Biomedicine in museums

Did you ever feel you lacked an overview of how the current European financial crisis affects museums and the culture sector as a whole?

I found a list of questions asked by the museum directors, fund-raisers, marketing managers, policy-makers etc. around Europe at the moment:

• How can cultural heritage be an economic driver?
• How can its economic impact be measured?
• What are the key technological innovations which have useful applications for the sector?
• Gimmick or gold dust – how can practitioners identify what technological developments create real impact and help organisations meet their objectives?
• How is new technology being used creatively to improve the visitor experience and engage new audiences?
• Can innovative technology be used effectively for a modest budget or does it always require a substantial investment?
• How do you future-proof investment in technology and avoid it becoming obsolete?
• What are the key drivers that will influence the shape of the sector in the next 10 years?
• What are the main challenges that need to be faced and what are the opportunities that can be harnessed?
• How can marketing strategies help organisations survive the current economic downturn?
• How can marketing practitioners still deliver results with dwindling budgets?
• In particular case studies are sought which have made the most of social media and/or operate on a shoestring budget.
• How can cultural heritage be used effectively in regeneration schemes?
• How can the impact of heritage-led regeneration be evaluated?
• What strategies are being used to develop new audiences for heritage sites and museums?
• How can venues attract diverse audiences and compete with so many other demands on people’s time?
• How can the local community be engaged and turned into frequent visitors?
• What will encourage families and young people to visit?
• As the sector faces devastating funding cuts, what alternative methods can organisations use to generate income?
• What can the cultural heritage sector learn from business approaches?

(from the Culture Matters 2012 website).

The problem with the list is it’s managerial lingo throughout. I wonder what a corresponding list of critical museum questions would look like? Slavoj, where are you?

(the Slavoj Žižek image is from Verso Books)

Every time I see a conference call for papers in my field of expertise these days, I’m thinking: could this meeting have been organised on Twitter or Google+ or some other online platform instead?

I’d rather participate in an academic discussion on my iPad at home or in a café than sitting in an ugly meeting room in an anonymous hotel somewhere in the middle of global nowhere. Better take a couple of rounds of discussions on Twitter than waiting for a mic to be passed down the aisle of a crowded conference room and then trying to hear what’s being said through the noise of the air-condition. Not to mention trying to have serious ‘discussions’ with people in the breaks between sessions, when everyone is running frantically around to find a toilet before trying to locate the next meeting room.

Going to conferences more and more feels like a kind of ritualised masochism. You’re time-lagged and sleep-deprived and are fed tasteless transfat-saturated cookies or small sandwiches with processed meat on soft white bread. Travelling is a waste of time, money and environmental resources: it drains your research grant for money that could have been used more productively, produces unnecessary tons of carbon dioxide, and helps transnational hotel chains increase their profit margins.

It has been said before, but it’s worth repeating again: Twitter is, in my experience, an almost perfect medium for academic discussions. I know: 140 characters seems ridiculously short, especially for academics who are used to writing books. But think again:

• Twitter sessions allow many discussants to join the conversation.
• Session are rapid and facilitate easy turn-taking; you don’t need to struggle for speaking time.
• Formal authority doesn’t count (it doesn’t matter if you’re a professor or a young grad student); only the strength of the argument counts.
• Twitter culture doesn’t give any room for pontificators or discussants who speak way too looong.
• Sessions can be spontaneous or planned, intense or lazy, existentially loaded or technically straight. They can last for 30 seconds or 5 hours, depending on the issue at hand, the interest of the participants and the power of the argument.
• Your personal features don’t matter: You can be a stutterer without being disclosed as such, and you can participate even if you have bad hair or a bad breath or forgot to apply your favourite deodorant.
• And technically, it’s a piece of cake.

Again 140 characters isn’t much. But it’s more than enough for an elevator pitch. And if you have more on your mind, you can always link to a blog post.

Nina Katchadourian‘s ‘Artificial Insemination’ (C-print, 20 x 20 inches, 1998)

A “very spontaneous” piece of work she writes:

a handful of tadpoles in water all fished out of a rainwater pond, a dinner plate from the cupboard, and a black t-shirt I was wearing at the time. A deliberate scrambling of the iconic scientific image of ‘when life begins’.

This is her only ‘biomedical’ art work — otherwise her work during the last two decades is mainly inspired by nature and maps (see much more here).

Hat tip to Jim Edmonson, who just drew my attention to Katchatourian’s ingenious ‘Seat Assignment: Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style‘, a series of photographs, video and still images made in flight using only a mobile phone camera.

The last two weeks in April, Medical Museion will host a number of events —  including a workshop+seminar +exhibition opening with Lucy Lyons, a seminar with David Pantalony from the University of Ottawa, and a film screening (Lars von Trier’s Epidemic) as part of CPH PIX film festival.

Lucy Lyons:
On Friday, 27 April, we will open an exhibition titled Experiences of Ageing, which presents drawings and objects from Lucy’s two-year postdoctoral research fellowship here at Medical Museion, funded by the Center for Healthy Aging at the University of Copenhagen. Lucy Lyons uses drawing as a method for gaining understanding of unfamiliar objects and to develop greater insight into the familiar — in this case the often overlooked aspects of ageing. The exhibition will run until 21 October.

The day before, on Thursday 26 April at 7pm, Lucy Lyons and her colleagues, Mette Bersang and Joanna Sperryn Jones, will give a hands-on workshop, where they and the participants can examine everyday medical objects through drawing, photography and much more. Tickets are very limited, so book now if you’d like to take part. Read more here.

Right before the exhibition opening on Friday 27 April, at 3pm, Lucy Lyons will give a MUSE Seminar titled ‘Artistic research: interventions with Medical Museion’, where she will talk about how she uses art in her reasearch, and how this art has now become its own exhibtion at Medical Museion. Read more here.

David Pantalony:
On Tuesday 25 April  David Pantalony from the University of Ottawa will give a MUSE Seminar titled “Examine first, ask what it is later: The multiple interpretations of 20th century scientific artifacts”. Here he will talk about a series of workshops at the Canada Science and Technology Museum, which put artefacts centre stage in order to experiment with new ways of thinking about the often-opaque objects of late 20th century science. Read more here.

Lars von Trier‘s ‘Epidemic’ (CPH PIX 2012 Film Screening: How do epidemics change society?):
On Thursday 12 April the CPH PIX film festival and Medical Museion will show Lars von Trier’s film ”Epidemic”. The film is one of von Trier’s earliest, and centers on a director and a scriptwriter, who are making a film about a fatal disease when suddenly life begins to imitate art. Before the screening, assistant professor Adam Bencard will give a short talk on the history of epidemics in Denmark, and how they have affected the way we organize our cities and health systems. Tickets cost 100 DKK, and can be bought from the CPH PIX website.

Last year, Medical Museion received the Society for the History of Technology’s (SHOT) Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits — an award that recognises museums and exhibits that interpret the history of technology, industry and engineering to the general public.

I am proud to serve on the Dibner Award committee for 2012-2014 — and we are now inviting nominations for 2012.

The closing date for this year’s nominations is already May 1 (sorry for this late posting). Here are the rules (more here):

Exhibits are eligible for this award if they have been open to the public for no more than 24 months before the deadline for nominations. The Society especially encourages nominations from local and regional historical societies. Virtual exhibits are not eligible for the award .

Anyone, including the institution or individual responsible for its creation, may nominate an exhibit for the Dibner Award, using the nomination form available here as a PDF or Word document. The completed nomination form should be e-mailed to each member of the Dibner Committee. Deadline for nominations is 1May, except in the case of traveling and short-term exhibits that close before that date; in those cases, nominators must either submit their documents to the committee at least two months in advance of the exhibit’s closing date. Nomination documents may not under any circumstances exceed 1 MB or contain anything other than text and static images.

After reviewing nominations, the committee will choose a short list of finalists, giving sole consideration to the evaluation documents submitted. The committee will then arrange for a “live” reviewer to visit each of the short-listed exhibits and write a report. Normally the chair will draw upon recommendations for live reviewers made by the nominator in the nomination document, although s/he may use her/his judgment to assign alternative reviewers as needed, including members of the committee.

Please, send your nomination to all members of the committe:

Glenn Bugos (2012-14), glen@momentllc.com
Jane Gavan, (2010-2012), j.gavan@sca.usyd.edu.au (chair)
Matthias Heymann (2010-2012), matthias.heymann@ivs.au.dk
Sheldon Hochheiser (2010-14), s.hochheiser@ieee.org
Arwen Mohun (2012-14), mohun@udel.edu
Thomas Söderqvist (2012-14), thss@sund.ku.dk

Always irritating,  but highly readable, Nicholas Carr quotes Clay Shirky saying:

I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”

It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.” The endless gratification offered up by our devices means that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we have to choose to do.

Well put! I’ll ask my wife to hide the iPad and iPhone for the rest of the Easter break. I need to develop some boredom so I can concentrate on Fred Tauber (ed.), The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science (1996) in order to prepare my presentation at the PCST-2012 in Firenze.

(the bored face is a detail from my How Are You Feeling Today?-poster, produced by Creative Therapies Associates, Chicago, 1989, which I bought in Palo Alto in 1991 and which has hanged in my office for daily contemplation in the last 20 years)

Hvad skal museer dog ikke stå model til!

Sohns forlag udgav for en måned siden Erwin Neutzsky-Wulff’s skønlitterære bud på sagen om Jack the Ripper, som i 1880’erne dræbte og lemlæstede prostituerede kvinder i London.

Til omslaget behøvede grafikeren en billede af en “gammeldags kirurgisk kniv”. Og hvor finder man sådan een? På Medicinsk Museion selvfølgelig!

Her er resultatet:

Skal vi så være pavestolte over vores indsats for den alsidige brug af den medicinske kulturarv (fra kulturarv til faktura)? Eller skal vi ærgre os over at forlag og journalister næsten altid kun vil have fingrene i de bloddrybende ting fra “gamle dage”?

Hvornår får vi se Genomic Enlightenment på et bogomslag?

Readers of this blog may remember that the 2010 biannual European medical museum conference was organised here at Medical Museion. The next biannual meeting, in 2012, will be hosted by our German sister museum, the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité, 13-15 September.

The theme for the Berlin meeting is ‘Hidden Stories: What do medical objects tell and how can we make them speak?’  (the call for papers was posted here a couple of months ago). Here’s the preliminary program with sessions and speakers:

Session 1: Intro, getting things going
– Robert Jütte (Stuttgart): Exhibiting intentions: Some reflections on the visual display of a culturally purposeful object
– Thomas Söderqvist (Copenhagen): Is the ‘things talk’ metaphor really useful? Or does it conceal a deeper understanding of our material interaction with things?

Session 2: Object biographies (I)
– Sophie Seemann (Berlin): A friend’s skull – gazing in a patient’s room in 1757
– Christa Habrich (Ingolstadt): A mystery of a platinum-made cystoscope
– Lisa Mouwitz (Gothenburg): Looking through the nail
– Jim Edmonson (Cleveland): The art of extrapolation: following the trail from patent number to a revolution in surgical instrument design and manifacture

Session 3: Object biographies (II) – Waxes
– Marion Maria Ruisinger (Ingolstadt): Christus anatomicus
– Sara Doll (Heidelberg): Models of human embryogenesis. The search for the meaning of wax reconstructions
– Michael Geiges (Zürich): Wax moulage Nr. 189. From teaching aid to the patients‘ story by an unusual research document

Session 4: Teaching
–  Shelley McKellar (London, Ontario): Challenging students with toothkeys and carificators: Experiences with object-based teaching in history
– Alfons Zarzoso (Barcelona): Teaching medical history through the material culture of medicine
– Stefan Schulz (Bochum) and Karin Bastian (Leipzig): Object-based, research-oriented teaching in seminars and exhibition Projects

Session 5: Research
– Thomas Schnalke (Berlin): Divas on the catwalk. Some thoughts on research with objects in medical history
– Claire Jones (Worcester): Identifying medical portraiture: The case of Andrew Know Blackall
– Julia Bellmann and Heiner Fangerau (Ulm): Evolution of therapeutic technology: Industrial archives and collections as sources for historians of medicine
– Benoit Majerus (Luxemburg): The Material culture of asylums,
– Nurin Veis (Melbourne): Stories from asylums: Discovering the hidden worlds of the psychiatric services collection

Session 6: Presenting
– Hsiang Ching Chuang (Eindhoven): Contextualizing museum experiences through metaphors
– Mieneke te Hennepe (Leiden): Scary things: Horrifying objects between disgust and desire
– Bart Grob (Leiden): Medicine at the movies
– Tim Huisman (Leiden): Anatomical illustration and beyond: Looking at Bidloo and De Lairesse’s Anatomia humani corporis

There is quite restricted seat capacity in the central conference venue in the ‘Hörsaalruine’ so the organisers strongly recommend that you register here as soon as possible (after 16 April and before 31 May). The registration is only valid when the organisers have received the conference fees.

Hoping to see you all in Berlin in mid-September! As the main organiser, Berliner museum director Thomas Schnalke, puts it:

We are looking forward to meeting with you in Berlin to share thoughts on ideas and issues that sometimes drive us crazy with frustration and delight: medical objects, collections and the stories behind them.

The organisers of a workshop titled ‘Science and Citizenship’, to take place in the Netherlands in June, point out that public understanding of science (PUS) scholars have argued for decades now that citizens aren’t just empty vessels into which science educators and disseminators can pour knowledge (the ‘deficit model’). Over and over again it has been argued (and demonstrated empirically) that citizens always already have a lot of knowledge and experience of science and technology. People aren’t passive consumers but engaged citizens that actively look for knowledge they are interested in.

Yet, “to the frustration of PUS scholars”, as the workshop organisers, Willem Halffman and Maud Radstake, put it, “the deficit model is surprisingly resilient”, especially, they suggest, among politicians, civil servants, ‘scientific statesmen’ and scientists. They could have added science journalists, science centres, science museums, and communication departments as well; in my experience, the list of adherents to the ‘deficit model’ of science communication can be made very long.

So why, then, is it so hard to move beyond the idea of dissemination filling up empty vessels? One reason, Halffman and Radstake suggest, is that even though the PUS-criticism of the deficit model may be correct, the practical consequences of the critique “are often hard to specify”:

what is a well-meaning and enthusiastic scientist to do? If she is convinced she has a life-saving project on her hands, should she not inform a world that is ignorant of her treasure, as a good citizen? Are such scientists really so naïve about what citizens know and think?

That’s a good point! And an even better, self-reflexive point is that we PUS scholars may be myopic. Maybe, say Halffman and Radstake, we take our own “well-educated middle class friends as models of ‘the citizen’?” And they add a “last, Foucauldian twist”: “is the notion of ‘citizen’ itself not profoundly shaped by scientific understanding, especially social sciences and even PUS itself?”.

I really like this attitude. My general impression of the PUS field is a crowd driven by a combination of enthusiasm and social/cultural criticism, but which is rarely self-critical, at least when it comes to its own cognitive and political motivations and power ambitions.

The aim of the workshop, which takes place in Soeterbeeck, Ravenstein, The Netherlands, 13-15 June, is to understand current debates in the public understanding of science by looking at notions of citizenship, both among scientists and policy makers and reflexively, and by looking at concrete examples of public engagement with techno-science and ask which conceptions of the citizen are involved. There is a registration form for the workshop (register by 22 April). And, by the way, the whole thing is supported by The Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC).

The title of this conference, organised by Petra Lange-Berndt and Mechthild Fend in the AHRC Research Network “The Culture of Preservation” (Activating Stilled Lives: The Aesthetics and Politics of Specimens on Display) is alluring.

The meeting will address “the challenges institutions face when dealing with formerly living entities and consider the aesthetics and politics of their display”. The idea is “to discuss the use of specimens in temporary exhibitions, museums or university collections and the role curators, art and artists have been playing in the transformation of these spaces”.

It will also consider “how preserved specimens have changed through the altering contexts in which they have been displayed”, e.g., “the initial transformation of organisms into objects, the more recent re-definition of pathological specimens as human remains, or the dramatic rearrangements that took place when natural history, anthropology or anatomy collections (many dating from the nineteenth century) were updated – coinciding with a shift in audiences, from specialists to a broader public”.

In addition the conference will consider the topic of preservation will be taken up.

• How and why do various cultures preserve elements of what is considered as nature?
• How does this relate to environmental notions of conservation and extinction?
• Should flawed specimens be disposed of?
• Can museums as a whole be considered cultural preserves?
• Should we preserve the preserves?
• And last but not least: Do we really need to embalm everything?

Speaker include:

• Mechthild Fend & Petra Lange-Berndt: Exhibiting Preserves
• Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Historian of Science, Berlin): Preparations Revisited
• Rose Marie San Juan (Art Historian, London): Bones in Transit: the Re-Animation of Human Bone in Early Modern Cabinets of Display
• John MacKenzie (Professor Emeritus of Imperial History, Lancaster): The Natural World and Imperial Legitimation: Hunting, Trophies, Taxidermy and Museums
• Robert Marbury (Artist, Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermy, Baltimore): Personal Computers as the New Wunderkammer and the Rise of Rogue Taxidermy
• Petra Lange-Berndt (Art Historian, London): Subsculpture: Assembling a Museum of Attractions
• Steve Baker (Artist and Art Historian, Norfolk): “Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead”
• Angela Matyssek (Art Historian, Marburg / Maastricht): “Museumlifes”: Mould, Decay and the History of the Object
• Panel discussion on “Curating Specimens” with Claude d’Anthenaise (Director, Musée de la chasse et de la nature, Paris), Christine Borland (Artist, Glasgow), Lisa O’Sullivan (Director, Center for the History of Medicine, New York Academy of Medicine), Johannes Vogel (Director, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin)
• Anke te Heesen (Historian of Science, Berlin): Displaying the Infinite Amount
• Nélia Dias (Anthropologist, Lisbon): The Fate of Human Remains from the Musée de l’homme to the Musée du quai Branly

The meeting takes place at the Department of History of Art, University College of London, 17-18 May 2012. The event is open and free for all, but please register with Pandora Syperek, pandora.syperek.09@ucl.ac.uk.

More here.