Biomedicine on Display

Rollator drawings  27^th–28^th, 28^th–29^th September 2010:

When I began drawing the rollator I asked myself why I was drawing something that was so boring, so ugly with no interesting features.

I was reminded of the talk Nurin Veis, Deputy Head Sciences – Science Communication and Senior Curator of Human Biology and Medicine at Museum Victoria, Australia, gave at the EAMHMS conference. In her talk about issues in displaying the cochlear implant, Nurin stated that the problem lies with our insistence in seeing the ‘black box’ item as ugly and not suitable as a museum artefact. Rather than trying to avoid it, rewrite it change or replace it with something explaining something about it, she asked why couldn’t we just accept it and learn to appreciate it? Maybe it is our job to see the aesthetic qualities of these ‘black box’ objects rather than try and avoid them.

The rollator’s use is essential to many, there is no doubt about that, but as an object, as a thing, it is so unappealing and uninteresting. It would not take long to draw such a simple plain thing.

Or so I thought. As I began I realized that the plastics had degenerated and the handles and wheels had an organic, sticky feeling to them. The way the brakes were attached to the wheels were far more complex than I had at first seen, but they were also connected by crude looking bolts. Mass produced steel rods had a feeling of hand madeness at the apex where they joined and the whole object took on a far more complicated nuance and styling than I had realized.

After 2 days, the amount of detail I had noticed changed my view of this object from boring and ugly to beautiful and fascinating. It’s complexities were hidden behind my prejudices and became seen clearly through my making the effort to spend time actually looking at this object and to stop making huge assumptions about it. How it worked, how it was made and the aesthetic of the object became more and more apparent during the two days I spent drawing it. Paying attention to such a modest and overlooked ungainly looking object showed it to be far more than I had at first perceived.

Overlooking such a vital yet seemingly unattractive object highlighted the need to spend time looking and building relationships with artefacts. The rollator has become, in my opinion a very beautiful object and reactions from others have been surprising also. Others have seen far more beauty in the drawing than they thought would ever be found in such an object. Maybe they will re-look at them and see them in a new way.

So many things associated with the ageing process are thought to be boring, ugly, utilitarian and uninteresting to look at. I am discovering for myself how wrong this assumption is. The toothless skull, so iconic of the image of ageing is fascinating and beautiful rather than ridiculous and unattractive.

Objects that help and assist the elderly, items used to test for ailments associated with ageing and objects used for treating them are all seen as having little aesthetic value as objects in their own right. And often the ageing population, the people themselves, are not regarded as being aesthetic so ingrained is it that beauty is connected with youth and newness.

Spending time looking at them, overcoming assumptions about them, elevating them from mere boring utilitarian thing to being experienced as unique, beautiful and fascinating encounters helps to re-see aspects of ageing in a much wider and more positive way.

Ugh! Last week I visited New York. What really spoke to my senses and touched my emotions in a provocative and morbid way was a toe-curling exhibition of works by the American artist Paul Thek (1933-1988) at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art. To be honest the works on display managed to freak me out a bit and that’s always a good indication of the effectiveness of an exhibition.

Even though I was quite disappointed about the architectural arrangement and the setting, which in general seemed a bit unfinished, I really enjoyed the display of works made by Thek. Especially the untitled pieces of meat from the series Technological Reliquaries made out of wax, hair, metal, wood, plaster, cord and paint presented in acrylic glass vitrines!

My first reaction: Ugh, dramatic and vulgar!

Secondly: Wow, it looks so real, although it’s not real at all!

And after that: What a delightful twisting of concepts! What a brave way of approaching the reversibility of meaning and expectation. This is real! This is more than real! Surely it’s the seduction of the hyperreal!

I think my personal fascination derives from experiencing the many different statements each item gives expression to. Each block of exposed meat, each cut of limb, hand, finger, foot, leg confused me and distracted my sense of order. Each and every one of the artworks seemed to present many conflicting layers of meaning. They have a charm that resembles Baudrillard’s conception of la seduction, and therefore they allow themselves to be grasped and described in his terms.

Baudrillard’s concept of seduction takes place on the reverse side of the logical linked terms of meaning. Through seduction mystery is raised by the blurring of every expectation and by combinations of opposite terms and relations. In the seduction, everything becomes obscure, and like a trompe l’oeil you become deluded.

Thek’s pieces of meat and his torn off limbs do not make a symbolic reading possible. There is no meaning and therefore nothing can be read. The neat surface of conceptual order is broken and we are faced with courageous juxtapositions of all kind. In some way – I would claim – the spectator is confronted with bodyparts more real than real. They are hyperreal, showing more of the fleshy matter than normally seen by the eye. This is the vulgar side of the exhibition, no doubt: blood, arteries, fatty lumps and the like are exposed right in ones face. Baudrillard would call this effect a growth of reality or a greediness of sight, which is in itself not seducing at all – very much the reverse! Yet we know that these pieces of meat are not the real thing. They are constructed. They are artefacts. They deprives reality of a dimension. They become ‘das Schein’: This is the mechanism of seduction. So, at the same time as one could say reality is exposed it is simultaneously obscured, veiled and covered up by the artificiality of the items exposed.

This seductive trick is executed on more than one level.

Continuing the theme the confusion of concepts of real and unreal is the question: Do the Plexiglas vitrines prevent the bad smell of rottening flesh? Well of course they do, at least my imagination tells me so. One of the pieces of meat has already been attacked by several of big fat flies. Yuk! My mind, my imagination of smell and my eyes tells me one thing: “it stinks!” on the other hand I’m aware that my senses could be playing tricks on me: These aren’t real flies and it isn’t real meat. Again I’m left in confusion, it doesn’t really make sense!

At many of Thek’s works a playful approach to several of our senses can be detected. Is it intended? Well, we will never find out for sure. Unfortunately Thek is long gone, but given his close friendship with and intellectual mentorship in Susan Sontag we might have a clue – at least we are allowed to make a guess. Sontag dedicated her famous collection of essays Against Interpretation to Peter Thek. I would like to round off with a quote from one of the essays titled the same:

”Like the fume of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intelllect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world […]. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” (Sontag 1966).

This exhibition of works by Thek seduces in a sophisticated way! It truly did mess up my concepts of reality in a fabulous way. It’s grotesque, rough, beautiful, adorable, painful and miserable. It’s unreal and highly artificial, but precisely because of the artificiality it manages to be so realistic and in touch with your feelings – mine at least!

Through the last six months I’ve been a regular visitor to the Medical Museion in Copenhagen. This house keeps collections of real flesh, skeletons, bodyparts with skin and all! Studying these objects of course has a strong impression on me as a spectator. Here I’m exposed to the real bodies, which once had a life. Yet I cannot imagine the smell of the real living flesh. It’s hard to get a grip on the realness of the real. It feels like there’s a big distance between me and the items observed. I ask myself why? Why is it easier to imagine the smell and the material consistency of the artificial flesh than the real flesh and bones? Maybe it’s because all the items on the Museion have to be understood in a different way. It’s like they almost require my empathy – or else I would be a bad and uninterested human being who didn’t care at all about lives once lived. I have to make use of my thoughts in a whole different way when confronted with the real flesh! It’s not that I don’t get seduced by exhibits of dead real bodyparts. I do, but in an entirely different way. It’s interesting how art compared to a more matter-of-fact science communication works. How might art and science communication work together? How might their synergism affect the museum visitor? These are questions which open a debate about the various forms of seduction we could expect at the museum – questions I will take up in the time to come…

At the conference “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month, one of the very hot topics was art. What contributions can art make to exhibitions of contemporary medicine?

The first speaker of this session, Yin Chung Au from Taipei, pointed out that we should move away from displaying the frozen end product of medical science, and show objects in use instead. Visitors don’t get their experiences from being awed by the wondrous possibilities of contemporary science, but from personal experiences with the objects. MedArt can help us display the processes of medical science and allow people to engage with it. At the same time it can blur the boundaries of traditional medical ways of thinking, and expose scientific discourse as normative. When confronted with a MedArt wheelchair that helps you create your own melody when moving about in it, you are forced to ask yourself is being in wheelchair is really being disabled. Read Yin Chung Au’s abstract here.

Afterwards, Nina Czegledy addressed the challenge of exhibiting BioArt in medical museums. It requires high technology and maintenance, but on the other hand it provides us with an alternative way of looking at the mediated body of contemporary biomedicine. She made a point of the interesting aspects of contextualizing this contemporary anatomical art with anatomical illustrations from historical artists. Read Nina Czedgledy’s abstract here.

Lucy Lyons presented the idea that by using the ‘primitive’ technique of drawing, we can give visitors a chance to get close to the museum objects and appropriate them. When you give yourself time to really look at an object, you begin to see it. Lucy calls this “looking through a pencil”. In her experience, this gives you a much wider and more personal experience of the materiality, the history, and even the use of, an object than you would get from reading exhibition texts. It was an inspiring talk about experiencing other peoples’ experiences of object through drawing, and about the importance of giving visitors a material understanding of objects. Read Lucy Lyons’ abstract here.

The following discussion included comments from Danny Birchall, Jim Garretts, Adam Bencard, Nurin Veis and Kim Sawchuk.

For a list of all conference abstracts, see here. Read more about this video clip project here.

This session at the conference “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month circled around the concept of the Renaissance Wunderkammer, and how we might use techniques of curiosity and wonder to engage people with scientific and historical objects.

Joanna Ebenstein —who writes the blog Morbid Anatomy— talked about how we can use the feelings an object or a collection of objects evoke to make the museum visit a personal and interesting journey.

Joanna suggested we display artefacts in a way that appeal to the visitors’ curiosity. Better let people be inspired to investigate objects and their history for themselves, instead of presenting them with an educational fact sheet. Curiosity cabinets don’t tell straightforward stories, but activate the visitors.

In the discussion afterwards it was pointed out that the curiosity cabinet’s clustered and intimate atmosphere might be a challenge to modern museum aesthetics. There might also be a danger that it mystifies science. On the other hand the Wunderkammer aesthetic could be useful for museums who don’t wish to present answers as much as incite people to ask more questions.

The power of the Wunderkammer approach for presenting contemporary medicine was questioned. However, in Joanna’s view recent biomedicine is just as emotionally evocative as the objects of the original curiosity cabinets. Feelings of horror when confronted with the perspective of being able to clone living human beings, or wonder at the intricate microscopic chaos of the molecular microworld are also evoked by many kinds of contemporary objects, she suggested.

The discussion after Joanna’s presentation included comments from John Durant, Kim Sawchuk, Kristen Ehrenberger, Danny Birchall, Karen Ingham, Robert Bud, Robert Martensen, Claudia Stein and Ramunas Kondratas (see the end of the clip).

Read Joanna’s full abstract here.

For a list of all conference abstracts, see here. Read more about this video clip project here.

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We’ve just set up the installation ‘An Ageing World’ in the main lobby of the Faculty of Health Sciences here in Copenhagen.

The installation has been made to mark the IARU-conference on Ageing, Longevity and Health that takes place 5-7 October, organised by the Center for Healthy Ageing.

The simple idea was to make a commentary on the rapidly changing demographic of the human population:

Protruding from a round earth disc, soaring a couple of feet above the floor, are age structure diagrams (histograms) from seven countries around the world (Denmark, China, Japan, United States, Bolivia, Malawi and Papua New Guinea) for the years of 1950, 2000 and 2050. The histogram protrusions are illuminated from below by means of fiber optics in contrast to the dark-blue earth disc.

Age structure diagrams, especially in poor countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas, traditionally take the form of pyramids (lots of kids and decreasing number of adults as the population grows older). But in the rich countries of the world the pyramids are already now turning into pillars, and in 2050 they will become mushroom shaped. In short, this is a major demographic challenge, which has enormous consequences for global health systems.

Bente and I got the idea to the installation from the way she, Camilla Mordhorst and architech Anne Schnettler used physical age structure diagrams in the Oldetopia exhibition here at Medical Museion a couple of years ago — this idea in turn had grown out of discussions we had with Susanne Bauer and Sybilla Nikolow over how statistics was displayed in the old Deutsche Hygiene Museum in the 1930s.

We then discussed different design solutions with exhibition designer Mikael Thorsted and graphic designer Lars Møller Nielsen (Studio 8), and eventually agreed on the light disc with a pixel-ish world map — with East Asia in the center, and with Europe and the US on the rim — and with the protrusing illuminated histograms. The disc was produced by Exponent Stougaard A/S, using a new printing method

Here are images from the installation of the disc in the main lobby of the Panum building last Thursday:

After four hours all 21 ‘pyramids’ were glowing and ‘An Ageing World’ was completed.

Throughout the day, students and staff stopped by, gathering in small groups and discussing the diagrams.

What started as an icon for the IARU conference, thus turned out — quite unexpectedly — to be a informal engagement site for understanding global demography.

Back in 2006, I, for one, was unreservedly enthusiastic (here) about XVIVO‘s animated ‘The Inner Life of the Cell’. Originally made for use in undergraduate life science teaching at Harvard, it became immensely popular on the internet. It was magic — as  Jim Endersby said , it was like “Terminator 2 meets a biology textbook”.

Since then we have eagerly waited for Terminator 3. And now the sequel has arrived — a four and a half minute animation, titled ‘Powering the Cell: Mitochondria’, showing the production of ATP.

But I cannot recall the original enthusiasm I felt about ‘The Inner Life of the Cell’. The magic has evaporated. This is just another didactic animation movie.

One of our basic aims here at Medical Museion is to put current trends in biomedicine in a longer historical perspective. Last Friday, we got yet another opportunity for doing this, when the new Core Facility for Integrated Microscopy at the Faculty of Health Sciences opened together with an international research symposium on the state-of-the-art of microscopy.

In the hallway outside the symposium room, we displayed a selection of six of our most beautiful old microscopes that represent the development from early simple single lenses to end of the 19^th century compound microscopes. The aim was to make the symposium participants better appreciate the beauty of early microscopes and the craftsmanship that has gone into constructing them.

During the lunch break, I had a chat with Peter Evennett, who has edited the English version of Harald Moe’s classical The Story of the Microscope together with Chris Hammond. Peter and Chris, who are members of the Royal Microscopical Society’s outreach and education committee, has helped us select the displayed items from our large collection of microscopes and write the showcase texts for the exhibition, which was designed and put together by Bente and Ion.

The oldest microscope (or rather replica of a microscope) selected is actually only a lens in a brass fitting, made in 1670 by Anthony van Leuwenhoek of Delft, who for the first time ever was able to clearly observe life on an incredibly small scale. Holding the lens at a slant towards the light, he was able to see living bacteria and wriggling, human sperm cells. It was the beginning of a whole new era for science.

Peter went on to tell me how early microscopes weren’t used for science, as I thought, but were a kind of intellectual hobby and prestige objects for wealthy gentlemen. Consequently many of the microscopes from this period are quite charming and exquisite. It wasn’t until the 1830s — when the wine merchant J. J. Lister was able to produce objectives that minimised the colour fringing — that the microscope was seriously introduced into science. And so in 1839 a group of scientists got together to propose a toast to the instrument and to found the Royal Microscopical Society.

On display was also a modern single lens microscope from 1848, just like the one Darwin brought with him on the Beagle. The newest microscopes in the exhibition were compound microscopes from the end of the 19^th century. They had a double lens system, with an objective lens that projected the image from the sample up through the tube to the eye lens, which worked as a magnifying glass. The light was redirected from a window or an oil lamp via a small built-in mirror, to hit the sample from below and carry the image up the tube, to the pupil of the scientist’s eye.

And then Peter’s efforts to educate me became technical …

Though it was by means of light that the microscope functioned, light was also the factor setting the limit for how detailed the samples could be shown. Opposed to what many people think, the basic principle in microscopy is not magnification, but  resolution. In the 1860s and 1870s, the German physician Ernst Abbe (co-owner of the Carl Zeiss AG, the famous microscope producer) discovered that the smallest distance you can have between two things before the images of them merge — and thereby determining how detailed a picture you can see in a microscope — is limited by three factors:  1) the angle of the light entering the microscope, 2) the substance through which the light has to pass, and 3) the wavelength of the light.

Of these three limiting factors the last is now being contested by using electrons with a wavelength 100.000 times smaller than visible light. But, as Peter puts it, that’s using tricks.

The covers of most major scientific journals are plastered with beautiful, realistic pictures taken with the latest advances in microscope technology. This month’s Nature Medicine is no exception.

Few of these images, however, have the qualities of David Goodsell’s works of art. Goodsell, who is based at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, creates hyperrealist paintings that render the molecular world not as an abstract, diagrammatical space as we know it from biochemistry textbooks, but as a teeming, chaotic, dense and beautiful mess. They are simple, yet they portray the complexity and distinct organization of subcellular life in a way that no ‘real image’ can.

For example, Goodsell’s pseudocolor depiction of HIV — shown here in cross-section and incorporating all current information from structural biology and electron microscopy — gives a much-maligned pathogen a unique artistic quality.

Reminiscent of those of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, William Morris, and the Austrian symbolist Gustav Klimt, the hybrid ornamental-organic style of this and Goodsell’s other paintings give the molecular world a retro feel, bringing the cell and its contents closer to us and our lives. The challenge of putting biomedicine on display in museums and engaging the public at large is to make connections between the abstract visualizations of the molecular world and the lived existence of the postgenomic individual. It’s one of Goodsell’s great contributions that he offers a way to bridge this gulf.

Read more here (Nature Medicine, vol. 16, September, p. 943, 2010)

Is a mass produced plastic chair just as good as an old, handmade wooden one? Yesterday Susan Lambert, Head of the Museum of Design in Plastics in Bournemouth, and professor of art history Marcia Pointon visited us to look through our collection of artifacts made of plastic. They are planning a new research project focusing on our relationship with plastics in a hospital context, and would like to have Medical Museion as one of their research partners.

Ion showed us plastic dentures from the 1860s, a very realistic plastic arm with painted finger nails, and colourful plastic leg pads for children. Even though museums in general look down on plastics as an inauthentic material, we actually found a lot of objects in the collections, which partly or totally consist of some sort of plastic. The two plastic-lovers enjoyed the tour, even though Susan was a bit frustrated because of not being able to touch the displayed objects. The wonderful thing about plastics is that it can look exactly like any other material. But as Susan put it;”Once you touch, you know”.

Plastics are discount: Plastic is also an interesting material because it is highly used, but not very highly thought of. Unconsciously a lot of people today think of plastics as a discount material, as the fast, cheap unnatural solution. The wide range of functions that makes plastics so usable is the same feature that alienates it from us. One can make anything out of plastic, which means that plastic in itself is invisible and without identity. Plastic is, what it is made into. Alone it is formless, it is nothing. It is hard to develop a relationship to an thing made out of plastics, when one knows that there are a million plastic objects out there exactly like it.

Plastics are clean:  already from the mid 19th century the first synthetic materials began to appear and in the beginning of the 20^th century, Bakelite (phenol formaldehyde), which was used for electric apparatus like telephones and plugs, was invented. It was not until the 1960s that plastics became the most common material to use in almost all areas of human life. Susan and Marcia are focusing on plastics in a hospital context, because in hospitals one will find both plastic object of everyday use and highly specialized hospital objects in the same material. At the same time the many single use objects exemplifies the good aspects of plastic products, like good hygiene, and environmentally bad aspects like waste problems.

Medical museums are often described as temples of horror. Invoking strong feelings of anxiety, fear and disgust, they remind their visitors of the frailty of life, disease and pain, bodily deformations, decay and death.

To make sense of such emotional responses we would need a better understanding of the aesthetics of anxiety, fear and disgust. Katrin Baumgarten at the Royal College of Art in London is one of the pioneers in this field. She is currently investigatng ‘revolting objects’ which exert

a certain ‘macabre attraction’ over the subject, leading to a peculiar absorption in the object and lending a magnetism to this aversion.

Like this electric switch which blurps out some yucky goo when you press it:

Baumgarten claims that the ‘power of disgust’ affects us in every aspect of our lives:

Disgust shocks, entertains and sears itself into memory.

By introducing the aesthetics of disgust as a tool for design, Baumgarten suggests,

one can intensify the user and object relationship through creating paradoxical emotions, going beyond practicality and functionality.

Sounds like a interesting topic for a medical museology phd project.

See also this news item in Wired.

As you may know, Medical Museion takes part in a multidisciplinary Center for Healthy Aging here at the University of Copenhagen. Currently, two of our junior researchers, postdoc Lucy Lyons and phd student Morten Bülow, are doing their research projects within the scope of the Center, and we are about to recruit yet another phd student.

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.

Instead of saying that we investigate an object, we often use the verb ‘inspect’. According to my dictionary, the ‘in-’ prefix is an intensifier and the ‘-spect’ suffix is derived from the Latin verb specere, meaning ‘to look at’, ‘to see’.

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”.

Being invited to join a drawing workshop usually elicits one of two reactions. Either enthusiasm because the person likes to draw or they think the idea sounds interesting or different. The other response is to dismiss the idea completely.

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?

Here’s another new example of a apparently fruitful collaboration between art and biomedicine – an opera called The Lion’s Face exploring Altzheimer’s disease and dementia. This time even with a public engagement with science twist. As Felicity Callard – who were involved in the production of the opera, and who just advertised it on the Neuroscience and Society mailing list – describes:

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!

Here’s the introduction to a talk titled ‘Cultures of Meaning and Cultures of Presence: The use of material objects in the history of science, medicine and technology’ that I gave at the Museo da Ciencia da Universidade Lisboa two weeks ago (see flyer here and resumé in Portuguese here); the images are from the web and for general illustration only:

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.
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(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).