It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to readers of this blog that our contribution to the overall Center activities involves a strong aesthetic component.

For example, we experimented with an aesthetic approach to aging in the Oldetopia exhibition two years ago. Lucy’s joining our group last December was a deliberate attempt to strengthen the aesthetic side. And the current exhibition ’Healthy Aging: A Life Span Approach’ (see also here), shown in our external exhibition area in the main building of the Faculty of Health Sciences is dominated by Danish photographer Liv Carlé Mortensen’s 15 collages of centennarians (like this one).

I just want to mention this as a background for why the upcoming conference on ‘Aging, Old Age, Memory, Aesthetics’ in Toronto, 25-27 March next year may be quite interesting for us. The conference focuses on how aging is portrayed and experienced in literature and the arts in light of social, political, scientific and cultural contexts:

In using the term aesthetics, we are drawing attention to the arts, aesthetic practices, theories of art, and modes of representation as they pertain to aging and memory. We look forward to presentations that analyze a variety of theoretical, thematic, and disciplinary approaches that remain linked by the consistent placement of old age and aging at the centre of concentrated investigation.

They are also recruiting creative submissions by artists whose work is concerned with the images generated by old age. 300-word proposals should be sent to andrea.charise@utoronto.ca by Friday 1 October 1, 2010.

To ‘inspect’ then is more than just seeing or looking at something. It means to look intensely, carefully and closely.

This is of course what museum curators do all the time when they get new objects into the collections. They look carefully at the objects and often document the inspection by means of photography (or drawing or painting).

But sometimes curators investigate objects through other senses than vision. For example, they may touch and smell the objects, sometimes deliberately, or at least accidentally in the course of looking at it. They may even taste it.

In these cases, the verb ‘inspect’ is obviously insufficient, even misleading. For example, when I handle or finger an object to investigate its texture, its temperature, its dry-/wetness and its soft-/hardness, I obviously don’t ‘inspect’ it. I may do so in parallel with the handling and fingering, but the primary activity (handling, fingering) is not covered by the verb ‘inspect’.

Speaking in terms of ‘inspection’ when one listens, touches, smells or tastes an object intensely and carefully is an instance of what is sometimes called the ‘hegemony of the visual’. The unique experience of other senses are reduced to that of vision.

What verbs can be used for listening, touch, smell or taste objects intensely?

My dictionary doesn’t have any intensified synonyms of any of these sensory activites. One has to use phrases like ‘intense smelling’, ‘attentive listening’, ‘intensive touching’.

‘Intense touching’ has unintended erotic rather than curatorial connotations. So what about ‘inhapt’ (from Greek hapto, I grasp; cf. haptics) as a straightly curatorial term?

‘Inhapt’ isn’t in the OED and is also a clumsy combination of Latin and Greek. But it’s new and sounds nice: “I’m going to inhapt the new collection of plastic syringes today”.

This reaction seems to be prompted by two main preconceptions about drawing. The first is that it is arty or simplistic, a bit of fun so would have no relevance to other more serious research activities.

The other preconception seems to stem surprisingly from fear. ‘But I can’t draw’ or ‘I haven’t drawn for years’ come the plaintiff explanations for foregoing the chance to partake in any workshops. The fear of being seen to be unaccomplished at the seemingly simple yet daunting task of drawing has caused a surprising lack of takers to participate in the project. Yet the response to outcomes, to evidence of the activity of drawing offering a valid method of investigation, and to the activity itself once a person engages in the process is encouragingly positive.

So what is going wrong?

I think the answer is the ‘D’ word, as in the word ‘drawing.’ Drawing is both an outcome and an activity. It is probably most common upon hearing the word drawing to think of it as describing an accomplished object consisting of an artistic convergence of lines, marks and shapes that form something visual on a surface which can be recognized in some way as being what one thinks of in general terms as a drawing.

This ‘drawing’ is a noun. Perhaps less considered is the use of the word ‘drawing’ as a verb, the doing word, drawing as an action, an activity something to participate in. If the first definition, the noun, is the more prominent and the one that sticks in the mind of someone invited to participate, then the expectations that are associated with this noun come into play. These expectations of the outcome of drawing can be unrealistically huge. They tend to start with Leonardo da Vinci and work their way down.

So it seems that when I think I am asking someone to join in a drawing workshop, they think I am saying ‘come and try and draw like Leonardo da Vinci in front of your peers.’ I see the problem.

The workshops focus on drawing as a phenomenological activity. By this, I mean that the activity, the act of looking and drawing as you look at an object, forces you to engage more fully with the object. This takes time and means a relationship has to develop between the viewer and the object. The time allows more attention to be spent looking and drawing. More detail is observed, more things specific to the object become noticed and the experience becomes richer and more personal. Understanding of the object, as an object grows and by ‘drawing your way into understanding’ the encounter, new insights can be achieved. The object is experienced and understood more fully through the activity of drawing it.

But this whole process is a practical and tacit methodology. The skill of looking and ‘touching’ the object or ‘seeing’ it through the tip of the pencil is not always easy. It is one that is best explained by doing. It is a kinaesthetic activity where the information and knowledge gained comes through doing rather than from instruction. In this way, the act of drawing allows someone to participate in actively gaining their own information for themselves rather than passively receive information via information panels or verbal instruction etc.

Spending time drawing a closely observed object is not a hugely complicated idea. It is actually a very simple notion. To begin at the beginning, with the actual object before you and just look and record and interpret your experience of this as it occurs by drawing, is a very humble action. Yet it is one that is often overlooked. Maybe because it is so basic an idea it can be seen as less important than other methods. Technology moves forward and the type of images we are now able to produce through scientific imaging are incredible. But these are not images we as individuals can make. They require training, understanding of equipment, experience knowing how to decipher the shapes and colours created to formulate clear data. We can all however, look at something and make marks on a page with a pencil at the same time. The traditional technology of hand/eye coordination and observational skill combined with the action of moving a pencil across a surface is one that is sometimes seen as being too old fashioned, too boring and simple to warrant consideration. Yet when it is suggested, there is something about the process that causes some people to become anxious and back away.

The outcomes of the activity may vary depending on skill and practice but the phenomenological activity of drawing can offer a valid way for a viewer to engage with, investigate and gain insight into an object in a different way. If the ‘D’ word must be avoided, what can replace it? How can the activity of drawing be explained in terms of a practical valid alternative method for investigating and engaging with objects?

Fundamental to the development of the opera was the sustained involvement of patients, healthcare staff, family members, as well as basic & clinical researchers. The librettist & composer visited the biomarkers labs, talked extensively to the various stakeholders and witnessed various practices of dementia care.

The opera premiered at the Brighton Festival in May 2010, and will come to the Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House, London in July 2010. The opera explores the lifeworlds and current research practices surrounding Alzheimer’s disease, and opens up a variety of questions vis-a-vis how aesthetic projects engage with social scientists, scientists and other stakeholders in the development of creative work that explores biomedical research and practices.

This event seems increadibly interesting (from my point of view investigating neuroscience and concepts of aging), and I certainly wish I was going to London this summer so I could experience it.

It’s not only that it appearently is really good science communication in the sense of communicating the experience and important aspects of a dreaded disease – see Dementia opera so realistic it could be used as teaching aid for medical students – but also that it shows the potential of art as a interactive medium for both public engagement with science and science engagement with public. Which, by the way, is just what I think the ideal medical museum should be!

Before I went into history of science and medicine (and then medical museology), I took a Masters in chemistry, zoology and historical geology (major).

Today, when I look back on my student years at a distance, I realise these disciplines were very much about the handling of tangible material stuff, involving all five senses. Chemistry, zoology and geology students were not just thinking about or viewing the world — we were also listening to it, smelling, tasting and touching it.

Chemistry was (at least when I was a student) about reactions between palpable chemical substances; it involved handling glassware and physical measuring instruments; lots of stuff was pretty smelly, we were constantly exposed to the sounds of boiling liquids and suction pumps; experiencing glowing heat and freezing cold were parts of the daily experience in the lab.

Zoology was very material too. We observed birds in the field, collected insects and marine animals, killed and dissected them, made microscopical thin sections and grinded organs down to cells and molecular extracts. Animal beings weren’t just genomic code — they were sometimes smelly, often noisy, always tangible. 

Historical geology, finally, was about handling real stones, minerals and sediments with axes, spades, knives and brushes. We spent weeks in the  field working outcrops and long hours in the lab afterwards, sorting out physical fossil specimens.

After this undergraduate immersion in the material world of science, I started in a PhD-programme in biochemistry at Karolinska Institute. I collected blood from animals which I had killed with my own hands, stood in the lab’s cold room for hours purifying blood proteins, degraded them with chemicals, separated the fragments in chromatography columns which I had packed myself, and then handled different kinds of lab glassware and measuring instruments to elucidate their amino acid sequences. The protein laboratory was a very physical place with lots of machines and chemicals — and again it involved all the senses.

So science was a very material and sensory practice. And if I hadn’t been confronted with its potentially deadly consequences — one day I swallowed a radioactively labelled substance by mistake (always remember to use a pipette bulb!) — I might have become a real scientist.

Instead, I left science to pursue my high school philosophical interests — what is classification? what’s a concept? what’s the relation between a name, a concept and reality? what’s stuff made of? (all classical epistemological and ontological questions) — took courses in philosophy of science and history of ideas, and then started a new PhD project on the historiography of 20th century science, more precisely the historiography of ecology.

The history and philosophy of science was, I realise now, an entirely different experience. Instead of manipulating and being surrounded by material objects, I found myself sitting at a desk, reading old scientific papers and books. I visited archives to look for handwritten documents and interviewed elderly scientists about their past.

In other words, history and philosophy of science was a world of words and texts (written or spoken). There were actually no material objects in my new disciplinary identity, except for the pulp the texts were written on.

Shifting from PhD-studies of the historiography of ecology to postdoc studies of the historiography of immunology, didn’t change my textual practice. True, I sometimes met practicing immunologists in conferences about the history and philosophy of immunology, but these meetings still revolved around texts and words. People read conference papers based on readings of other texts. Again — text, text, text.

My own research practice was also totally text-based. I spent eight years of my life going through the huge archive of a contemporary immunologist, and spent hundreds of hours talking with him. And when I visited his former colleagues to interview them, we talked and inspected documents and photographs together. We never went to their labs to handle a piece of immunological lab equipment together.

It was as if the material and sensory world of science which I had been so thoroughly immersed in on a daily basis when I was a student totally disappeared when I entered history and philosophy of science. From a world of stuff, smells, sounds, tastes and manual touch I had stepped into a world of disembodied text.

What is most remarkable, now when I look back on it, is that I wasn’t at all aware of the gulf that separated the material and sensuous world of science, and the textual and disembodied world of history and philosophy of science. It was as if I had lost the ability to experience the material and sensory qualities of the laboratory, as if I saw the world of science through the textual spectacles of history and philosophy of science. To the extent that when, occasionally, I visited laboratories, I only ‘saw’ papers, inscriptions and documents, maybe a few images here and there.
[..]

(thanks to Martha Lourenco at the Museu da Ciencia da Universidade Lisboa for inviting me to give the talk — this post contains the introduction only, the rest needs revision before being put online).

This great image epitomizes the notion of the aesthetics of decay.

It’s shot in an abandoned surgery room somewhere in the eastern part of Berlin, in the former Sovjet sector.

Photo by Andreas Swane © All rights reserved. Used with kind permission. More here. 

Andreas describes himself as “a hobby photographer from Oslo”, who hopes that his future photo specialty “will be derelict / abandoned places here and there”.

“The beauty of old and decayed places fascinates me”, he says on his Flickr page.

(thanks to Øystein for the tip)

What was most noticable about the morning was the intense silence. We are used to sitting for a couple of hours at the cinema or in front of the tv. but it is rare to be amongst a group of people who spent two hours staring at a single, static object.

The drawing session allowed those who had already seen the specimen to re-see it in a new way and offered a new experience for those who had never seen it before. All found they saw more and more detail the longer they spent looking and drawing. The glass case housing the specimen became an issue. It is as much part of the object as the specimen within but the significance of the affect it has on the display is not always apparent. The activity raised questions about distortion and distraction and the effects of the shifting reflections and refractions caused by the glass.

The old chestnut of the ubiquitous skull also came up. We all think we know what a skull looks like but can we be sure this is what this particular skull we were observing looked like? The whole group recognized the need to look at the object and try not to draw what we imagined we saw.

Each group of drawings by each individual shows not only their developing understanding of the object they were observing, but shows to us as viewers how differently we all saw the object. Everyones’ responses, focus on detail and areas of interest differ from eachother yet the object is equally recognizable as the same object we all saw and drew.

By spending these hours with the artefact each of us found new details to see and drew our way into trying to understand the materiality of what we were looking at, making it clearer to ourselves and offering fresh insights to others.

All the drawings can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/lucylyons/sets/72157623684073972

Three staff members — Anni, Camilla and Nanna — participated in a group drawing workshop. The specimen we drew is an example of bones of the middle ear mounted in a magnifying glass and placed on a small wooden plinth. It comes from the Ibsen-Mackesprangske collection made between 1824 and 1836 and was taken from a collection made of inner ear bones of 55 deaf people at the Danish Deaf Institute. This object forms part of the collection chosen for the ‘6 ting og sager’ exhibition, which opened last Friday (see presentation in Danish here).

The object was placed in the centre of the table. Anni and Camilla sat on one side and Nanna and I sat opposite. All three drew more than two or three drawings on one piece of paper. All found that the object was complicated but the more they looked the more they were able to visually unravel it. It became apparent that the intricate network of bones were not the only focal point. Although all three participants presumed that the ear bones would be the main thing they observed, all began to also draw the magnifying glass in which thery are mounted. The mount and stand that contain the bones became of equal importance and a key part of the object and their experience of it. Initially it was overlooked through the activity of drawing it they soon realised it was a relevant part of the artefact.

Nanna became the most frustrated as she realized after some time she had not observed the object in front of her. Having already spent so much time with the object in the context of conserving it, she thought she already knew everything about it. But she admitted she was ’drawing from a photograph of it in her head’. This is a common occurrance where people draw what they think an object looks like rather than how it actually appears to them when they are looking at it. Assumptions are made and the specificity of each object and each person’s experience of that object become replaced by memories of what they think it looks like.

Having spent a great deal of time with her head bowed in concentration drawing a detailed remembered representation of the object, Nanna moved positions and spent time looking at the object and drawing again from a different angle. Then she saw the object she knew so well with ’fresh eyes’ and was amazed by the new detail and insight she saw. Her drawing demonstrates how she saw the whole object and experienced it as a new artefact rather than in the fragments she pieced together from her remembered past experiences.

Time spent drawing and looking also benefitted Anni and Camilla. Anni’s alterations to her lines reveal her journey of seeing and understanding what she sees and Camilla’s three drawings demonstrate her understanding as she became more aware of the shape of the handle and the reflections on the glass.

Once they forgot to concern themselves so much with how the drawing looked and spent time looking at the object and tried to visually understand it, they made drawings that showed detail and clearer understanding and apprectiation of the object.

Feelings about the resulting drawings were varied but the view that all who participated appreciated the object, learned new things about it and gained respect for something that could have been overlooked.

See more here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lucylyons/sets/72157623623490658

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.

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.