In a comment to cartoonist James Sturm’s plan to give up his net connection, Nick Carr (a.k.a. Rough Type) suggests that “disconnection from the internet is the new counterculture”. Counterculture? Give me a break! Seth Finkelstein has got it right in today’s comment to Carr’s post:

When people worked in fields, the high-status action was to have skin untouched by sun. When that changed to mostly working in buildings, the high-status action is to have a suntan.

When Internet access was a restricted part of intellectual jobs, being connected was a high-status action. As it becomes common, being disconnected shows you have the high-status

There we are! To disconnect from the net is just a new form of distinction in Bourdieu’s sense.

I just got a mail saying that the Canada Science and Technology Museum is organising a summer institute in material culture research on the theme ‘Reading Artefacts’, in Ottawa, 16-20 August.

Anyone interested in material research and museum artefacts — grad students, postdocs, faculty “teaching history through artifacts” and historians who are “looking to expand their research methods” — are welcome to attend. Because of the venue, there will probably be a lot of focus on sci, tech and med museum artefacts.

Great initative. My only hesitation is the title — Reading Artefacts. What do the organisers actually mean by reading an artefact?

In my understanding of reading, there is a text to be read. But an artefact is not a text (unless there is a label glued on to it), so there is nothing to read.

The only way I can make sense of the title is that they use the verb ‘read’ metaphorically. That is, they probably don’t believe that an artefact is a literal text which is read like the text you are reading now. What they probably mean is that curators and historians engage with artefacts in a way that is analogous to the way readers read texts, and they use the verb ‘read’ as a short-hand for this analogy.

But how useful is it to think about our engagement with artefacts in analogy with reading texts? Granted, it may be useful as a rhetorical device, or for science journalism purposes. But I’m afraid the analogy is counterproductive from a scholarly point of view, because it draws one’s attention away from the epistemologically thorny issues at stake:

How do we actually engage with material artefacts? How do we make sense of them? How do they actually influence us? Is there any kind of seimotic interaction going on between humans and dead material things, or is it ‘merely’ physical interaction?

In other words, ‘reading artefacts’ is not one of those metaphors that curators ‘live by’. On the contrary, I suggest it’s one of those metaphors that kills the curatorial imagination.

That said, however, the course looks very useful; it will give the participants an opportunity to:

• investigate artifacts, trade literature and photographic collections as resources for research, teaching, and the public presentation of history
• work with leading collection scholars in a national museum setting to explore material culture methodologies and approaches
• use artifacts as the centre of discussion and hands-on activities
• immerse themselves in a material culture perspective of the technological past
• learn the basics of conservation, cataloguing and developing collections in local environments – a growing and essential resource for history studies.

Tuition fee is 250 Can. $ for students, 350 for postdocs and 450 for faculty and professionals (but it includes breaks, lunches, and a field trip; and students can get some financial support). Register here before 16 June, but do it long before then, because they can only accomodate 30 participants. Further info from Anna Adamek, aadamek@technomuses.ca. One can also join the Google Group here.

Museum websites use to write about the birth of exhibitions, but rarely about their death. So let’s try the death-approach for once.

Last Sunday, Split & Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine closed to the public, and we are now busy taking it down. Below are some images from the deconstruction work.

Our conservator, Nanna Gerdes is packing artefacts borrowed from the Danish Society for Computer History.

Student assistant Anders Nøhr is cleaning after the rabbits.

The two exhibition rabbits (Split and Splice) on their way to a new home on a farm on the island of Lolland in southern Denmark:

In other words, no animals were harmed, neither in the construction nor in the destruction of the exhibition.

I just read a short article by Marion Maria Ruisinger (curator of the medical collections at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) in the UMAC Journal — and was struck by the fact that she declares, without much ado, that

“three-dimensional objects … have an immense potential for the communication of science”.

I agree, intuitively. I’ve used the same argument in applications for funding. However, it is one thing to claim that this is the case (and intuitively feel it is right), another thing is to give empirical evidence for it and, if it turns out to be the case, to give some reasons for why (I’m one of those modernist oldies who like empirical evidence and rational arguments  :-).

So, is it true? Do we have any substantial empirically based studies that tell us that people understand or engage better with science after having been confronted with material artefacts from museum collections?

And if this is the case — why is it then that artefacts have such an alleged immense potential for the communication of science — in addition to what can be communicated via popular books, magazine articles, newspapers, TV programs, websites, podcasts, Facebook-groups, Flickr-images, blogs, etc.?

Events like the upcoming ‘Congress for Curious People’ — organised by Joanna Ebenstein (Morbid Anatomy) and some of her Observatory friends and colleagues — makes me think that New York, NY, is sometimes a more rewarding place to live than Copenhagen, DK (at least if you are interested in curiosities and collections). 

The Congress (which is held 9-18 April in conjunction with the Coney Island Museum) includes panels examining the collecting of curiosities, the history of ethnographic display and the interface of spectacle and education in 19th and 20th century amusements, and the politics of bodily display in the amusement parks, museums, and fairs of the Western world. It also features nightly lectures on topics as the taxidermy of a Victorian curiosity-collector, the history of automata featuring an actual automata demonstration, a meditation on ‘the saddest object in the world’, taxidermy in the fine arts etc. A ‘Collectors Cabinet’, showcasing astounding objects held in private collections, will be on view for the entire Congress. In conjunction with the events at the museum, Observatory will host ‘The Secret Museum’, an exhibition exploring “the poetics of hidden, untouched and curious collections from around the world”.

Much more on Joanna’s blog! And by the way, Joanna is hopefully attending the conference on ‘Contemporary biomedical science and medical technology as a challenge to museums’ organised here in Copenhagen, 16-18 September, so we will get a chance to discuss contemporary medical curiosities with her then.

Natural history museums are usually thought of a places for school children. Now the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia is trying to broaden their audience by playing the art card — like several science and technology museums and some European natural history museums already have done.

The Scientist reports that the museum is currently showing two exhibitions that “use the aesthetic quality” of natural science “to get people interested in the science”: “First Impressions: Thomas Horshfield’s printed plants of Java”, which is part of new The Art of Science permanent gallery at the Academy, and “Looking at Animals”, a temporary exhibition, which displays nature photographs by artist Henry Horenstein.

The vice president of public operations for the Academy claims that both exhibitions have been successfully attracting a more adult audience to the museum.

Will be interesting to see when the Academy of Natural Sciences will take the step to introduce more contemporary art forms into their venerable museum.

Museums are in a constant identity crisis, and so is ours. Ten years ago we were a typical medical-history museum, now we are thinking more about ourselves as a place for medical science communication. But we haven’t yet found a clear identity. Maybe we will never do, but the process of trying is nevertheless instructive.

So I’m perpetually browsing around the get ideas, and just found this one from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres’s website: “Ainsi, peut-on considérer à juste titre l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres tout à la fois comme un ‘conservatoire’ (c’est-à-dire un lieu où l’on ‘sauve’ et où l’on maintient vivante la mémoire humaine) mais aussi un ‘laboratoire’ (c’est-à-dire un lieu vivant et foisonnant où s’élabore la recherche sur l’homme, ses sociétés et ses cultures.). In translation:

Thus, one can justifiably consider the ‘Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres’ both as a ‘conservatory’ (a place where human memory is ‘saved’ and kept alive) and as a ‘laboratory’ (a place that is alive and flourishing where research on human societies and cultures is taking place).

Sure, our museum is a place where human medical memory is ‘saved’ and kept alive for future generations. But ‘Medical conservatory’. Hmm? Gives associations to a school of music, doesn’t it? Or a greenhouse!

‘Medical laboratory’ gives completely wrong associations (we don’t do wet science). What about ‘Medical memory laboratory’? But that smacks too much ‘Learning lab’, a 1990s concept for didactic experimentation sites. ‘Medical conservatory’ emits better vibrations. After all, medical culture is a kind of greenhouse for medical memories.

And again — no! ‘Medical conservatory’ seems to be a fairly established term in the US for a school for medical training (synonym for medical school?).

A couple of days ago, I argued against Christian Sichau’s restrictive acquisition policy for museums of science, technology and medicine. I suggested, not only to actively promote the acquisition of visual, material, and textual objects from contemporary laboratories and storage rooms, but indeed to open up the sluice gates for collecting as much contemporary stuff as possible.

An optimistic ‘‘Yes, please’’ policy is nicer and wiser than a pessimistic ‘‘Nein’’ policy.

My argument is based on my experiences from Medical Museion’s integrated research and curatorial program ‘‘Biomedicine on Display’’. The program was launched in 2005 with the explicit intention to lay the research foundation for the acquisition and public outreach of the visual and material culture of late twentieth century and contemporary biomedicine — a time period which so far has been very sparsely represented in museums of science, technology, and medicine.

During the past four years we have run a number of research projects on a variety of aspects of late twentieth century and contemporary biomedicine. Parallel to these research projects, we have set up a series of exhibitions with more or less explicit connection to contemporary science (‘Oldetopia’, ‘Design4Science’, ‘Eye Catchers and Swagger Images’, ‘Split + Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine’, ‘Primary Substances: Treasures from the History of Protein Research’, and ‘Healthy Aging’).

These research projects and exhibitions have been more or less closely associated with the collection of a large number of recent artefacts from laboratories and hospitals in the Copenhagen region. Some artefacts were chosen to satisfy the needs of the exhibitions, others were unsolicited donations from university laboratories, hospital clinics, and pharmaceutical and medical device companies.

We have an acute lack of space and certainly do not have enough professional curatorial staff to take care of everything properly. Registration is constantly lagging behind. Nevertheless we rarely say ‘‘No’’. In some concrete cases we have, with some trepidation, done so, but not as a general policy. Why?

Basically, I suggest, because a ‘‘Yes, please’’ policy opens up a whole array of fruitful interactions between museums and practitioners of science, technology, and medicine. Indeed, it promises to change the way science, technology, and medical museums place themselves in relation to the rest of the university.

Instead of seeing the university museum as a closed repository for exquisite objects guarded by professional curators, a ‘‘Yes, please’’ policy is an open invitation to every single researcher, technician, and student at the university to become adjunct curators of their own heritage.

Sichau is right in the sense that museums will never be able to employ enough professional curators to describe, register, and evaluate every single artefact and image in the university’s laboratories and storage rooms. But with the help of our colleagues in science, technology, and medicine, we can create a distributed curatorial expertise.

In the next post, I will discuss the notion of ‘distributed curatorial expertise’ further.

(this is the third part in a series of posts about the participatory museum and distributed curating was  brought yesterday — see the first part here and the second part here. To be continued)

On several occasions we have had the pleasure to organise events together with Scandinavian literary scholars Frederik Tygstrup (Copenhagen) and Knut Stene-Johansen (Oslo); for example, Frederik spoke at the opening of our temporary exhibition ‘The Face of Disease’ (Sygdommens Ansigt) in 2006, and Knut sat on the committee that evaluated Adam Bencard’s PhD-thesis in February 2008 (and I’ve been giving a seminar on ‘presence effects in contemporary biomedicine’ in Oslo).

Knut and Frederik organised a Nordic research network called Infectio, which has resulted in a couple of meetings and now also an anthology titled ‘Illness in Context’ on Rodopi, which focuses on the literary perspectives of medicine and illness:

The reading practices highlighting the clinical, phenomenological and archeological approaches to illness take as their point of departure the living text, that is, the literary experience mediated and created by the text. Literature is seen not solely as a medium for the representation of experiences of illness, but also as a historical praxis involved in the forging of our common understanding of illness. In contrast to traditional literary analysis – primarily oriented toward the interpretation of the literary work’s meaning – the project will emphasize description and understanding of how literature itself performs as a means of interpretation of reality.

More here.

In an article titled ‘Einstein, interaktiv und zum Anfassen. Oder: die drohende Auflösung des Museums?’ in NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin (vol. 17, 85–92, 2009), Christian Sichau has argued for a severely restrictive attitude to new acquisitions.

He develops his argument for a next-to-zero collecting policy in opposition to a short appeal made by the historian Klaus Hentschel in Physik Journal in March 2008 (‘Bitte nicht wegwerfen! Allzu oft werden Quellen der Physikgeschichte achtlos entsorgt, statt sie zu sichern’). Here Hentschel gave a chilling example of the accidental destruction of some of the important sources for the history of early German solid state physics. Hentschel called on physicists to be more aware of their heritage, and asked them to contact archives and museums before throwing out older material of any kind.

Sichau takes Hentschel’s appeal as his point of departure for articulating a deliberately pessimistic position. Because there is very limited space available in museums, the daily routine for curators is to reject, rather than accept, new objects. Furthermore, contemporary objects are not spectacular enough for exhibitions; they neither give us clues to the historical past nor relate to what goes on at the frontiers of science, technology, and medicine today. Finally, the need for public outreach more often than not trumps the need to preserve the heritage, and today’s exhibitions tend to rely rather on dramatic multimedia than objects anyway. So even if there may be good scholarly reasons for collecting objects, ‘‘werde ich als Kurator ‘Nein’ sagen müssen’’, concludes Sichau.

If I had agreed with Sichau’s arguments, I would never have devoted so much energy to trying to represent the material culture of contemporary science, technology, and medicine. I have chosen to focus Medical Museion’s efforts — our research, our acquisitioning activities, and our public outreach — precisely on late twentieth century and contemporary medical science and medical technology, and I have come to rather different conclusions than Sichau.

All museum people are familiar with the problems that Sichau is confronting, and I can easily understand why he expresses such defeatist views. I too believe that the acquisitioning and keeping of contemporary science instruments and artefacts is a very demanding task for museums, especially university museums. The current cultural and political climate places university museums uncomfortably between, on the one hand, a museum logic that favors the creation of spectacular public shows and events and, on the other hand, the prevailing logic of university departments, which is to publish as many often-cited scholarly papers in high-ranked journals as possible.

Today’s university museum is placed somewhere between these two entrenched logics. This borderline position is problematic, because curating scientific instruments, technological devices, and medical artefacts does not necessarily lead either to popular blockbuster shows or to a steady flow of articles in high-impact journals. Acquiring and curating material artefact, image, and document collections all too easily becomes a neither-nor; an unspectacular and invisible activity resulting in insignificant publications in low-ranked journals.

In contrast to Sichau, I am not pessimistic, because I believe these problems occasion a number of interesting challenges: intellectual, logistic, and political (see Söderqvist and Bencard 2008; Söderqvist, Bencard and Mordhorst 2009). I see opportunities rather than obstacles. I therefore believe that we should, as a rule, say ‘‘Yes, please’’ when we get a chance to collect visual, material, and textual objects from contemporary laboratories and storage rooms. I suggest that we should even, in Hentschel’s spirit, actively promote the acquisition of such objects. In other words, not only should we not be restrictive, we should indeed open up the sluice gates. An optimistic ‘‘Yes, please’’ policy is nicer and wiser than a pessimistic ‘‘Nein’’ policy.

In the next couple of posts I will explain why this position is not as naïve as it sounds. See next post here.

—
Söderqvist, T. and Bencard, A., 2008. Making Sense or Sensing the Made? Research into Presence Production in Museums of Science, Technology and Medicine. In: G. Cavalli-Björkman and S. Lindqvist (eds), Research and Museums, Stockholm, 161–173.

Söderqvist, T., Bencard, A. and Mordhorst, C., 2009. Between Meaning Culture and Presence Effects. Contemporary Biomedical Objects as a Challenge to Museums, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 40, 431–438.

(the first part of the series of posts about the participatory museum and distributed curating was  brought yesterday — to be continued)