Biomedicine on Display

In the early morning — just before Johanna began to make the usual noices to indicate she wanted to be transferred to our bed for a last cosy hour of sleep — my eyes fell on this sentence in a piece by Douglas Haddow in Adbusters (‘The coming barbarism’):

Rather than Bourriaud’s altermodernism, we should pursue an alter-realism: dispense with the art gallery altogether and make reality our experimentation lab.

I admit it’s taken out of context. Nevertheless, try to translate the sentence into the domain of science/medical museums and sci- and bioart, as represented by, for example, the Wellcome Collection:

Dispense with the sci- and bioart gallery and make scientific reality our experimentation lab.

In other words, don’t move the aesthetic out of the laboratory into galleries and museum exhibitions (this is what all sci- and bioartists so far have been doing). Go to the lab instead, do some real experiments and re-frame this practice into an aesthetic experiment within the walls of the lab itself. The lab is your art gallery.

A few months ago, I advertised the meeting ‘KörperGegenwart, neue Technologien, neue Sammlungen’ to be held at the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden, 22-24 April.

Now the program has been finalised — and it looks very good! After a plenary discussion on ‘Schauplätze der Schönheit: Klinik, Kunst, Medien und Museen’ on Thursday evening, there follows two days of presentations, most of which seem to be very relevant for the future of medical and science museums:

• ‘Körperspuren im Deutschen Hygiene-Museum. Strategien und Objekte’ (Susanne Roeßiger, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden)
• ‘Auf Biegen und Brechen. Zur (In)Formierung des Körpers’ (Stefan Rieger, Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
• ‘Der Körper und seine Teile. Vom Präparat zum transplantierten Organ’ (Katrin Solhdju, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin)
• ‘Vom Körper zum Maß. Zur Geschichte der Konfektionsgrößen’ (Daniela Döring, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
• Vermessene Menschen. Vom Fingerabdruck bis zum Ganzkörperscan’ (Erika Feyerabend, BioSkop-Forum zur Beobachtung der Biowissenschaften e.V.)
• ‘Prothesen exponieren. Sichtbarkeiten neuer Technologien’ (Karin Harrasse, Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln)
• ‘Design in der Orthetik. Innovative Prinzipien der Körperanformung’ (Andreas Mühlenberend, resolutdesign; Hochschule Magdeburg-Stendal)
• ‘Wie sieht der bionische Mensch aus?’ (Friedrich Ditsch, Technische Universität Dresden)
• ‘”It’s a Material World”´: Situiertheit, Verkörperung und Materialität in der neueren Robotik’ (Jutta Weber, Universität Bielefeld)
• ‘Von der Nasen- zur Gesichtstransplantation: Zur Geschichte und Zukunft der kosmetischen Chirurgie’ (Sander L. Gilman, Emory University, Atlanta)
• ‘Science Fashion´: TechnoNaturen und deren alltagskulturellen Umdeutungen im System der Mode’ (Elke Gaugel, Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Wien)
• ‘Wie kommt die Seele ins Museum? Medizinische Museen und das Transzendentale’ (Robert Bud, Science Museum, London)
• ‘Den biomedizinischen Apparat ausstellen: Materialität und Digitalität in “Split + Splice” (Kopenhagen)’ (Susanne Bauer, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
• ‘Die Schärfung des Blicks. Kunstinterventionen in anatomischen Sammlungen’ (Ingeborg Reichle, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften)
• ‘Körperwissen in der Kunst’ (Ute Meta Bauer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston)

As you can see, all presentations are in German — so the germanophilically challenged may have problems.

More here and here.

Can’t wait to avoid seeing Repomen when it is released in a theatre near me later in the spring. The trailer shows Jude Law, Forest Whitaker and a lot of lesser known stars running around killing each other in a near future when artificial organs can be bought on credit and some people can’t afford to make the payments on hearts, livers and kidneys they’ve purchased. Probably says more about the cultural expectations around the new transplantation future than about medical research. The dramaturgy doesn’t look particularly inspiring either.

The Mori Art Museum in Tokyo is currently showing an exhibition called ‘Medicine and Art: Imagining a Future for Life and Love’, showcasing 150 works of art — some are installations designed by artists, other are historical medical artefacts that are contextually transmogrified into art objects by being situated in the art museum space, like these:

From Boing Boing.

Adds to my general impression that the identity of a medical artefact — as a historical museum artefact, as a clinical tool, as an art object, etc — is all about context. Framing means everything.

Four years ago, San Francisco-based biochemist Raven Hanna quit protein sequencing and began designing silver necklaces and earrings in the shape of molecules instead. Today she sells more than 2000 pieces a year: 
neurotransmitter earrings, endorphin necklace, amino acid jewelry, serotonin cufflinks, and so forth. For details and order form, see her website, Made with Molecules:

See also interview in San Francisco Chronicle online. She could have been part of our Design4Science exhibition last spring.

(Thanks to Jessica for the tip)

In late March, Rikke Schmidt Kjærgaard (which several of us here at Medical Museion met when she gave a seminar here a couple of years ago and who is now working at the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit, University of Cambridge) is organising a meeting of great relevance for anyone interested in biomedicine on display, whether in museums or on the screen.

Titled ‘Have you ever seen a molecule? Art, science and visual communication’, the two-day meeting at the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), 25-26 March, concentrates on the correlation between art/design and molecular biology, in particular structural biology, and on the impact of the arts and artistic practices on scientific culture. Current molecular biological research is very dependent upon visualisation methods, both in the production of intepreted data and in the communication to other scientists and the public at large. The call for papers explains the relevance of this topical issue, both for scientists and for science communicators, understood broadly:

Despite the fact that structural images of individual projects are made by thousands of researchers in laboratories around the world, there is as yet no general consensus on what makes a good image. Consequently, there is no obvious and necessary correlation between the images made for pragmatic and heuristic purposes in the laboratory, those chosen for posters and conference presentations, the images accompanying article submissions, and finally those that will be selected or further designed for public engagement and communication. Instead, how specific traits should be visualised, which colour schemes should be applied and how to pick the perfect image for specific purposes depend to a large degree upon pragmatic categories and local factors within individual laboratories and research groups, as well as on editorial decisions and a stronger promotional value, at least to some degree independently of scientific preferences and arguments.

Interdisciplinary collaboration in visualising molecular structures lies at the very core of contemporary research processes and products. Bringing art, design and science together is far more than just an interesting experiment in transdisciplinary cross-communication, it is a necessary step in exploring new ways of optimising imagery at the molecular level and thus breaking new ground. We depend upon this in the arts as well as in the sciences in the future university to make things better and to advance our knowledge of life at a molecular level.

Rikke/CRASSH welcomes submissions for presentations broadly within visualisation of science. Send a <250 words abstract, a brief CV and a few lines about your interest in the conference before 1 February 2010 to rsk@mrc-mbu.cam.ac.uk (and please use the form here).

Registration fee (includes catering) is a bargain (£30 for faculty, £15 for students.). Registration will be available from the conference website shortly.

Seed is running a series of monthly portraits of workbenches of interesting people (like Oliver Sacks, a renowned bat expert, an industrial designer, etc.)

The latest portrait, published in yesterday’s online issue, is the lab bench of Martin Chalfie, one of the three who won a medical Nobel last year for the discovery of green fluorescent protein (GFP).

The image on seedmagazine.com is interactive (of course) — that is, you can blow up details with accompanying texts.

Nifty, but …. what struck me when I first saw the image was that Chalfie’s lab bench doesn’t look authentic. Take a look at the magnified version below — it is way too neat and tidy! It looks like the photographer has cleaned up and arranged everything in orderly fashion before shooting the image.

Then I read the caption to the small glass bottles detail on the shelf above the microscope — it explains why:

I have to admit, I haven’t done a lot of experiments recently. I spend most of my time in my office next door, working on papers or talking with post-docs about their studies.

That’s the fate of most senior scientists — and Seed doesn’t seem to have realised that this fact corrupts the authenticity of the image. The difference between a used and not-so-much used lab bench is subtle. But it is there. Maybe they could have presented it as ‘the dead workbench of Martin Chalfie’ instead.

So, please, in the forthcoming issues, let’s get some images of lab workbenches that reflect some real lively untidy 24/7 lab work.

(thanks to Bertalan Meskó for the tip about Seed’s article; that said, however, Bertalan wrongly, in my view, believes that the image ”lets you look behind the scenes of the workbench of a famous and successful scientist”. That’s exactly what it does not — it’s lets you see pure surface, no behind.)

Did you know that even bacteria are annoyed by the music of Engelbert Humperdinck? (Yes, you are not the only one). E.coli bacteria can’t stand it. It’s all (sort of) true:

Adam Zaretsky once spent 48 hours playing Engelbert Humperdincks’s “Greatest Hits” to a dish of E.coli bacteria to determine whether vibrations or sounds influenced bacterial growth. Watching the bacteria’s antibiotic production increase, Zaretsky decided that perhaps even cells were annoyed by constant subjection to “loud, really awful lounge music.”

Quoted from here. Any questions? :)

We are of course not the only museum that struggles with how to juggle art, science, materiality and medicine in our exhibitions. Next Friday, 4 December, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at University of Cambridge is organising a most interesting afternoon symposium titled ‘Assembling Bodies: Art, Science & Imagination’.

Curators and artistic contributors to MAA’s current experimental exhibition with the same name will explore techniques of investigation and presentation — including relationships between the body and material things, the potential of exhibitions as research projects, incorporating different sensory engagements in museum display, and accommodating multiple audiences.

After an opportunity to see the current exhibition there will be four presentations:

Anita Herle, ‘Exploring the body in the arts, social and bio-medical sciences’:

How do we know, experience and create different bodies? How have different bodies been imagined, known and acted upon in different times, places and disciplinary contexts? This presentation will examine the creative potential and challenges associated with curatorial techniques of assemblage and juxtaposition.

Mark Elliott, ‘Putting the pieces together: negotiating parts and wholes in Assembling Bodies’:

Exhibits about the measurement, classification and distribution of bodies highlight ways in which fragments, measurements or representations can ’stand’ in for larger categories or entities, such as body, type, or human. This paper considers how the curators negotiated the relationship between parts and wholes, highlight the contingency as well as the potency of some of the technologies that make bodies visible.

Jocelyne Dudding, ‘Shifting images: Using ‘anthropometric’ photographs in museum display’:

This paper discusses the historic use of ‘anthropometric’ photography in the collecting and classifying of information of human bodies. It explores how anthropometric methods of photography were followed in some instances, and resisted or ignored in others, why other photographs were recontextualised and used as ‘anthropometric’, and how contemporary artists have responded to such classification.

Bonnie Kemske, ‘Capturing the Embrace: a sculptural engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s ‘lived experience’:

The inclusion of ceramic ‘hugs’ in Assembling Bodies challenges the dominance of the visual within exhibitions, makes us question our perceptions, and leads us to a more engaged understanding of personal relationships to art. Capturing the embrace as ‘cast hugs’ engages the body’s sense of touch as a way to merge the body as subject with the sculptural object: ‘… not the thing on its own, but the experience of the thing.’ [Merleau-Ponty 1962]

Admission is free, but spaces are limited. Mail liz.haslemere@maa.cam.ac.uk to reserve a place. If it wasn’t for the damned carbon footprint I would be tempted to fly Easyjet Cph-Stansted-Cph for a one-day trip. Why not videocast the presentations?

An online-version of Adam’s, Camilla’s and my essay ”Between meaning culture and presence effects: contemporary biomedical objects as a challenge to museums” is now available on the website of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science.

Here’s the abstract of the paper:

The acquisition and display of material artefacts is the raison d’être of museums. But what constitutes a museum artefact? Contemporary medicine (biomedicine) is increasingly producing artefacts that do not fit the traditional museological understanding of what constitutes a material, tangible artefact. Museums today are therefore caught in a paradox. On the one hand, medical science and technologies are having an increasing pervasive impact on the way contemporary life is lived and understood and is therefore a central part of the contemporary world. On the other hand, the objects involved in medical diagnostics and therapies are becoming increasingly invisible and intangible and therefore seem to have no role to play as artefacts in a museum context. Consequently, museums are at risk of becoming alienated from an increasingly important part of contemporary society. This essay elaborates the paradox by employing Gumbrecht’s (2004) distinction between ‘presence’ and ‘meaning’.

Wish I could put the direct author’s link to the full version here, but Elsevier will most probably sue me if I do — so alas you will have to access it in a pay version (Science Direct) here or through your local university library (which most probably will give you access to Studies through one of their many subscription packages).

The printed version in Studies won’t be out until December or so.

My email inbox is continuously inundated with announcements for workshops, seminars, colloquia, conferences and other kinds of academic gatherings, covering all possible shades of the academic spectrum. Everything of the slightest interest for our job here in the museum gets some attention.

I must admit that over and over again I get a feeling of deja vu (”is there still someone who finds this kind of stuff interesting?”) — but sometimes an announcement pops up on the screen that brings me out of the state of boredom. Like the recent call for papers for a postgrad symposium on ’Mediated Memory: Of Monuments, Machines and Madeleines’ at the University of Glasgow, 29 January next year.

Sponsored by the AHRC’s current “Beyond Text” programme (!), the symposium is organised in three panels, all of which are highly relevant for museum people interested in visual and material culture.

One deals with ‘monuments’ — the idea being that we memorialise ourselves and our achievements through the production and archiving of material structures and objects, “including architecture, artworks, music, text, museums and archives”. The panel shall investigate the relationship between the construction of memorial objects and modes of remembrance, and “the processes of creating, transmitting, storing and memorialising narratives through objects of memory”. A must-topic for collection curators.

Another panel centers on ‘machines’ in the form of mediating technologies for remembering, such as photography, video, phonography and the Web. The panel will “investigate the effects of the delegation of memory to machines ­technologies in a larger sense ­ upon human experience and its consequences for our personal and public past” (also very museum relevant, of course).

The third panel deals with one of my favourites — ‘madeleines’: “Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, all can transport us instantly”. The panel will explore “how such sensory encounters and chance remembrances inter-relate as well as the wider ways in which unintentional sites of memory participate in the constitution of our lifeworld”. This panel too is a gold mine for museum curators.

<200 word abstracts to m5symposium@googlemail.com by 25th November 2009 (sic!). Further details here.

I have often been amazed by the steps taken to prevent people from smoking and I have found two gadgets to keep people from the habit quite fascinating: A year’s worth of tar and Smoking Sue.

It now seems that the Danish government wants to play hardball. For quite some time smokers have been used to having warning signs on packages stating that cigarettes are dangerous and potentially deadly. I find it surprising to what extent even the size and font of the letters of the warning are regulated by law. Here’s a quote from § 10:”The general warning […] must cover 30 pct. of the surface of the relevant side.” And a bit further down in § 11, part 1: “Printed in black, bold characters in font Helvetia on white background.” Here taken from the Danish law regulating tobacco.

There is just something fascinating about public health in the language of bureaucrats. One can imagine how the fight over the exact percentage has been waged and a compromise made.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because the Danish government has just proposed putting images on cigarette packages. Pictures that show what smoking will do to you. And they are quite nasty as one can see from this article in the Danish newspaper Politiken. I know that this is practised in other countries also (take a look at these from Brazil but be warned – they are really disgusting), but I’m really in doubt as to the effect of these images. Do they really work?

When I was a student, announcement boards — with flyers for conferences, graduate courses, seminars, new books etc. — were centrepieces in the hallways of Academia.

In many departments they still are. Like this well-groomed one in the Dept of Philosophy at the University of Leeds (where I visited to give two talks last May).

But with all these emerging new social web media, will the academic announcement board have a future?

Well, maybe not if you think in terms of the board above. Seen without people in front of it, it could as well be substituted with a Facebook dashboard. But what about this:

(from here)

This image (from the University of Kaunas, Lithuania) illustrates the fact that a physical announcement board allows you to touch the news of the academic world, even touch them together. Touching news together (even if it’s news in text and image format) is an entirely different social experience than viewing the news on a screen.

In continuation of last week’s post about protein art — here is a (somewhat dated) YouTube-movie about the making of such a beast:

It’s an interview with German physicist-turned-artist Julian Voss-Andreae working on his antibody sculpture ‘Angel of the West’, now placed in front of the Scripps Research Institute in Florida.

Voss-Andreae comments in Leonardo, vol. 38: pp. 41-45, 2005:

The main idea underlying these sculptures is the analogy between the technique of mitered cuts and protein folding. The sculptures offer a sensual experience of a world that is usually accessible only through the intellect.

As some of you may have noticed, the online Image & Video Library of The American Society for Cell Biology has been closed since February, and nobody knew whether it would be opened again.

Last Thursday the ACSB announced, however, that the site will be re-opened and developed further by means of a $2,5 million ’stimulus grant’ from the NIH (one of the consequences of the new Obama administration).

According to ACSB’s press release, the present image and video collection will be turned into “a comprehensive, international digital library” and furthermore, by “developing a systematic protocol for acquiring, reviewing, annotating, and uploading the images”, the ASCB will create “an efficient platform for building the library at a rapid rate”.

These are exciting news for all cell image fans!