainstream ad nauseam — I always wonder if these literary and cultural studies guys have ever paid a visit to a life science lab? And what would their jargon sound like if they had?