Biomedicine in museums

How is one’s personal identity constructed these day? I’m asking, because I just read the announcement for a series of workshops and a special issue of the journal Minds and Machines on ‘The Construction of Personal Identities Online’.

Makes me think about how, over the last five or ten years, I have probably spent more and more time at the computer screen than face-to-face with my colleagues and staff here at the museum or talking with colleagues in seminars or at conferences. My sense of professional self — who I am, my identity as a professional, etc. — as well as other people’s sense of who I am has no doubt been formed, even to a considerable extent, through email and blogging and other online activities. (In contrast to my identity as a father, which I don’t believe has been much affected by my online activities.) Scary!

Historians of medicine and medical museum curators have invested a lot of interest in changing historical conceptions of death and the material remains that signify death and afterlife.

But few have turned their attention to death on the internet and other digital media. The announced one-day seminar on ‘Afterlife & Death in a Digital Age’ to be held at the National University of Singapore on 17 April promises to provide some interesting input to how museums could incorporate these new conceptions of death:

How is the dash between life and death, being and oblivion reflected in the age of digital media? How can we approach the subtleties of different cultural practices and beliefs through design? What is the technological response to the ephemerality of our digital and physical existence? What are the issues around ordinary technologies transforming into memorials, evoking powerful memories, nostalgia etc? What is the function of different projects offering technological response to death and afterlife? Are we simply witnessing technological sentimentality and kitsch and designing new forms of ‘earthly and ridiculous immortality’ as Milan Kundera would inspire us to think? What are different design solutions responding to? For example, are they trying to respond to the immense indifference of nature and the universe to human life and death? How can we respond to the ever-increasing mass of digital refuse or ‘dead’ data and what are the implications of and insights provided by reflecting on the inevitable end of ‘civilisation’? What are the legal and ethical implications of ‘freedom of choice’ being supported through technology, digital desecration and the hybridisation of (the remains of) the dead with the living?

Keywords include:

• possible immortality and afterlife through digital media
• cultural issues with dying, death, afterlife and technology
• new forms of grieving and commemorating via emerging technologies
• the motivation, role and function of technological responses to mortality
• digital archiving and the preservation of self and society
• the ethics of supporting death and desecration through technology
• the hybridisation of once living, sentient beings with other biological and robotic entities.

Excellent questions and topics. Hope one of the organizers would like to come over to Copenhagen one day and create an exhibition around these themes with us.

Last month we presented Morten Bülow, the new PhD candidate here at Medical Museion.

We are also lucky to have recruited a new postdoctoral fellow — Lucy Lyons, whose research examines the role of drawing as an activity which engenders new revelations and communicates insight in its audience whilst maintaining the dignity of the subject being observed.

Lucy Lyon’s PhD-thesis from Sheffield Hallam Unversity, titled ‘Delineating Disease: a system for investigating Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressive’ (2008), was based in the Museums at the Royal College of Surgeons of England where she drew the processes used to create, preserve and conserve specimens with a rare congenital disease. The PhD-project explored a system of drawing called ‘delineation’ that requires direct close observation of an object and portrays the specificity of unique visual experiences as opposed to generic archetypes. As well as making drawings of the skeletons of deceased patients, Lucy has interviewed patients living with the condition, and has worked closely with medical researchers studying the cause of the disease. Her work reveals the power of drawing to delineate the hidden structures of disease. The project showed that drawing is not mere documentation but is about participation. Understanding is gained in the activity of drawing.

Her research led, among other things, to an exhibition at the Hunterian Museum in the autumn of 2008 — read more about it here. She is currently on leave from the City & Guilds of London Art School. Read more about her earlier experience here, and see some of her art work here.

Lucy’s 2-year postdoc project at Medical Museion, titled ‘Now I see it! Drawing information from the collection’ focuses on the activity of drawing as a way of gaining insight and communicating information. It is aimed at visiting members of the public, the museum staff and medical and technical community as well as other artists and researchers. It is a participatory project that will encourage all to engage in different ways with the museum and the objects within it.

The project is financed by a grant from the Nordea Foundation to the Center for Healthy Aging, Faculty of Health Scences, University of Copenhagen. The Center was established last year with a budget of 300 mill. DKK for a five-year period — and a smallish amount of the total will be used for studies of healthy ageing science communication in a museum context here at Medical Museion.

Københavns Universitet er ved at opgradere intranettet (som lige nu hedder punkt-KU) og har udskrevet en konkurrence blandt ansatte og studerende om et godt navn på den nye version.

Hvad med ‘Closed Access’?  Som en selvironisk kommentar til at intranet tit er ganske overflødige — det meste af det, der lægges på intranet kan med fordel lægges ud til open access.

Selvironisk, fordi tidens ånd selvfølgelig er open access, og ikke closed access. Dvs. en opgradering af intranettet går imod demokratiseringen af nettet.

Selvironi er for øvrigt en fin gammel universitetstradition, som desværre ikke bliver holdt i hævd særligt meget mere. Det udstråler integritet og reel selvtillid — hvilket universitetet sandelig har brug for i disse dage.

We thought our storage facilities were warm enough to work in, even in the winter. But the current Arctic spell — which is a proof of the simple fact that global warming isn’t evenly distributed around the world — has forced one of our external designers, Mikael Thorsted, to wear winter cloths when inspecting artefacts for our new exhibition:

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What is going on? Well, ‘Primary Substances‘ — the first exhibition in our brand new extramural temporary exhibit area in the main building of the Faculty of Health Sciences — is closing tomorrow. It will be followed by ‘Healthy Aging’, which approaches the major global challenge of ageing (sic!, see disclaimer below) in three different ways — through science, art, and cultural history:

Through science: Studies of the process of aging is a rapidly growing international research field. How can the biological and social sciences and the humanities help us experience a more healthy old age? In a series of wall panels we are presenting the new multidisciplinary Center for Healthy Aging, University of Copenhagen, established in 2009 by means of a grant from the Nordea Foundation.

Through art: Science is not very good at capturing the existential dimension of aging or visualizing the accumulated layers of life experience. But that’s something that art can do. Acclaimed photographer Liv Carlé Mortensen has created a photo and interview collage series of portraits of Danish centennarians, called ‘100 Light Years’ (we are displaying the series of commissioned photo collages that Liv made for our intramural ‘Oldetopia’ exhibition two years ago).

Through cultural history: Finally, aging has its own visual and material cultural symbols. Two showcases in the lounge area are going to display historical objects from our rich historical collections that represent four kinds of aids that have been associated with old age — artefacts that have helped us overcome the deterioration of bodily functions.

The show is produced by myself together with Bente Vinge Pedersen, Jonas Bejer Paludan, Ion Meyer and Nanna Gerdes from Medical Museion. Design and graphics is taken care of by Mikael and Lars Møller Nielsen, Studio 8, Copenhagen.

We are also working closely together with Tina Gottlieb, administrative head of the Center for Healthy Aging, and the team leaders of the Center’s five research programmes, who have contributed text proposals and images for the wall panels. But lots of editing and re-writing, because few academic scholars really understand how little text you can actually display on a 125×85 cm wall panel 🙂

‘Healthy Ageing’ is scheduled to open on Monday, 8 February. More about it later.

(Disclaimer: for purely irrational reasons, I don’t like the American spelling of ‘aging’, but prefer Br. Eng. ‘ageing’. However, the Center for Healthy Aging, which pays for the show, has adopted the American spelling practice, so we courteously adjust to this fact to avoid a bi-lingual show.)

I’ve just received the announcement for the 11th annual meeting of Universeum (the European network for university heritage) in my inbox.

The meeting will be held in Uppsala, 17-20 June, on the theme ‘University Heritage: Present and Future’. The organisers invite submissions of papers devoted to “academic heritage in its broadest sense, tangible and intangible, namely the preservation, study, access and promotion of university collections, museums, archives, libraries, and buildings of historical and scientific significance”.

Academic heritage institutions traditional roles are collecting, preservation, research and teaching. Increasingly, they are expected to develop public programs and exhibitions as well as to assume a stronger role in marketing their university’s identity. These roles can pose considerable challenges. How can we position ourselves within the growing constraints of generating external funding, creating new audiences and keeping our institutions’ identity?

The present and future status of university museums is a very important topic for a museum like ours (we are a unit under the University of Copenhagen). But frankly, this call doesn’t sound as inspiring as it could have been. I had expected a more clearly defined theme for the meeting, focusing more on, for example, the complicated transition phase that university museums are in at the moment — squeezed as they are between, on the one hand, schemes for national research governance based on scientometrics etc. and, on the other hand, new market-oriented and populist national museum policies. Both trends are eroding traditional scholarly ideals for the production and preservation of and engagement with the academic heritage.

And frankly, the format of the meeting looks pretty uninspiring too. Proposals are invited for the usual 20 min (including 5 min discussion!) presentation format only. I would have expected a somewhat more imaginative spectrum of formats, like panels, group discussions, small workshops on selected topics, etc. I don’t expect online Twitter-sessions, but if Universeum has the ambition to set agendas for the future of European university museums, it should strive for sharper thematic programmes and a more up-to-date meeting format.

But one can of course be happily surprised. And Uppsala is absolutely gorgeous in early June. So if you haven’t been discouraged by this post, send your proposal + short bio + short mention of research interests to universeum@gustavianum.uu.se — before 15 March, 2010. 

More info here: http://www.gustavianum.uu.se/universeum2010.

If you happen to be near or in Philadelphia the weekend after next, you may consider attending the upcoming Medical Film Symposium. A awesome lot of film-makers, -theoreticians, and -historians will watch and discuss films that explore “the relationship between moving images and medical science”.

The Mütter Museum (no link provided, they have a malicious virus on their website right now!!, no kidding) will host the well-rounded Saturday program and the Friday night screening will take place in the Pennsylvania Hospital Surgical Theatre, which (Joanna says) is the oldest surgical theatre in the United States).

See the screening and academic program here. Register before Friday, 15 January. Joanna will attend the symposium in the role of “official blogger” for the event, so we can all expect to read well-written accounts about what went on — for example, whether the Saturday night party will turn into a symposium in the original meaning of the word, or not.

Musician John Boswell has just released the third part (called ‘The Unbroken Thread’) in his Symphony of Science series of music videos — the explicit goal of which is

to bring scientific knowledge and philosophy to the masses, in a novel way, through the medium of music.

Boswell’s thing is to remix and tune the spoken words of famous scientists like Jane Goodall, Stephen Hawking etc. with high-profiled popularizers (David Attenborough, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkin, etc.) and combine them with footage and his own electronic music compositions.

I really don’t know what to say. One side of me just loves to watch and hear the four secular gospels of the creation of the world — i.e., the history of the Universe, the history of the Earth, the history of Life, and the history of Humankind — after all, we atheists too need mind-expanding narratives we can live by:-). One of the most awesome narratives (combining the last three secular gospels into one) I’ve seen is Claire L. Evans’ ‘Evolution in 60 seconds’.

On the other hand, there are limits to what my aesthetic sensibilities can cope with. And even though ‘The Unbroken Thread’ is occasionally able to raise the right feelings of secular sublimity, Boswell’s re-mixing of pretentious voices, his outdated electronic tunes and the use of worn-out molecular animations combines into a major artistic flop. How can he for a moment believe that he will be able to bring scientific knowledge and philosophy “to the masses” (what a phrase to use!) with this kind of music video production?

I’m sure The Knife together with Korb would be able to create a much more sophisticated musical and visual rendering of the four secular gospels of creation.

The Mori Art Museum in Tokyo is currently showing an exhibition called ‘Medicine and Art: Imagining a Future for Life and Love’, showcasing 150 works of art — some are installations designed by artists, other are historical medical artefacts that are contextually transmogrified into art objects by being situated in the art museum space, like these:

From Boing Boing.

Adds to my general impression that the identity of a medical artefact — as a historical museum artefact, as a clinical tool, as an art object, etc — is all about context. Framing means everything.

Can’t resist forwarding a query from Keni Sturgeon, curator at Mission Mill Museum (a textile museum in Oregon), on the ACUMG-list. Keni, who also teaches museum studies at Western Oregon University, is in the midst of planning “a graduate course on Small Museums” and would like some input from other small museums, especially college and university museums/galleries:

So, if you were in a position to hire a new, entry level employee fresh out of a museum studies program in grad school, what things would you want them to know about working in a small museum? What would be the top three skills they could come with? In what ways do you see small museums as being different from mid-large size museums and how does that difference impact your job?

Good question — what kind of skills do we look for when interviewing applicants for jobs in a small university museum like ours?

• We cannot afford to hire people who are too specialised; a small museum curator needs to be a jack of all trades.
• At the same time he/she must be a master of at least one trade to uphold general academic-curatorial standards.
• All museums want staff with excellent collaborative skills — but for a small museum the lack of such skills is a disaster.
• Academic-curatorial staff in small museums is expected to be willing to do all kinds of jobs, from cleaning artefacts for the next exhibition (which always opens next week) to writing trail-blazing academic articles in high-impact, peer-reviewed journals.

What else are we looking for?

(added on 11 January):
Quoted from the discussion on ACUMG-list:
Lesley Wright, Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College suggests:

I would be looking for an employee who writes and speaks well, who is organized and task oriented, and who is willing to pitch in and do a wide range of tasks. The biggest difference to me between small museums and larger museums is the lack of specialization. I direct (e.g., administer), but I also curate and handle much of our public relations. And I teach. And I can design an exhibition if I need to. And I write grants. And I lead tours. I would hope any graduate of a museums studies program could do budgeting, and knows how to work with a budget. Grant writing would be a big plus. A familiarity with art handling would be great. And a desire to make art accessible to a wide public is a must. I would also welcome a recent grad’s knowledge about the wider field of museums, as we are all prone to getting buried in our work and lose sight of the bigger picture. Finally, prima donas need not apply. I need employees who can work well with a wide range of people.

and Phillip Earenfight, The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, adds

Sincere devotion to serving the public and passion for the work.
Good judgment.
Flexibility and creativity on the fly with a eye towards keeping priorities in order.
Keen visual skills.
Solid writing and speaking.
Attention to detail.

Great list of qualities (virtues?) needed by a museum like ours. Any more comments?