If you are attending the ‘extreme collecting’ workshop at the British Museum next Thursday, you could consider coming to London one day earlier, Wednesday the 27th, to hear Ingar Palmlund present her research project ‘The Female Patient and the Male Doctor: Gender Construction in Drug Advertisements in Medical Journals, 1950-2000’. The seminar takes place at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, Euston Rd. 183, at 13.00. (And don’t forget to take a look at the Sleeping and Dreaming exhibition while you are in the house!)
In continuation of our earlier (here and here) discussion about ephemeral biomedical objects, I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to the workshop on ‘Scale, Size and the Ephemeral’ at British Museum, next Thursday, 28 February 2008, 1-6pm:
The wealth of models, miniatures and dioramas in museum collections provide collecting paradigms modelled on numismatics and library ephemera. At one level these seem to be forms of ‘easy collecting’, at another they represent best practice. Size and scale give rise to portability, control and management of objects but conversely, allow for compelling evidence of the limitations and fragmentary nature of the collecting process. Moreover, large objects have important expressive functions in terms of place and architectural context, as anchors for museums. Should outsize items, or ephemeral materials such as foodstuffs, plant pith, featherwork and paper ever be collected and stored? Related to this is the question of the natural decay of ephemeral objects. Three-dimensional laser scanning techniques, such as the one now installed at University College London, now have the capacity to record objects in minute detail, over time to document surface decay. Art museums struggle to conserve works of unstable materials; how should anthropology and other cultural museums enter debate around the questions of size and natural decay? This session will explore the conditions under which size, scale and sustainability matter in contemporary collecting.
Speakers include: Dr Victor Buchli (UCL), Paul Cornish (Senior Curator, Exhibits & Firearms, Imperial War Museum), Dr Tom Gretton (UCL), Professor André Gunthert (EHESS, Paris), Susan Lambert (Museum for Design in Plastic), and Calum Storrie (Exhibition Designer, author of ‘The Delirious Museum’). (See here for abstracts)
The workshop is the third in a series of four on ‘Extreme Collecting’ organised in cooperation between British Museum and the program for Teaching and Research Collections at University College London. The series explores collecting practices that challenge the bounds of normally acceptable practice and “apply a critical approach towards the rigidity of museums in maintaining essentially nineteenth century ideas of collecting and move towards identifying priorities for collection policies in UK museums which are inclusive of acquiring ‘difficult’ objects”.
By ‘difficult objects’ they mean, for example, things that “appear so mundane and mass-produced as to appear uninteresting”, or objects which “have physical characteristics—of ephemeral substance, size and scale—that make it impossible to acquire and exhibit or are prone to rapid decay”.
They are currently registering for the last two workshops in the series. Check their website for details and abstracts!
(thanks to Material World for the tip)
Apropos earlier posts (here and here) about the posthumanist movement: The Forschungsmuseum Alexander Koenig in Bonn (Germany) will soon open an exhibition by artist Reiner Maria Matysik called ‘Biofakte–Organismen der Zukunft’ (Biofacts–Organisms of the Future’).
Matysik’s project takes it point of departure from the notion that gene technology will eventually lead to a radically new evolutionary stage which he calls ‘post-evolutionary’—in other words, that we can begin actively to design organisms. Matysik creates models of imagined future synthetic organisms, so called ‘Bionten’, which he believes will wipe out the differences between plants, animals and human beings.
(We are still speaking of art, of course. Even if the Craig Venter Institute say they are soon going to be able to do it, others, for example, Drew Endy in the newly formed Biological Engineering Department at MIT, believe this is a pretty difficult task.)
Anyway—the exhibition will open on 8 May and will run until 10 August. More info (in German) here.
For an earlier videodokumentation of the production of these artworks at Matysik’s institut für biologiske plastik (Institute for Biological Sculpture) at the Technical University in Braunschweig, see here.
(thanks to Ingeborg for the tip about ‘Biofakte’)
Medical museums do not necessarily need to be in dialogue with contemporary science and technology; they can remain safely embedded in the past. But if they have the ambition—like we do—to contrast possible biomedical futures with the medical past (so as to be able to create some really engaging exhibitions), medical museums are well advised to make some educated guesses about what these futures might be.
One source to such guess-work is the National Academy of Engineering‘s list Grand Challenges for Engineering. The current list of 14 challenges includes blockbusters like making solar energy economical, providing energy from fusion, providing access to clean water, securing cyberspace, preventing nuclear terror, and restoring and improving urban infrastructure. And there are, of course, medical and health challenges on the list as well: advancing health informatics, engineering better medicines, and reverse-engineering the brain.
But hey, something’s lacking!? As Partial Immortalization (Attila Csordas) points out, life extension is not among the 14 frontrunners of NAE’s grand engineering challenges. Disappointed, Csordas seems to have given up on government and academy committees ability to lobby for human enhancement. He thinks life extension should be a private business instead, “not something left to governmental policies and think thanks”.
So he puts his hope on the Google founders. When Brin and Page grow older, he thinks, they will hopefully get tired of personal genomics and 23andMe (see earlier post here), and begin supporting “everything healthy and biotech”, and thus become “the decisive player in life extension technology”.
The rest of the argument hangs in the air, although Csordas promises to get back to this story later. I can hardly wait, because his hint of a new chapter in the contemporary history of converging technologies—that is, the fusion of Google and transhumanism—would in my mind be the perfect topic for an exhibition of a sublime medical future. Unless Michel Houellebecq comes first!
I’ve just stumbled upon The Museum Detective, a website/blog dedicated to finding stories “from behind the scenes of the museum world”, edited by museum advisor/consultant Joanna Cobley in Christchurch, NZ.
Particularly noteworthy is the large number of posts with podcasts. For example this interview with Conal McCarthy, Director of the Museums and Heritage Studies programme at Victoria University in Wellington, NZ, who “takes us into the world of over-crowded display cases, ferocious custodians and sparse museum labels”. The perfect companion during my 25 min bike trip between home and work!
Joanna has also added a guide for podcast-beginners, including seven good reasons why museums should podcast:
- It can help build more audiences (especially the digital native generation).
- Extend the virtual museum visitor’s experience (which we know is growing).
- Enhance existing educational resources.
- Extend the reach of the museum’s public programmes e.g. lecture webcasts.
- Disseminate research undertaken by museum staff.
- It’s a relatively low cost, low risk venture.
- It’s fun.
(quoted from here)
A crew from Swedish Television (SVT) has just been visiting Medical Museion. They spent a full 10 hour day walking around the whole museum, from the golden lion on the ground floor to the syphilitic skulls on the third. Here they are focusing on one of Niels Finsen’s (Nobel Prize 1903) original lenses for light therapy of skin tuberculosis:
Bente kept track of everything
and I had to take the role of interviewee (because I speak Swedish 🙂
They will send 4-5 episodes in the weekly ‘Fråga doktorn’ [Ask the doctor] show in late March and April. Watch it on Mondays at 66.15pm — or see the show on-line here afterwards.
Two days without posts, because we’ve been discussing the next exhibition after ‘Oldetopia‘ which closes in December 2008. It will be based on the subprojects in the ‘Biomedicine on Display’-project and the working title is (surprise, surprise) ‘Biomedicine on Display’; but don’t be surprised if the final title turns out to be different. Yesterday we laid the frame budget and today the group discussed the budget experiences of ‘Oldetopia’. We’ll be back with more details about the next exhibition after having met with the prospective exhibition curator in late Febraury. And tomorrow we’ll be back with postings again.
Yesterday, our own Adam Bencard defended his Ph.D.-thesis — ‘History in the Flesh: Investigating the historicized body’; for a resumé, see here — in the old anatomical theatre of Medical Museion.
Adam started with a 40 min long presentation about the basic idea of the thesis — that the notion of ‘presence’ (Gumbrecht, Runia) might be a way out of the impasse into which the linguistic turn, cultural history and especially New Historicism has led the historiography of the body:
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Then Roger Cooter (historian of medicine at Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, UCL) started the opposition, praising Adams’ erudition but also asking some difficult questions about the historical situatedness of this kind of historiographical intervention:
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followed by literary scholar Knut Stene-Johansen (University of Oslo) who, among other things, went into the poetic qualities of the thesis:
and finally Dorthe Gert Simonsen (historian at the University of Copenhagen and chair of the committee), who questioned some aspects of the basic structure of the work:
(I hope to be able to get back with more details about what the three opponents said.) Needless to say, Adam passed with flying colours after two hours of intense dialogue.
By the way (and apropos the topic of the thesis): as the discussion proceeded, it seemed to me that Adam’s body language shifted from cautionary to engaged,
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thereby adding an extra layer of presence-effects to the meaning culture that otherwise use to dominate these kinds of academic rituals.
Camilla (here) and I (here) have earlier brought up the relation between exhibitions and the blog medium. Now Dave Johnson (Blogging Roller) reports from the 2nd annual North Carolina Science Blogging Conference a couple of weeks ago:
The last session I attended was devoted to helping the Museum of Life and Science (Durham, NC) figure out how to use blogs to engage and educate the public about nano-technologies (they’ve got an NSF grant to do things like that).
I have tried to find more info about the project on the Museum of Life and Science’s website: Are they working with the two media separately? Or do they somehow integrate them? I guess we have to write directly to Troy M. Livingston, the museum’s Vice President for Innovation and Learning, who gave the talk.
Otherwise I haven’t found any place that experiments with mixed blog-exhibition media. Anyone out there who can help?
Mia Ridge, a database developer for the Museum of London, asks some interesting questions on her blog Open Objects about how museums and cultural heritage institutions relate to the ‘participatory web’ (web 2.0, social networking sites, user-generated content etc).
Mia’s (perhaps not very unsurprising) impression from speaking with colleagues is that museums are pretty conservative in this respect. But also that there may be differences depending on what kind of institution we’re talking about. (Maybe art historians are more resistant than social historians?) She also wonders how the resistance to the participatory web is expressed. Is it active or passive? And a lot of other interesting questions: “At this point all I have is a lot of questions”.
Note that the resistance Mia has found doesn’t seem to be against the digitalisation of collections or web-presence as such, but specifically against the participatory web.
These are interesting observations, and I wonder: Can this resistance perhaps be understood in terms of an opposition among curators against a perceived profanation of the sacred character of the museum? In the same way as Wikipedia and other user-generated content websites have been viewed with skepticism from the side of many academics — not just because they may contain errors (which encyclopedia doesn’t?), but also because it is a preceived profanation of Academia. (For earlier posts about profanation of the museum as a sacred institution, see here and here.). Any ideas?
PS (25 February): Mia answers today, here.