Ever experienced being too overworked to come up with new and exciting ideas? Feeling you have nothing new to say? Three days of posting-silence is a symptom of the fact that our little group here at Medical Museion is in a pretty hectic ‘phase’ right now:

• We opened Design4Science less than two weeks ago after ten days of intense preparation work — it’s beautiful, but it took its toll.
• Some of us are teaching a 2,5 ects course in Medical Science and Technology Studies for students in the medical engineering programme (a joint programme between the Danish Technical University and University of Copenhagen).
• Several of us are very busy planning for the next exhibition — Split & Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine — which will open on 11 June. More about this later …
• We are also preparing an exhibition on the history and culture of protein research for the official opening of the new Center for Protein Research at the Faculty of Health Sciences in early September. More about this later …
• We are also finalizing a glossy prospectus about the future renovation and expansion of Medical Museion that shall be sent to a selected number of foundations shortly. More about this later …
• Some of us are also preparing the second phase of a grant application about visualization practices in contemporary health sciences; and one of us is preparing an application to the Research Council for Culture and Communication. More about this later …
• Most of us are involved in writing chapters for our planned anthology about biomedical curatorship — a very good British publisher has expressed great interest and we have to prepare the final manuscript. More about this later …
• We are writing project descriptions for a couple of new phd-scholarships within the frame of the University of Copenhagen Center for Healthy Ageing programme. More about this later …
• We are beginning to discuss how to make our research, teaching, cultural heritage and public outreach efforts work more smoothly together, for example by a more narrow intellectual focus. More about this later …
• And then there are all the daily things — like writing research papers; trying to postpone deadlines; responding to urgent calls from people who want us to take a look at their old medical stuff before they throw it out; balancing the budget; promoting the museum to the Danish media; planning for the 2010 exhibitions; etc., etc. More about all these things later …

It’s probably all these ‘More about this later…’-things that drain the brain and press whatever new thoughts that temporarily enter your consciousness back into oblivion. That’s at least how I feel right now. Since I haven’t seen much from my co-bloggers’ keyboards recently, they probably feel the same.

I guess what I wanted to say is: Forget about everything you’ve heard about a university museum being a boring place to be! It’s definitely not — it’s an exhaustion machine.

One of my longheld convictions is that the individual life trajectory is both one of the most neglected and most exciting aspects of biomedicine, not least when it comes to collecting and displaying biomedicine in museum exhibitions. Documents, images and objects from individual scientists, doctors, engineers and patients is a rich resource for museum curators — the individual and personal perspective in exhibitions adds a dimension of engagement similar to how biographical writing engages readers in a way that other forms of historical writing don’t.  

Therefore I was quite curious when I read about The Digital Lives Research Conference that will be held at the British Library, London, next week (9-11 February). The aim of the meeting is to bring archivists and curators together with scientists, historians, writers and IT specialists to discuss the challenge of organising and preserving personal digital archives. It will focus on the latest approaches to curating digital objects and archives, on the development of such archives from the point of view of the creators and researchers — writers, scientists and historians — and give an overview of current life-online and digital archives. The organisers are asking how libraries and archives can help people whose lives are becoming increasingly digital to secure, preserve and organise their personal archives of digital photographs, documents, correspondence and multimedia, and, second how to establish relationships with providers of online services and social systems technologies. Read more on www.bl.uk/digital-lives/confreg.html (btw. the conference is free).

I wonder how museums and individual material collections fit into this and similar initiatives? There is obviously more to individual lives than digitalizable photos, documents, correspondence and multimedia. Material things have always loomed large in most people’s lives, but as lives are becoming increasingly digital-based, the non-digitalizable material residue becomes, I believe, increasingly precious. How can museums help secure, preserve and organise such personal material collections? How can such collections be organised and preserved through social technologies? What is the museum 2.0 counterpart to digital lives?

Seems like museum 2.0 has already come of age. Because the Smithsonian Institution has just hosted a two-day conference titled “Smithsonian 2.0: A Gathering to Re-Imagine the Smithsonian in the Digital Age”.

A stellar group of keynote speakers and experts from the web and digital worlds met with a group of Smithsonian staff on 23-24 January to take a closer look at the museum´complex’s current level of engagement in new media — with the aim to “identify how to move the Smithsonian forward toward a ‘Smithsonian 2.0′”.

Read more here. Lots of interesting comments from staff and outsiders on their blog. There’s also a readable journalistic report in the Washington Post of 26 January. And best of all, the four keynotes can be viewed as webcasts.

It looks like most of what they call museum 2.0 is good old 1.0, however, that is, how to put the collections on the web, on Flickr Commons, etc. Real 2.0 — for example, seriously engaging the public in collecting and exhibition making — is still largely a vision for a distant future.

It also makes me wonder if museum 2.0 is just New Museology in digital clothes? Or is there something ‘post-new museological’ going on here? I’m just asking …     

According to yesterday’s press reports, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card has complained about Obama’s new informal dress code which he finds disrespectful of the office (“a locker room experience”).

I’ve read somewhere that military historians operate with a rule-of-thumb about who is a historical winner and who is a loser, viz., that the fanciest brass predicts a loser. Whereas informal military dress code signals a winner (any military historians out there who can confirm this?). The reason is quite obvious, of course: spending time and energy on fancy uniforms tends to reflect a lack of attention to the real job.

Which reminds me of an experience that I probably share with many others but haven’t heard anyone express explicitly, namely, that there seems to be some kind of correspondence with the formality of scholarly/scientific environments and their level of quality.

For example, in my experience, the more formal a meeting setting is — with introductory talks by university dignitaries, receptions in the city hall, accomodation in five star hotels, programs full of academic titles, etc. — the less interesting the meeting usually is. Not because of the formality of the meeting as such, of course, but because the level of formality often is a symptom of a lack of interest in the basic intellectual problems at hand.

Could it be that the more formal a scholary area is, the less successful it is bound to be? So if you are looking for a vibrating intellectual field, look out for not-so-fancy websites and meeting announcements in courier font, for blog discussions and on-line journals, and for meetings which definitely don’t have a city hall reception on the programme. Socities that present an array of prestigious price winners during the annual conference dinner are probably on their way towards stagnation too.

The Nordic Network of Medical History (in which Medical Museion is a partner) is organising a workshop in Oslo, 4-6 November 2009 on the theme ‘Medical knowledge and medical practice in the 20th century’.

The workshop  — which is primarily intended for scholars from the Nordic countries — is about the interconnectedness of knowledge, practice and institutions, more specifically “the circulation of knowledge between medical science and medical practice, with a particular focus on an important aspect of medicine in the 20th century, medical technology”:

Medicine in the 20th century has both been subject to and itself caused a multiplicity of changes in what it means to be human. Be it diagnostics or therapy, computer tomography or organ replacement, the century has seen the creation of a whole set of novel ways of understanding and intervening into health and disease, many of them related to technological inventions: Organ replacement has challenged our concept of the human body, antibiotics and antibiotics resistances have reshaped infectious diseases; the rise of the risk factor has — to say the least — challenged the traditional association of sickness and symptoms of disease.

There will be keynote addresses from Kristin Asdal (Oslo), Thomas Schlich (Montreal) and Steve Sturdy (Edinburgh). In addition, the organisers are inviting abstracts for 30 min contributions, which can include topics like

• the interrelationship of medical practice and medical sciences.
• the circulation between different spheres such as hospital wards, practices, laboratories, and the public.
• the material culture of medicine (instruments, machines, diagnostic apparatuses, statistical methods and laboratory practices).
• how local knowledge is disseminated and how it acquires general status.

Send a title and an abstract (max 300 words) to Christoph Gradmann (christoph.gradmann@medisin.uio.no) and Anne Kveim Lie (a.h.k.lie@medisin.uio.no) before 20 April.

The meeting is hosted by the Section for Medical Anthropology and Medical History at the University of Oslo and will be held at Voksenåsen Conference Centre (www.voksenaasen.no/en). Food and lodging will be covered for all attendees.

As a university museum, we are constantly thinking about how to use our huge collection of medical artefacts (est. 150.000-200.00 items) for research and teaching purposes.

I mean, using artefacts in exhibitions is not that problematic. Find them on the shelves, dust them off, and put them in some kind of orderly display, that’s it. Well, it’s a little more complicated (especially the orderly display part :-), but that’s the essence of it. This is what museums usually do.

Using collections for teaching and research purposes doesn’t come easily, however. Most museums don’t have to think about it because they are not involved in much regular teaching, and (sorry to say this) because most museums don’t do much research at all (despite their occasional self-understanding). They are usually tuned towards producing exhibitions for mass consumption.

University museums are in a somewhat different situation. They are also involved in exhibition making, of course. But, in addition, they belong to institutions that value research and teaching activities much higher than displays for hoi polloi. So university museums are supposed to engage in research and teaching to a much greater extent than their non-university cousins.

Now, for the benefit of all university museums around the world, UMAC (University Museums and Collections, a subcommittee of ICOM) is organising its 9th international conference in 2009 around the theme ‘Putting university collections to work in research and teaching’, to be held at the UC Berkeley campus, 10-13 September 2009.

The conference theme interestingly takes the Polish Archival Dictionary’s definition of ‘archive’ — “an institution called upon to guard, collect, sort, preserve, keep and render accessible documents, which, although they are no longer useful on a daily basis as before, nonetheless merit being preserved” — as its point of departure:

It is worth considering the relevance of this definition to the status of university museums and collections. The archival role of public museums, their responsibilities to preserve the material heritage they contain, seems clear enough. In the case of university museums and collections, however, the description of being “no longer useful on a daily basis as before” is seldom accurate. Very frequently, the objects held in academic collections are still quite actively used in research and in the classroom. The dividing lines among the accumulation of objects in individual faculty laboratories, departmental teaching collections and fully-fledged university museums are blurry. Indeed, university museums are full of objects, specimens and artifacts that entered the university in the course of faculty research and teaching activities. In justifying the relevance (and in some cases even the continued existence) of university collections, their ongoing utility in relation to the teaching and research missions can be paramount (my emphasis).

The organising committee welcomes presentations from the full range of university collections:

Universities are very different from public museums in containing research materials that may be lodged in formal museums, departments, and individual faculty labs and offices, and that span the full disciplinary range of the university. This multiplicity of collections, and the slippage among them, has created challenges and opportunities that may be analyzed and even celebrated as part of the unique culture and history of university museums. How do collections respond to changes in their user communities, to conflicting demands by different user groups, or to changing research technologies? Collections of historical scientific instruments are good examples of artifacts that have shifted from being research tools (in the sciences) to objects of research themselves (in the humanities). How might these sorts of transformations be encouraged? What are some examples of renewed scholarly or scientific activity that have resulted from either new museum initiatives? How can preservation as a primary mission be balanced with active research and providing classroom access?

They encourage papers that give an historical perspective to these questions, papers that address instances of current programs, difficulties and successes, and papers that suggest new models for developing the research and teaching potential of museum collections for diverse user communities:

• Where are university collections and museums placed within the administrative structure of the university? Are they allied to one particular department or discipline, or are they freestanding in their research affiliations? How has administrative placement affected research uses, demands by different user groups, and other functions of the museum? How can collections make themselves more visible to new scholars and students so that they can maximize their research potential?
• All disciplines change over time, asking new questions, employing new methods and exploring new objects. Inevitably this means that the relationships of material collections to their disciplines also shift. How have these changes affected the research potential of collections? One dramatic instance in recent decades has been the emergence of increasingly sophisticated forms of DNA analysis, which have changed not only the nature of cladistics but also transformed the relevance and viability of natural history collections.
• Interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary collaborations are now at the forefront of most research, even in the humanities. How have such collaborative research programs affected the use of collections?
• How are collections used for teaching? Are there accessibility issues that must be solved? In particular, how are they made available to undergraduates for research as well as teaching or display purposes? Are there instances where public or community groups become involved in the teaching or research functions of the museum? How can university museums and collections best convey the findings of current research to students and the general public? Can and should the research mission of a museum be integrated into its public mission?

You have to observe a host of rules if you want to submit an abstract before 31 March; see the call for papers here. See also the UMAC’s website.

During the last months this blog has experienced quite a lot of smart spam comments which more or less indirectly recommend a variety of oh so healthy acai berry juices. They never advertise openly for the product, the texts are varied and pretty cleverly written, and they almost always relate somehow to the post they comment on. But when you click on the sender’s name you are directed to their product pages, like this one.

Here’s an example — a spam comment for MonaVie juice, a highly contested ‘health’ product:

If I hadn’t read about the lawsuits against MonaVie I would almost feel a kind of sympathy for these guys. They sell a potentially healthy, or at least harmless, product, they probably don’t earn as much profit as weapon dealers, and they go out of their way to try to formulate reasonably intelligent (everything is relative, of course) comments (or maybe they have spam robots that can ‘interpret’ my posts and formulate a seemingly intelligent comment?). In this case, the MonaVie spam comment refers to a colourful post.

And yet, after all their effort to appear serious, I mercilessly delete them. Splat! Like a fly on a window pan.

By the way, this wave of spam began after we had been become part of the Wellsphere community.

I have written about the Artefacts meeting series before (here, here and here). The 14th meeting will be hosted by Science Museum in London on 20-22 September 2009. The topic will be “The relations of science and technology as portrayed in museums”. Reserve the dates. Deadline will be around 1 April, but we’ll be back with a more formal and detailed announcement.

… spørger Camilla. Af tilbagemeldingerne at dømme, er indholdet i udstillingen svært at forstå. Det er jeg sådan set enig i, men jeg tror ikke det er pga. det videnskabelige (proteinkemiske, molekylærbiologiske) indhold i sig selv, men snarere måden dette indhold er fremstillet på.

Sagen er jo den, at samfundsteorier, for ikke at tale om litterære eller æstetiske teorier, gennemgående er meget sværere at forstå end basal kemi og biologi (spørg bare 2. generations indvandrere, som synes at samfundsfag og humaniora er meget sværere end naturvidenskab og teknik). Det har med indforståethed at gøre. Problemet med Design4Science er at den i vid udstrækning præsenterer biologi og proteinkemi på en alt for indforstået måde — den giver hverken den videnskabelige eller historisk/kulturelle kontekst som ville gøre det nemmere. To eksempler:

1) Den animerede film (“The Inner Life of the Cell”) som vises på den hvide Mac-skærm i hjørnet i den sidste store udstillingsstue er fuld af fantasiæggende former og farver i bedste Pixar-stil. Men der gives ikke nogen som helst forklaring af hvad man ser. Vi får fx ikke at vide at det var verdens bedste animeringshold (dem bag ‘Shrek’) som lavede den i 2005-2006 som undervisningsmateriale i samarbejde med biologer ved Harvard (se tidligere post om den her) og vi får ikke noget at vide om designarbejdet bag den. De pseudo-3D-billeder man kan lave med animeringstekniken kontrasteres ikke med tidligere 2D-billedteknik. Og fremfor alt får vi ikke noget som helst at vide om hvad man “ser” på billederne, dvs. hvad animeringen skal “forestille” — celleorganeller, proteinmotorer, cytoplasmatisk netværk, ribosomer, proteinsyntese, mm. Man kunne godt have brugt et halvt eller helt rum i udstillingen med at gå i dybden med hvordan animering (movie design) af molekyler og cellestrukturer foregår, hvad for slags data animeringen bygger på og hvor meget, der er pedagogiske forenklinger (fx. tomrummet mellem molekylerne og alt sker i ekstrem ultrarapid), hvor meget der er fri animeringsfantasi (fx. farverne), og hvor meget, eller lidt, som er eksperimentelle “facts”. Den slags forklaringer og kontekstualiseringer ville have gjort skærmbilledet mere begribeligt, og ikke gjort det æstetiske indtryk mindre — tværtimod, tror jeg.

2) John Sulstons studier af programmeret celledød (Nobelpris i 2002 sammen med Sidney Brenner og Robert Horwitz) bliver vist meget summarisk. For den som kender bare lidt til Brenners og Sulstons forskning er det ret fantastisk at se Sulstons egne notesbøger. Det må være lidt ligesom musikhistorikere, der får sommerfugle i maven når de ser et håndskrevet originalpartitur til en af Beethovens symfonier — jeg undslap i hvert fald et højt wow! når jeg indså at det var the real thing som lå under glasskiven. Men for den uindviede er disse notesbøger lige så håbløst uintressante som det er at se Dødehavsrullerne i original, hvis man ikke har læst eller hørt om Bibeln. Det kræver mere af videnskabelig forklaring og historisk kontekst for at forstå, hvordan Sulston brugte Brenners elskede C. elegans til at følge den genetiske progammering af hver eneste celledelling og celledød, celle for celle, i den lille orm. Som den nu bliver præsenteret, er det bare en masse ringer og nummer i en bog. En slags uforståeligt laboratoriepartitur.

Jeg kunne give flere eksempler. Pointen er altså, at selv om udstillingen umiddelbart er svær at forstå, så er meget af det biologiske faktisk ret nemt når man får det forklaret og sat i sin historiske sammenhæng. Det kræver bare mere plads og mere tid og meget mer omfattende udstillingsforberedelsesarbejde. Og det kræver at man gør mere ud af forskningen som kognitiv produktionsproces — hvordan tænkning  og eksperimentelt arbejde samvirker, hvordan instrumenter, data og fantasi går op i en højere enhed. Udstillingen proklamerer denne højere enhed, men den viser det ikke.

Det betyder ikke at Design4Science er en dårlig udstilling. Den er enormt flot, Shirley Wheeler har gjort en fantastisk arbejde med at indsamle disse smukke billeder, modeller og dokumenter og lave en helstøbt udstilling af den. Som estetisk oplevelse synes jeg at den er bedre end meget af det, der bliver vist på kunstmuseerne og gallerierne i dag. (Og den står meget bedre her på Medicinsk Museion end den gjorde på Nobelmuseeet sidste år, hvor den næsten forsvandt i den store søjlehal). Men samtidigt er den altså et godt eksempel på, hvor utroligt svært det er at lave udstillinger på grænsen mellem videnskab, kunst og historie. At lave udstillinger hvor den videnskabelige process, den æstetiske dømmekraft og den kritiske historiske tænkning forenes. Det er ikke lykkedes for Design4Science — og det er næppe lykkedes for nogen anden udstiling jeg har set, men det forhindrer jo ikke at vi kan have det som et mål at stræbe efter.

Problemet er altså at det er svært at triangulere en pedagogisk uddannelsesudstillilng (som de ville gøre det på Experimentarium), en kunstudstillilng (som de ville gøre på Kunstindustrimuseet) og en kulturhistorisk udstilling (som fx. Nationalmuseet ville lægge op til).  Design4Science ligger meget tættere på kunstudstillingen. Men vi skulle nødig gå i den anden grøft og begynde lave udstillinger som en form for museumsdidaktik. Så jeg tror vi kan lære rigtigt meget af at gennemgå Design4Science og analysere i detaljer både der, hvor den ikke kan bære og der, hvor den (faktisk og i stort omfang) er en succé. 

For så at svare på Camillas spørgsmål. Jeg tror at indholdet i Design4Science er simpelt nok. Men det er ikke kontekstualiseret nok.

Artist Phillip Warnell (see earlier posts about his movie ‘The Girl With X-Ray Eyes’ and his pill camera installation) is just now visiting Medical Museion, where he is researching possibilities for a number of visually and conceptually driven projects.

Firstly, Phillip is guest-editing an issue of The Performance Research Journal on the theme ‘Transplantations’ (see more here). As well as inviting contributions from an interdisciplinary group of academics, artists, biomedical researchers etc, the plan is to have a photo-editorial series of inserts, with images corresponding to broad notions of transplantation. Phillip is therefore working with Medical Museion’s collections on visual research forms, sourcing material that can be appropriate for publication in this context.

Secondly, Phillip has for some time been generating material towards the development of a theatrical/peformative project on the simultaneous spread of theatre and the plague across Europe. In 2007, whilst researching at Hotel Dieu in Lyon, he came across a pattern for an original plague doctor mask, part crow, part breathing apparatus. He have had three such replica masks manufactured, and is hoping to combine these photographically (at a later date) with the enigmatic plague ambulance held in the collection (a black synergy), along with undertaking collaboratively some more ‘forensic’ research into the rather mysterious origins of the ambulance itself.

Finally, he is working in a project financed by Leverhulme Trust (a fellowship) entitled ‘The Anxious Object’, looking for points of connectivity between objects and their properties (material and psychic), psychology, invisible phenomena or other discreet supplements. The model for this idea has been his performative group portrait working with the sole surviving baquet of Franz Mesmer, housed in the Museum of Medicine and Pharmacy in Lyon. This portrait involved photographing separately, and assembling digitally, a group who collectively surround this extraordinary therapeutic object, intended to balance one’s animal magnetism. The current research, significantly, draws from a number of biomedical archives and personal collections, assembling what may become a part publication, part sculptural project, one highlighting the essentially a-visual.