Biomedicine in museums

A collection of videodocumentaries of art projects that implement contemporary technologies of artificial life, robotics, and bio- and genetic engineering has just opened in the Kaliningrad branch of the Russian National Centre for Contemporary Arts.

The exhibition — curated by Dmitry Bulatov under the title ‘Evolution Haute Couture: Art and science in the post-biological age’ — contains a row of interesting works including, for example, Floris Kaayk’s ‘Metalosis Maligna’, “a fictitious documentary about a spectacular yet chronically disabling disease which affects patients who have been fitted with medical implants” (quote from here).

Bulatov (who has some interesting views on art and biotech) takes a broad sweep over contemporary and future biomedicine and biotech:

• Artificial but Actual (Artificial Life)
• Limits of Modeling (Evolutionary Design)
• Shining Prostheses (Robotechnics)
• Body as Technology (Technobody modification, WearComp, Biomechatronics)
• More than a Copy, Less than Nothingness (Bio-and Genetic Engineering)
• Semi-Living (Tissue Engineering)
• Post-Sodom and Post-Gomorrah (Nanoengineering)

from the following perspective:

What is radicalization and redundancy of technological and scientific progress? What is the evolutionary potential of the basic technological trends of the XXI century – robotics, bio-and genetic engineering, nanotechnology – like? Each of these trends actualize the traditionally formed boundaries of beginning and end of human existence, the demarcation of norm and pathology and the distinction of the non-(or semi-)organic model or entity. These – and many other issues – cannot be taken into consideration without the experience of contemporary techno-biological arts; the representatives of which do not so much confirm the technological versions of contemporaneity, as determine their boundaries. Art that is created under the new conditions of postbiology – under the conditions of an artificially fashioned lifespan – cannot help but take this artificiality as its explicit theme. However, time, duration, and life cannot be shown directly but only as documentation. The dominant genre of postbiological art is thus technological documentation: plans, drafts, and videos. It is precisely at this point where documentation becomes indispensable, and produces the life of the living thing: the documentation inscribes the existence of an object in history, and gives the object a lifespan which this existence (independent of whether this object was ‘originally’ living or artificial).

More on the art centre’s website and here. Looks like a good occasion to take a closer look at Kaliningrad (direct flights with Rossiya-Russian Airlines from Copenhagen for about 1500 DKK = approx. 300 USD).
(thanks to Ingeborg for the tip)

One of the problems for museums that want to display contemporary medicine is that many medical devices are hopeless as museum artefacts because they are so damned anonymous.

Take CT scanners for example: huge white or light blue plastic/metal boxes, that’s all.

People who have been scanned for some serious condition may have strong personal feelings about such artefacts — but for the rest of us, they are pretty lousy museum objects. No immediate presence effects.

But yesterday’s post on Imre Kissík’s and András Székely’s ‘Indulge in the fascinating world of radiology and nuclear medicine’ blog almost makes me change my mind. They display a YouTube movie that shows the inner, rapidly spinning parts of a CT scanner in operation (plastic cabinet taken off).

There are actually quite a few spinning CT scanners on YouTube. Here is a General Electric ’64 barettes au travail rot’:

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And here are 40 seconds of the brand new General Electric Brightspeed 16-slice CT system:

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This unidentified ‘CT at max speed’ is particularly awesome, I think.

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(note the background conversation!)

And more here, and so forth.

One thing is that taking the plastic/metal casing off and displaying the inner spinning device makes us better understand how a CT scanner works. It adds to the meaning of it.  But what really strikes me when seeing these clips is how the strip act changes the scanner as a museum artefact — from being an anonymous white silent behemoth to a lively noisy object with a lot of fascinating detail. Strong presence effects!

As a commentator on the ‘CT at max speed’-movie says (his spelling):

Monster Mashine, when you could see this, you never yould lie in it, it’s really fast and scary

In other words: imagine having that washing-machine-centrifugish thing spinning around your body! What if the bearings crack?

Maybe we could acquire a used ‘live’ CT scanner from the National Hospital for our exhibitions? We probably have to comply with some basic security rules for displaying machines at work — but that aside, I think it would be worth trying. So much better to show the real spinning thing than a 30 second bad quality movie on YouTube.

Sorry, there was no posting yesterday. Some of my co-contributors are on vacation, some are busy-busy writing chapters for our forthcoming book, and one is on parental care leave. And I didn’t post because I spent my spare-time yesterday reading a blog that I’ve never heard about before — Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0.

I found it because I had a chat with my colleague Bodil Busk Laursen at nearby Danish Museum of Art & Design the other day. We talked about user-driven acquisitions, user-generated exhibitions and such things, which in turn led to questions like: Is the ‘museum and web 2.0’-discussion restricted to using Facebook for building visitor networks, writing museum blogs etc? Or can museums also learn from the general idea of web 2.0? Can we use the experiences from the participatory web to develop the notion of ‘the participatory museum’?

Well, these days one can rarely come up with a web 2.0-related idea which hasn’t already been around for a year or two. A quick search revealed the existence of Nina Simon’s power-house of a blog, launched in late 2006 and filled with interesting, innovative views about museums and the web. Some of the content it pretty well-known stuff and sometimes it’s a trifle verbose — but more often than not Museum 2.0 is an innovation machine for thinking about the future of museums.

Nina expresses very succinctly what Bodil and I were stumbling to formulate the other day, namely that the participatory web is a powerful analogy for developing the notion of the participatory museum:

The web started with sites (1.0) that are authoritative content distributors–like traditional museums. The user experience with web 1.0 is passive; you are a viewer, a consumer. Web 2.0 removes the authority from the content provider and places it in the hands of the user.

And she then suggests that museums have “the potential to undergo a similar (r)evolution as that on the web, to transform from static content authorities to dynamic platforms for content generation and sharing”:

I believe that visitors can become users, and museums central to social interactions. Web 2.0 opens up opportunity, but it also demonstrates where museums are lacking. The intention of this blog is to explore these opportunities and shortcomings with regard to museums and interactive design.

Her point of departure is the following four key elements of the participatory web:

1. venue as content platform, not content provider
2. architecture of participation with network effects
3. perpetual beta
4. flexible, modular support for distributed products

and then she translates, very convincingly I think, these four elements into the basic features of the participatory museum. This 20 minute slideshow is a good starter.

There are some bits that I’m not happy with, but the general direction of Nina’s point — to apply the philosophy of the participatory web to the museum world — is excellent. Not to be followed slavishly, but as inspiration for fostering creativity with respect to the way museums relate to their custom… (sorry) visitors in a more participatory way than we usually do. Much food for thought.

So here are four questions for my colleagues when they return from their vacations and chapter writing:

1. what does it mean to turn a medical museum into a ‘content (or aesthetic experience) platform’ rather than just a provider of content (and aesthetic experience)?

2. how can one think of a medical museum in terms of an ‘architecture of participation?

3. how can our exhibitions be ‘perpetual beta’ rather than finished?

4. and what does a ‘flexible, modular support’ look like (other than the obligatory museum café)? What other kinds of museum widgets could we imagine? 

The name of this blog was chosen without thinking too much about it. We had some discussions a couple of years ago about the somewhat vague term ‘biomedicine’, but felt that Alberto Cambrosio and Peter Keating’s definition in Biomedical Platforms, 2003 (see earlier post here) was useful.

The ‘display’-part never gave rise to any discussions. I guess it seemed pretty straigthforward — we are a museum and museum have displays, period. Therefore ‘Biomedicine on Display.

In the course of the last couple of years, however, this blog has in practice expanded its field of interest to include the study of many other kinds of biomedical science communication practices and web presences.

So it’s time to do our homework — what do the linguistic experts have to say about ‘display’? The most relevant meanings of the noun ‘display’ are (pace the OED):

          
• The act of displaying or unfolding to view or to notice; exhibition, manifestation (1680–)
• The act of setting forth descriptively; a description (1583–)
• The presentation of radar echoes or signals on the screen of a cathode-ray tube; a visual presentation of data from a computer, whether by means of a cathode-ray tube or some other device; also, a device or system used for this = visual display (1945–)
• A specialized pattern of behaviour used by birds as a visual means of communication, often in conjunction with characteristic calls (1901–)
• An exhibition, a show; a proceeding or occasion consisting in the exhibiting of something (1665–)
• Show, ostentation (1816–)

Seems like a list of useful varieties. We could also have called this blog ‘Manifesting Biomedicine’, ‘Setting Forth Biomedicine’, ‘Biomedicine on the Screen’, ‘Exhibiting Biomedicine’, ‘Biomedical Ostentation’, and so forth. But ‘Biomedicine on Display’ seems to cover all kinds of presentations, manifestations, ostentations, descriptions, imaging practices, show room activites, exhibitions, web displays etc., in which biomedical ideas and practices are being set forth. And I especially like the derived notion of biomedical display as “a specialized pattern of behaviour used by biomedical researchers and clinicians as a visual means of communication”. So I suggest we keep our present name. Any objections?

Science blogging has been on the Nature Group‘s radar screen for quite a while. On Saturday 30 August Nature Network organizes the ‘Science Blogging 2008’ meeting in London to promote the genre — especially among scientists and science educators:

What can science bloggers do to maximise their impact? Can blogging contribute to scientific research and careers? How can blogs be used to help educate the public about science? What other emerging online tools will play a role in science?

The day starts with a keynote by physician/journalist Ben Goldacre (who writes The Guardian’s weekly Bad Science column), followed by a panel about “how science blogs can change the public’s perception of scientists and provide a support framework for scientists themselves”. The rest of the day is devoted to breakout sessions: 1) Can blogging unlock your creativity?, 2) How to make friendfeeds and influence people, 3) How to enhance your blog?, 4) Science in Second Life: a virtual tour, 5) Science blogs and online forums as teaching tools, and 6) Communicating Primary Research Publicly.

Read more here.

Relations between curators and museum management, between museums and their owners, and between museums and sponsors/donors come in all varieties. Sometimes they can be quite troubled—one of the best known cases is perhaps the censored Enola Gay exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum in the 1990s.

The Smithsonian apparently has a perennial problem. In an article in the Newsletter of the Organizaton of American Historians (nr 36, August 2008) titled ‘History with Boundaries: How Donors Shape Museum Exhibits’, the current president of the OAH, Pete Daniel, tells the sad story about how sponsors and donors together with the top management have curbed curatorial control over exhibitions in the National Museum of American History. The museum, says Daniel, “could dare to present exciting and controversial interpretations based on recent scholarship”, but instead it “has settled for donor-demanded exhibits, ignored recent scholarship, marginalized curators, and now strives for mediocrity”. Read more here.

(thanks to Jim Edmonson for the tip)

The Hunterian Museum in London is looking for an assistant curator to develop the cataloguing and storage of its big odontological reserve collection. Successful candidates are supposed to have “a good working knowledge of primate anatomy and taxonomy, and the motivation and enthusiasm to realise the potential of a world-class research collection” + a relevant degree + some previous experience of working with collections. The pay is pretty limited (£20,000 pa), and it’s only an 18 month contract, but it’s nevertheless a good starting point for someone who wants to have a career in medical or natural history history collections. More info on the Hunterian Museum website. Closing date is 15 September.

(via Simon Chaplin)

More results of playing with Wordle: here are the 221 members of the History of Biomedical Research Interest Group (BRHIG) gathered for a ‘group picture’:

A nice touch is that Wordle incidentally uses its one and only institutional member (because it has such a long name) as a ‘rope’ from which the rest of the group hangs. And please note that it’s Wordle that situates me right in the middle, below a lila coloured Carsten Timmermann.

If you want an enlarged and printable cloud, click this image:

And if you want to construct similar images from other digitalised membership directories, note that it took approx. one (!) hour for the data to travel forth and back between my computer and Wordle’s server to transform BRHIG’s membership list into a cloud! Okay, I could do other things simultaneously, but it’s not a rapid thing to do.

I should add that the BRHIG is open to everyone interested in the history of biomedical research:

In addition to the presentation and discussion of work-in-progress, the group will serve as a forum for discussion of issues of common interest, such as the identification and development of source materials; the uses and pitfalls of oral histories in research; and collaborations between historians and the biomedical community.

Register as a member here.

The registration is now open for the ‘University museums and community’ conference in Manchester, 16-20 September. The meeting is organised by ICOM’s International Committee on University Museums and Collections (UMAC) and the registration fee is reasonable low. So this is a good opportunity to meet others engaged in university museums. This year’s topic is important because our kind of museums have to find a way to balance on the one hand our identity as university museums with international research ambitions and on the other hand our identity as university museums that cater for local and regional community interests. Hopefully some of the presentations will address this problem. See program and other details here: http://www.meeting.co.uk/confercare/umac2008.

(thanks to Cornelia Weber)

Here’s the audience gathering for the session on ‘The Public Engagement of Science and Web 2.0’ organised by Gustav Holmberg for the 10th Public Communication of Science and Technology conference (PCST-10) held in Malmö a month ago (read more on our joint session blog).

And here’s my own paper for the event (responses are welcome, it needs a lot of improvement and re-writing before it can go to publication):

Abstract:
Within a few years, science blogging has emerged as a new genre for science communication. But is science blogging really best understood in terms of ’science’ and ‘the public’? Or does the phenomenon of science blogging suggest other dichotomies? This paper argues that ’science communication’ is better conceptualized in terms of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’. Science is financed and managed by a network of national and transnational state organisations and corporations, while the overwhelming number of laboratory and field workers constitute a global knowledge proletariat. These different positions in the global ’scientific field’ entail two different domains of communication practices which correspond, roughly, to the cultures of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’, respectively.

And here’s the talk:

1. Those of you who have followed the field of science communication over the last decade have seen how earlier approaches to public understanding of science — usually based on what is often called the ‘deficit model’ — have repeatedly been challenged by demands for more participatory (dialogic, two-way, etc.) models for science communication.

2. In spite of these attempts to foster more participatory modes of engagement, however, the traditional one-way public understanding of science through institutionalized mass media, such as newspapers and magazines, radio and television, museums, etc., still constitutes the ruling paradigm, both in communication practice and in communication studies. Even the internet and web-based science communication is more often than not used for institutionalized one-way communication — a kind of digital broad-casting. More dialogic practices are still a largely utopian vision.

3. However, the possibility for developing more dialogic science communication practices has become much more realistic with the recent emergence of the participatory web, i.e., web platforms and services that aim to enhance user-driven content, easy and informal information sharing, and collaboration among users. Podcasting, image and movie content sharing services like Flickr and YouTube, social networking services like Facebook, wikis like Wikipedia, and not least blogging provide the means for a new flourishing of dialogic science communication.

4. In other words,  Read More