Biomedicine on Display

Split + Splice, Del + Hel, is about the inter-relations between the culture of biomedicine and the enormous complexities of 21st century living.  The exhibition explores these complexities through the material culture, objects and instruments used by biomedical practitioners in research and in clinical activities.

Much as biomedicine itself, Split + Splice is an innovative hybridisation of complex practices.  It is not exactly science communication; it will not teach you comprehensively about the field of biomedicine.  It is not exactly old-fashioned history of science; it will not show you a triumphalist progression of miraculous discovery.  It is not exactly an art exhibition; it will not leave you with a sense that you have seen inside a solo mind.

Investigation, intervention, inquiry, analysis, critique, visualisation, modeling.  All these processes are present in scientific methodology, in the disciplines of art, design and aesthetics, and in the methods of the history and philosophy of science and medicine.  If the sheer knife of a microtome can give us the startling and strange histological slice of tissue that revealed the neuron to Ramon y Cajal for the first time, then we must also be able to wield with equal precision what we know about aesthetics to reveal vital information about the cultures that made the objects under scrutiny; here we have investigated the prosaic but fundamental way that both plastics and computing have revolutionised medicine.  Under a humanities microscope, epistemological investigations of the ritual and often hypnotically repetitive practices of biomedicine can reveal, among other things, the social assumptions that often underpin disease prediction.

In Split + Splice we have used different techniques from the arts, the sciences and the humanities as prisms to analyse the same material in several ways.  The exhibition’s ‘catalogue’ User Manual is also the object index for the entire show: a gift to the visitor to take away and keep, but also something that sets the objects free from text, allows them to be discovered in their form and materiality by the visitor.  

Split + Splice is not about the ‘user end’ or the magic bullet, but rather the minutiae of biomedicine’s daily practice.

  
We take the visitor into the engine room of biomedicine, into its Cold Room, its Wet Lab, its number crunching, its visualisation practices.  Its incubators and ion exchange columns.  Its legal frameworks and its media leaks.  We will take you into some of the historical origins of biomedicine’s process of fragmenting the body into smaller and smaller pieces.  We came to the conclusion that all of biomedical practice is a never-ending attempt to contain the torrent of life and manage the flows of this cascade of complexity from biosample to dataset, from clinic to lab, from individual to populace.  These practices of containment and flow tell us much about the cultures of biomedicine and the kinds of societies that its practices produce.  
 

Split + Splice is an experience, not an explanation.  We want people to leave the exhibition with a sense of how to ask pertinent questions about biomedicine and the ways in which it affects their own individual and social/collective lives.  Switch on, measure up, and to go with the flow, into the show.

Martha Fleming, for the exhibition team: Søren Bak-Jensen, Susanne Bauer, Sniff Andersen Nexø, Jan Eric Olsén and Jonas Paludan.

For more pictures from the exhibition, see Museionblog or, for a slideshow of the pictures, go here.

We are a little more than two weeks into our installing period for Split+Splice (Del+Hel), the exhibition about the culture of biomedicine that is opening 11 June at the Medicinsk Museion.  The thrill of seeing ideas materialise into meaning through the juxtaposition of objects of many different kinds is palpable in the team.

The other day, some Supermen from 3×34 delivered among other things a Supercomputer which we have on loan from the Dansk Datahistorisk Forening (a museum that no other museum interested in the 20th century can do without: www.datamuseum.dk). 

In short order it became part of the beginning of what will be our Data Avalanche – an experience most scientific researchers will know only too well.

In the same room there is another high-object density display of measurement instruments going up, and here you see our high-quality designer, Mikael Thorsted, at work finessing the layout.

The Ur-stories of biomedicine are also emerging from other rooms: here a ghostly presence reminds us that ‘looking in’ is predicated on ‘cutting open.’ 

Read more about Split+Splice in Søren Bak Jensen’s earlier post : http://www.corporeality.net/museion/2009/04/26/warning-the-soundtrack-of-split-and-splice-fragments-from-the-age-of-biomedicine/

Here’s the manuscript for my article to the Medical Museion Yearbook 2007 which is coming out in July. It s an outline of ideas which will be explored in the workshop ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context’ and the ‘Art and Biomedicne: Beyond the Body’ conference in late August and early September, organised by Jan Eric Olsén, Stine Hebert, Thomas Söderqvist and myself.

Opening the morning paper it is not unusual to see biomedicine displayed. An image of the SARS virus. A world map showing migratory patterns of wild birds purported to be propagating avian flu. An article about the licensing of pharmaceutical patents to drug manufacturers in India who will produce anti-retrovirals cheaply for an Africa overwhelmed by HIV. A graphic template showing the genome of the fruitfly.

But the virus image is not an enlargement of a microscopic entity: it is an elaborate visualisation constructed painstakingly from data some of which is obtained crystallographically and some of which is theoretical. Before even reaching the newspaper’s picture editor it will have gone through the mill of a specially written enhancement software package before being tipped into Photoshop for false colouring. The world map does not show the trade and trucking routes for the food industry which is just as lethal a vector of avian flu as any wild bird or… high-flying businessman. The article about pharmaceutical licences does not say how many have died unnecessarily during the fifteen year battle of activists to obtain inexpensive treatment for HIV. The fruitfly genome gives the impression of showing the ‘building blocks’ of life, but does not explain that gene expression is different from genetic structure, nor does it explain why the lowly fruitfly was worth the time and effort to be gene sequenced.

There are a lot of invisibles in current biomedicine. As we have seen, some are very big, others very small. How can these invisibles be conceptualised, visualised and explored by museums of medicine? Medical Museion has taken on this challenge, an engagement which will no doubt benefit many museums much larger than itself. It has taken it on by starting in the right place, which is to think before acting, to create a research culture around these issues, and to develop solid interdisciplinary communities among those who know this to be a burning issue. It is a burning social as well as intellectual issue – how can a larger public be empowered by knowledge of these complex fields to act responsibly and effectively, and how can health policy be informed by more than the science itself?

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