Friday 17 August, Danish Television Channel 2 (DR2) program Deadline aired an eight minutes interview with sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard on occasion of the forthcoming premiere of his new sound work LABYRINTHITIS, commissioned by Medical Museion. See the interview here.
Read more about the performance on Sunday 2 September in an earlier blog post here.
In connection with the conference ‘Art and Biomedicine: Beyond the Body’ held Monday 3 September, Medical Museion has commissioned sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard to create a new work.
Jacob Kirkegaard has turned his listening ear inwards – to his own ear. By using specially developed listening equipment, he has captured the microactivity which the hair cells of the ear send out.
LABYRINTHITIS consists entirely of sounds generated in Jacob Kirkegaard’s own ears. Deep inside the cochlea there are thousands of microscopic hair cells functioning as sensory receptors. When sound enters the ear, they begin to vibrate in the watery liquid surrounding them, like underwater piano strings.
Thus, the hearing organ does not only receive sound. It also generates sound, just like an acoustic instrument. Some of the hair cells in the cochlea can change their shape to such an extent that they are enabled to move the basilar membrane and produce sound themselves.
These faint tones resemble the sound of a tinnitus – and they can be recorded with a microphone in the ear canal.
Jacob Kirkegaard employs the 1787 auditorium of Medical Museion as well as the audience for his composition: His listeners become part of an interactive concert as their own auditory organs respond to the tones played out into the auditorium. The room, at the same time, turns into one big resonant labyrinth of sound.
Jacob Kirkegaard LABYRINTHITIS
played on The Spiral Organ will be performed in Medical Museion, Bredgade 62, Copenhagen on Sunday 2 September 2007, at 6pm, 8pm and 10pm. Entrance is free, but seat reservations are necessary. Please write to soundevent@mm.ku.dk, indicating which of the three performances you prefer to attend.
For background information, please see http://www.ku.dk/satsning/biocampus/artandbiomedicine/sound_event_english.htm
(The news about Jacob’s performance have been registered by, among others, Networked Music Review, http://transition.turbulence.org/networked_music_review/2007/07/30/live-stage-jacob-kirkegaard-copenhagen)
Just want to remind you all that we are arranging the public conference “Art and Biomedicine: Beyond the Body” here in Copenhagen on Monday 3 September, 10 am – 5 pm.
Confirmed speakers include
For detailed program, including venue, titles and abstracts, see www.ku.dk/satsning/biocampus/artandbiomedicine
No registration necessary. For inquiries, contact Monica Lambert, mbl@mm.ku.dk
I love to discover new professional fields and knowledge-practices that I’ve never heard of before. Today Street Anatomy opened up the virtual door to one of them, viz., that of biocommunication and biovisualisation (formerly medical illustration).
I believe what these professionals do is of great significance for what we are trying to achieve in medical museums, including this humble institution, especially exhibitionwise.
Take for example The BioCommunications Association (BCA), which was founded as the Biological Photographic Association in 1931 and now has a much wider mission, i.e., to be an international association of media professionals who “create and use quality images in visual communications for teaching, documentation and presentations in the life sciences and medicine”. Thus the BCA includes people working with computer graphics, digital imaging, biophotography, videography, teleconferencing, scientific poster production, etc. — for the purpose of biological and medical communication (but it looks like the photographers are still setting the tone of their annual meetings).
They also have an annual competition (the BioImages Salon) with some great images among the finalists (unfortunately the images cannot be copied from the site; these guys are professionals: they know how to protect their IPRs).
Their link page is awesome — enough for a week’s browsing in this (to me) new and exciting professional field. When will there be time over?
Added: Is this a professional field in trouble, institutionwise? Penn’s Medical School decided in 2002 to close their department of Biomedical Communications (to the dismay of its former director). Maybe these are knowledge-practices and skills that are so widely used now that they cannot be confined to a special uni dept? Does anyone know?
One of our new blog siblings is Street Anatomy: Medicine + Art + Design, created in December 2006 by Vanessa Ruiz,
a graduate student in the Biomedical Visualization programme at the University of Illinois (Chicago) — this is the largest medical illustration program in the US, with their own Virtual Reality in Medicine lab. A kind of ‘medicine on display’ programme.
As Vanessa points out, most of us tend to have a rather dated understanding of what ‘medical illustration’ is. I, for one, always thought of medical illustrators as people who could handle a pencil and a water colour brush. Not anymore: “they use their artistic skills combined with technology to produce dynamic visualizations” in the form of illustrations, graphics, animations, 3D models etc. Partly to educate medical doctors and students, but also to encourage the public’s engagement with medicine: “we persuade people to learn by engaging them with visual media that will educate them to take care of and maintain their bodies”.
Accordingly Vanessa’s blog is heavily illustrated — with a lot of stuff that medical museum curators could learn quite a few tricks from.
It will be exciting to learn more of what goes on in the field of medical illustration and biomedical visualisation. Does anyone know about other great sites in this field?
Just found a short, but updated and quite useful bibliography of cellular and molecular imaging books and articles from a history of science and STS perspective, compiled by Maura C. Flannery, a St. John’s University professor, who’s major research interest is the visual aspects of biology and the aesthetics of science. Even better, Maura also has a page with a number of useful links to cellular and molecular imaging websites. Browse and enjoy!
Medical blogs vary enormously with respect to quality, updating frequency, and aimed audience. Some are useful and interesting for medical museum curators. I believe Medgadget is one of them.
Founded in December 2004 (same month as this humble blog was born) by San Francisco anesthesiologist Michael Ostrovsky, it was announced as “an independent on-line journal covering the latest medical gadgets and technologies, medical science, and the progress of the digital revolution in the healthcare industry”.
From the very beginning Ostrovsky and his team of editors and other contributors (who write 3-10 posts a day together) have invested a lot of enthusiasm in the project. In their own words, they have a passion for medical gadgets, constantly jotting down “snarky commentary on cool new gizmos”.
In other words, they are the true geek-peekers of the new medical technology world. But with a serious aim — they want to help medical professionals “make informed decisions based on objective analysis and honest editorial writing”.
Now they can add medical museum curators to the aimed audience list. Because many postings provide quite useful information for curators interested in collecting contemporary biomedicine, medical engineering and biotechnology. They identify all sorts of new medical objects, they provide background stories and they often contextualise them. And they almost always bring pictures of the items.
Medgadget doesn’t have any contemporary historical or museological ambitions (yet). But they are museologically quite useful — by default.
Genetics has become progressively important for medicine during the last 50 years — primarily for biomedical research, but also clinically. Consequently the history of genetics is bound to play an important role in the history of contemporary medicine, and historical studies of genetics in different varieties do in fact take up much of the shelf space in libraries of the history of medicine.
There are also a number of associations and networks of interest. One of these is the Genetics and Medicine Historical Network (GMHN), founded in 2002 by medical geneticist Peter Harper at Prifysgol Caerdydd (Cardiff University), with the original aim to help preserve sources for the documentation of human/medical genetics, particularly in the UK.
In 2005 the GMHN received a three-year Wellcome Trust grant, primarily for “identifying and conserving key written records, including personal scientific records of workers, records of societies and institutions, and images”. In other words, basically to build up a history of human genetics archive. They are also actively promoting interviews with older medical geneticists in collaboration with the Oral History of Human Genetics Project. So far, however, they have not followed the advice from some of their foreign colleagues to add the acquisition of the material culture of genetics to the project aims. But this may come at a later stage, particularly if the Wellcome Trust prolongs the grant.
The third network meeting, organised by Toine Pieters (Amsterdam) will be held in Barcelona, 1-3 June 2008. Read more about it in the last GMHN Newsletter (#11) here.
Plato and Aristotle did it, Cicero did it, and many other classical authors too. Montaigne wrote a long essay on it, and Henry David Thoreau a whole book. Friendship is one of the perennial topics in the history of philosophical thought.
Some sociologists say that friendship relations have perhaps never been as strong as they are today, when individualism flourishes and traditional social institutions and solidarities have broken down, at least in Western societies.
Now, Western societies are also science-based societies — and science is an extremely individualist enterprise — ergo, one could expect friendship to be quite a pervasive kind of social relationship in science, technology and medicine, including biomedicine. In his autobiography (What Mad Pursuit, 1988) Francis Crick said that friendship was crucial for scientific collaboration: “certainly you have to be personal friends” (on p. 93).
Crick’s point is underlined by the ubiquitous references to friendship in book prefaces. In almost every book, in the humanities as well in the sciences, authors thank their colleagues and/or friends. And even if they may exaggerate, or include people they would never dream of having a really friendly relationship with, the ubiquity of the term ‘friend’ seem to reflect at least an widespread expectation that friendship in crucial for scholarship.
What has been written in history of science and science studies? The other day I searched through some of the standard book and article data bases (Arts & Humanities Citation Index and Google Scholar; and RLG’s Eureka for history of science) — and found almost nothing.
True, historians of science, technology and medicine have written quite a lot about concrete friendships, but I didn’t really find anything about friendship as a social or cultural category in the HoSTM- and STS-literature.
The only interesting item I did in fact find was one made in passing by veteran STS-scholar Evelyn Fox Keller who wrote in a memorial article to one of her old friends, mathematician Lee Segel, that in their case friendship came first: “work grew out of friendship, and gradually became the very medium of friendship” (E. F. Keller, “Science as a medium for friendship: How the Keller–Segel models came about”, Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, vol. 68, 1033–1037, 2006; on p. 1034).
Maybe there is a rich literature on friendship in science that I have missed in this preliminary literature search? But it may also be the case that friendship has been overlooked among historians of STM and STS scholars.
Maybe the general opinion corresponds to the naïve idea expressed by F.J. Ayala that “scientists are inclined to transcend ideology, nationality, friendship, monetary interest and other prejudices when the mettle of scientific knowledge is at stake” (“On the scientific method, its practice and pitfalls”, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, vol. 16, 205-240 1994).
That kind of naïvité has been surpassed when it comes to ideology, nationality and monetary interest, but may still be valid with respect to friendship. I don’t know. Does anyone have any good ideas?
It’s fascinating to see how cultural studies are embracing old alternative health agendas. Take breathing (see my earlier post), for example.
Breathing used to be the prerogative of Reichian therapists: Wilhelm Reich (a student of Freud) thought unrestrained and natural breathing was the clue to all kinds of health and happiness. He has, in turn, inspired generations of therapists from the 1960s and onwards, like Norwegian physiotherapist Lillemor Johnson, who developed a treatment program (Integrated Respiration Therapy), based on breathing exercises to help build up underdeveloped muscles; and there are numerous others, e.g. here.
What’s interesting from a contemporary historical point of view, is that the new body history — which has emerged as a purely intellectual and academic movement, for example out of New Historicism, in the last decades (see Adam Bencard’s forthcoming PhD thesis) — has now reached a point where it begins to interact with the therapeutic movement. Where will this lead? Will cultural historians begin to practice the old breathing therapies? Will therapeutic practitioners begin to distance themselves from their practice in a traditional academic fashion?
