The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin announces two 2-year postdoctoral fellowships associated to the Research Network “History of Scientific Objects”, beginning May 2008. For more details, see http://scientificobjects.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de or contact Hannah Lund (hlund@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de). Dead-line is 1 January 2008.
Speaking of our recently opened exhibition Oldetopia: On Age and Ageing — Antje Kampf at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz is one of the organisers of an interdisciplinary conference titled ‘(Re)constructing the Aging Body: Western Medical Cultures and Gender 1600–2000’, 26-28 September, 2008.
With an ever growing proportion of elderly people in many Western societies and modern medicine promising to prolong life and well-being, the aging body has become an increasingly common image in current society. ‘Anti-aging’ has become a popular movement for promoting activity, mobility and life-style choice instead of conventionally held stereotypes of decline and decrepitude. Current theoretical contributions argue that the aging body cannot completely be reduced to culture and stand up for a materialistic deconstructionist perspective considering the elderly’s experiences and the interaction of mind, body and society. It is the meaning attached to gendered aging bodies by medical cultures that needs further investigation. Uncovering the meanings attached to, the knowledge produced of, and the processes inherent to gendered aging bodies in the past and in contemporary Western societies requires an interdisciplinary approach.
Much more info on www.aging-body.com. Deadline for 300 word abstracts is 7 January, 2008 (or mail to antje.kampf@uni-mainz.de).
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) are looking for a full-time archivist in the Office of NIH History who shall maintain the documentary and artifact collections at the Office and the Stetten Museum, including more than 30,000 prints and photographs, 2,000 instruments and artifacts, 400 books, and 1,500 feet of documents and audiovisuals. Some of the collections are used in exhibits around the huge NIH campus. Salary: $66,767.00+. Applications before 23 November. See more here.
Yet another nearly missed conference: the Design Research Group (Anna Moran, Sorcha O’Brien and Ciáran Swan) are organising a one-day conference titled “Love Objects: Engaging Material Culture” on the relationships between people and their objects, to be hosted by the Faculty of Visual Culture, National College of Art and Design, Dublin, 14 February 2008. Dead-line for papers was last Friday — but maybe one can attend without a contributed paper?
Here is the aim of the conference:
The relationship between people and their objects is a complex and multifaceted one, which is continually negotiated between the material and the immaterial. Objects are used as tokens of affection, symbolic gestures and statements of devotion and can be represented, employed and appropriated in a multitude of ways. They carry out important roles in our relationships with each other, either as bearers of significance, or through embodiment, engagement or control. The seductive quality of objects can also mediate our relationships with them, as they engage our emotions in both subliminal and visceral ways. In doing so they facilitate the projection and subversion of identities, and the creation of the contexts in which they operate.
This is obviously very significant for any sci/tech/med museum, including our own medical collecting and display work — every single topic and theme vibrates of relevance:
In an earlier post I discussed the Silicon Valley web-based genetic information up-start company 23andMe as an example of converging technologies.
23andMe and its public-engagement-with-genetics based business idea is the subject of a long and interesting feature article by Thomas Goetz in today’s Wired Magazine. 23andMe is now offering customers to scan their DNA for just $999 (by SNP genotyping from individual saliva samples with the help of the Illumina HumanHap550+ BeadChip).
The Wired-article raises a plethora of issues concerning the formation of ‘biocitizenship‘, or, to use a neologism, rather bio-consumership — that is, the convergence between bioinformatics, business, and the public engagement with science.
Goetz relates a meeting in September when Avey and Wojcicki invited their board of scientific advisers to review the website before it was launched. Much of the discussion circled around the question of how much they would have to teach their customers about genetics to enable them to understand the business offering. They ended with a compromise: “letting the genetics hobbyist geek out on the details while giving the novice a minimum of information”.
As Goetz writes, a web-based, customer-oriented bioinformatics company is not like Flickr or Facebook:
There’s nothing intuitive about navigating your genome; it requires not just a new vocabulary but also a new conception of personhood […] There’s a massive amount of information to comprehend and fears to allay before customers will feel comfortable with the day-to-day utility of the site.
23andMe’s solution to the public-engagement-with-genetics problem is to offer a rather rich menu of FAQs together with some basic animated tutorials (e.g., here and here) that explain the basic principles of genetics.
It will be fascinating to follow 23andMe. I guess several other companies will soon follow along the same bio-consumership road.
(The Wired-article also includes a videochat with 23andMe co-founders Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki who explain “how they’re helping people make sense of their genetic information”, but Goetz’s text is much more informative.)
Twice a year the Danish museum community comes together for a two-day meeting at the Fuglsø Conference Center, strategically placed between Copenhagen and Aarhus. The 2007 autumn meeting last Wednesday through Friday gathered 500+ participants, and quite a few of them attended the Thursday morning session on “Science, medicine and technology as culture”, organised by Karin Tybjerg (formerly HPS, Cambridge, now Head of the Dept of Astronomy at Kroppedal Museum outside Copenhagen).
I had expected an audience of twenty or so, but to my surprise there were at least 75 people in the room
Sometimes I wish I were still a graduate student, because all interesting conferences these days seem to be aimed at junior scholars (maybe it’s time to shift career again?). For example this one: ‘The Power of Beauty: Aesthetics, Politics, Morality’, a graduate student symposium at Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Saturday 5 April, 2008.
The meeting feeds into a revival of ‘beauty’ (even ‘universal beauty’?) in the arts and humanities (or maybe ‘beauty’ never really disappeared?). I don’t know if this revival should be interpreted as a sign of post-postmodernism, or ‘rightism’, or even ‘neo-fascism’ (as my good colleague Roger Cooter might say), or if it is maybe just an effect of the constant need for academic renewal? Whatever the case, however, the comeback of ‘beauty’ is interesting, I think, because it expands the repertoire of interpretative and communicative strategies in the museum world.
Joanna Marchant reminds us (on Digital Heritage) that many museums are busy creating on-line catalogues and other digital access points, but that this is a slow process and that few institutions are utilising the full potential of digitalisation. However, she says, a current research project by Suzanne Keene (formerly Head of Collections at Science Museum, now at UCL),
hints that attention should be turned towards mobilising the current fad of user generated content pages to the cause. If museums are to fully utilise digital technologies to widen access then they should seriously consider how they can tap into sites such as Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia and interactive gaming.
I’m all in favor of using Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia etc. for museum purposes. But utilising these and similar new media for making existing collections accessible to a larger audience doesn’t necessarily mean that the content becomes ‘user-generated’. User-generativity would involve a much more radical redefinition of the sacred status of collections — maybe a kind of ‘profanation’ of them.
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PS: The Digital Heritage blog was set up by Kostas Arvanitis for an optional course in the Art Gallery and Museum Studies MA programme at the Centre for Museology, University of Manchester. They discuss ideas and experience of using digital technologies and designing and producing digital content for museums and galleries — and they use the blog actively in the course. Great initiative!
As Erik points out, Stanford University’s new directory of private and professional blogs written by students, professors and other members of staff is an implicit recognition of the blog medium in the elite academic community. Unfortunately the mediocre quality of many Stanford blogs, including The Stem Cell Blog, diminishes the impact of the endorsement. Why don’t they benchmark ‘their’ blogs instead of listing everything bloggish on campus? (I mean, if I want a list of Stanford blogs I can just search Technorati or Google Blog Search.)
I’m curious about the ‘Sculpture and Touch Symposium’ to be held at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, 16-17 May 2008. The organisers open the call for papers with a quote from Goethe (from Römische Elegien):
Marble comes doubly alive for me then, as I ponder, comparing / Seeing with vision that feels, feeling with fingers that see
and then go on to describe the aim of the meeting:
Since the Renaissance, at least, the medium of sculpture has been linked explicitly to the sense of touch. Sculptors, philosophers and art historians have all related the two, often in strikingly different ways. In spite of this long running interest in touch and tactility, in recent decades vision and visuality have tended to dominate art historical research.
Couldn’t agree more! (This is analogous to Adam’s analysis of contemporary historiography of the body). Questions addressed include:
- In what sense does beholding sculpture enlist tactile sensations, even where direct physical contact is impossible?
- How do sculptors anticipate the possibility of physical interaction with their work?
- Does sculpture have a privileged relationship to the sense of touch?
- Are there sculptures that repel or avoid the sense of touch?
- Is talk about touch and sculpture largely metaphorical?
- In what ways are tactile sensations mediated by vision?
- How far should art historical theory and language draw on the insights of the psychology and physiology of touch?
The organisers invite contributions also from scholars in disciplines beyond art history, including (I suppose) medical historians and students of medical science studies, so this would in fact be a great opportunity to follow up on some of the themes from the Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context workshop in August and the presentation that Jan Eric and I gave at the Artefacts XII meeting in Oslo in September.
In Oslo we were mainly thinking of instruments, but the history of medicine is in fact full of (touchable) sculptures, from early modern sculptures of Saint Sebastian to the contemporary Noëlle robotic birth simulator. And lots in between.
Wonder if art historians would accept the Noëlle birth simulator as sculpture? Or if they think that its sculpture-ness is acquired only after it has been taken out of its immediate medical context and transferred to a museum or art gallery? (I can’t help associate to Damien Hirst’s 1991 pickled shark).
Send 300 word proposals for presentations to Peter Dent (peter.dent@courtauld.ac.uk) before 30 November. More info here.
What do you say, Jan Eric? Shall we give it a try?