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

Interesting initiative — I am thinking of the launch of the Archives, Collections and Curatorship section of the Journal of Design History, which could be useful for those of us who work with the history of medical technological artefacts.

The journal section wants authors to evaluate the relevance of an archive or collection as a resource for design historical research — for example, by taking more critical perspectives or reflecting on the practice of collecting, archiving and doing research in archives or collections. They include all kinds of archives and collections held by museums, libraries, businesses, educational institutions, etc. (digital or physical), and they expect all sorts of authors: historians, archivists, museum professionals, curators, designers, students, etc.

This is interesting to us because it could be an opportunity to sum up the experience we had a couple years ago, when our neighbour, the Danish Museum for Art & Design, created a big exhibition about Danish design history. They did not only display the usual suspects (B&O television sets, etc), but also chose to show some 60 medical artefacts from our collections and put them in a design history perspective. We had never thought of that before — what an eye opener it was to co-operate with their curators!

Format for articles is: overview/summary of the archive, collection or exhibition; evaluation of its relevance, usefulness, strengths and weaknesses; 2500-5000 words; up to eight images; and access information. See instructions for authors here (http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org); submit via http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org. Queries to the AC&C editor, Nicolas P. Maffei n.maffei@nuca.ac.uk.

When New York-based artist Joan Linder passed by Medical Museion a late afternoon a few weeks ago, we took a tour around the collections. We came into the X ray collection room right after 5 PM, at the rare moment when a lonely sunray found its way between the adjacent buildings at the exactly right angle and hit one of the displayed delicate x-ray vacuum tubes by the window.

The effect was electric — I have never seen these vacuum tubes like this before. It was like a visible radiation coming from the outside commenting on the invisible radiation from within the tube. Joan grabbed her camera and shot an image before the sunray disappeared again:

(photo: Joan Linder)

In addition to Split and Splice, we have recently opened another and smaller exhibition in the reception hall — Eye Catchers and Swagger Images: Research in Poster Format (Danish: Blikfang og blærebilleder: forskning i posterformat) — with a selection of our collection of scientific posters, from the mid-1980s to the present.

The idea behind the exhibition goes back to August 2007, when we had a specialist workshop on Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context here at Medical Museion, followed by a conference on Biomedicine and Art.

One of the speakers at the Biomedicine and Art conference was James Elkins (the Art Institute of Chicago), who spoke about the new impulses for art theory and visual studies presented by science, technology and medicine. Rikke Vindberg, who had finished her Masters degree in history and who had quite a lot of experience of exhibition making, attended Elkins’s talk and was intrigued.

Afterwards, we discussed different possibilities for applying Elkins’s ideas (especially in Visual Practices Across the University, 2007) and eventually decided to take a closer look at scientific posters, because it is an interesting hybrid form of expression between science and art.

In October 2007 we attended a medical scientific congresses in Copenhagen to get a first-hand look at a big and active scientific poster session (with many hundreds of posters) and to discuss the content and features of the posters with the scientists that had produced them.

We also wanted to acquire posters for our growing collections of contemporary biomedicine. Rikke contacted research groups at the Faculty of Health Sciences and the National Hospital (Rigshospitalet), and within a few months, she had acquired some 30 posters from different biomedical and clinical research areas, representing a variety of textual and visual expressions; the oldest from the mid-1980s

Rikke summarized her acquisition project in a 25 page curatorial report (in Danish only, unfortunately) before she left to have her first baby. But in March, when discussing how to refurbish our reception room here at the museum, the idea came up to display the poster collection. Fortunately (for the museum that is), Rikke had not yet found a new job and could therefore take on the task at once.

The result is a small, unique and fascinating exhibition. The main idea is simple. In contrast to most sci- and bio-art shows, Eye Catchers and Swagger Images highlights the aesthetic practices within science itself. The guiding idea is that all medical scientific activity, in the laboratory and elsewhere, is permeated by aesthetic practices — there is no medical science action, site or space that is not, somehow, infused with aesthetic considerations, most probably unconscious.

Scientific posters are different, however. Poster production is a lab practice which most scientists are acutely aesthetically aware about. When interviewing medical scientists in connection with the acquisitions, Rikke inquired into their aesthetic views and their choice of graphic and iconic expressions in the posters. Several of these are quoted in the exhibition.

Here’s Rikke Vindberg (right) and museum assistant Jeppe Hørring a couple of days before the show opened in late May:

Eye Catchers and Swagger Images will be open at least until early next year.

Last Thursday, we opened our new temporary exhibition Split and Splice: Fragments From the Age of Biomedicine (Danish: Del and Hel: Brudstykker fra biomedicinens tid) here at Medical Museion. In the next couple of days, we will hopefully be able to upload some images from the opening (depends on when Benny has sorted out the hundreds of pictures he took).

Until then — why did we make this particular exhibition? The decision actually goes back five years in time, to the spring of 2004, when we were beginning to restructure the old medical-historical museum here in Copenhagen — a task we were thinking of in three ways:

First, we wanted to integrate the practice of a museum (cultural heritage and exhibition making) with the logic of the university (which is research and teaching), in order to emphasise that a university museum like ours is a site of museological experimentation, a place where we do research in new theories and methods for museum science communication.

Second, we wanted to understand what is going on in medicine today — the recent merger between basic biological science, medicine and information technology. And third, we wanted to transcend the usual narrative and didactic exhibition practice which was (and still is) so common in museums of science, technology and medicine. We wanted to highlight the stunning visual and material culture of medicine. We wanted to focus on the immediacy and presence of the clinic and the laboratory (the phenomenology of biomedicine if you want) rather than just explaining and contextualising the results of biomedical science — something that other media can do much better. We simply believed that a more conscious aesthetic approach opens up for a stronger emotional engagement with the world of science.

We were so fortunate that a private research foundation (the Novo Nordisk Foundation) found these ideas interesting and realistic. So for the last four years, we have run a combined research, collecting and exhibition project — called ‘Biomedicine on Display’ — to explore aspects of the visual and material culture of contemporary biomedicine.

The research output of these four project years can be read in a growing series of articles in international scholarly journals (and hopefully, an anthology in 2010). The result of the collecting effort is a growing number of exciting, peculiar and evocative artefacts in our storage facilities here in the museum. And the public outreach, finally, has resulted in a number of exhibitions over the last three years — first, Oldetopia and 100 Light Years then Design4Science, and now Split and Splice.

To strengthen the experimental and aesthetic approach to biomedical culture, we asked Canadian artist and designer Martha Fleming, who has a strong interest in science and science museums, to be lead curator. I had met Martha at a conference in Paris in 2001, we then met occasionally over the years after, and in 2007 we organised a workshop and a conference about biomedicine, art and aesthetics here in Copenhagen. It was therefore quite natural to ask Martha to supervise our group of post-doc fellows in the ‘Biomedicine on Display’-project (Susanne Bauer, Sniff Andersen Nexø, Jan Eric Olsén and Søren Bak-Jensen) and transform them into a team of exhibition curators.

This also meant that we took the full consequence of our current search for new forms for public communication of medical science in a museum context. Split and Splice is not a historical or a didactic medical science exhibition — it is a 250 m2 sci-art installation. In other words, there are very few explanations and attributions of meaning in textual form, instead there is a strong focus on the material and visual presence of contemporary medical science.

Whether you will like it or not probably depends on what you expect from an exhibition in a medical museum. If you’re looking for explicit historical contextualizations and explanations for contemporary biomedicine, you would probably be disappointed. But if you are willing to let your mind and senses be stimulated by material surfaces, forms, colours, unexpected juxtapositions of artefacts, etc. you will hopefully like it.

As I said, we will get back with images from the opening and selected rooms and installations. We also intend to bring comments from visitors and others, and clippings from press reviews.

Joanna Ebenstein’s exhibition ”Morbid Anatomy Cabinet or Gallery as Wunderkammer” has just opened at the Barrister’s Gallery in New Orleans. Find out more about the show on her blog here. Excellent images!

Last night, I had a couple of beers with an American bioartist and some of his friends. I have always been somewhat sceptical about what is going on in so called genomic art, and after my first pint of Herslev Pale Ale, I suddenly found myself saying: ‘Genomic art is so much last year’.

My guest protested vigorously, probably because some of his own recent work can be designated ’genomic art’. How could I mean that? Before he had the chance to refer to the many great works that have been produced in the last 10 years, I continued my argument.

Genomic art grew up in the wake of the immense public interest in the human genome project in the 1990s and early 2000s. It was an oblique response to the importance attached to the genome among scientists, funding agencies, pharma companies, the media, and social critics. Genomic art was fuelled in a tension between the bioscience establishment and a critical political and intellectual movement.

Now, the heat of genomics is over. What is now discussed in the research world — in private/public laboratories and in the board rooms of funding agencies, Big Pharma, and biotech companies — is proteomics. Largely because the design of specific, targeted protein molecules and knowledge about their interactions in the cell is supposed to have great potentials for future drug production.

Genomic art will continue to be produced, of course, but it is no longer fuelled by the political tension of the 1990s. It now lives a life of its own, less driven by political and critical discussions. However, there is so far not much interesting protein art to speak of.

My bioartist friend didn’t agree. Maybe I was right with respect to the changes taking place in the research and industrial world, but he thought I attached too much significance to this change, because proteins are the product of the transcription and translation of DNA/RNA and therefore play a secondary role on life — and, as a consequence, for critical bioartists.

To which I responded that in spite of this ’secondary role’ of proteins, artists interested in materiality (which most bioartists are) should nevertheless pay more attention to them than to DNA/RNA, because the material substrate of the cell and body functions lies precisely in the interaction between proteins, not in the information that has coded for them.

Again disagreement: Nucleic acids are not just code, they are material too. Right you are, I said, but the material presence and direct material consequences of nucleic acids in the body is small compared to the material presence and consequences of proteins, so we can as well forget about it.

Unfortunately, our discussion ended there, because I had to go home. If I could have continued it, however, I would have said that I’m of course not suggesting that the future direction of bioart should be determined by shifting research focuses in the biosciences, or that the strong material presence of this or that molecular species should be a reason for an artist to pay attention to it. That is not how bioart, or any other art form, works.

But the fact that my bioartist friend and I got into such a heated discussion about genomic versus proteomic art is nevertheless interesting, I think.

(Dictated through my Dragon speech recognition software, therefore, alas, no links or images today)

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/

Just to let you know, on 12 May art historian Robert Zwijnenberg is giving a talk at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Berlin about “How to Depict Life. A Short History of the Imagination of Human Interiority”. Here is the exciting abstract:

From 14th-century pictorial efforts to the images produced by visualization technologies, such as fMRT, the depiction of human interiority has always also been a struggle to depict and understand life itself. But how to depict interiority in such a way that life itself becomes understandable? This question was as much a problem for the anatomist of early modern times as it is for the 21st-century molecular bioscientist.

The talk will take place at 7.30 pm in the Akademiegebäude am Gendarmenmarkt, Leibniz-Saal Markgrafenstraße 38, Berlin.

Next time you happen to be in New York, make sure you pay a visit to Observatory, a new collaborative presentation / screening / classroom / exhibition located at 543 Union Street in Brooklyn. The collaborators include Joanna Ebenstein (Morbid Anatomy), Michelle Enemark and Dylan Thuras (Curious Expeditions), Pam Grossman (Phantasmaphile), Herbert Pfostl, illustrator/animator G. F. Newland, and video and book artist James Walsh. Plans for Observatory include lectures screenings, exhibitions, book-release parties, classes, and symposia. For recent events, see here and here.

Continuing our series of visualizations of viruses (see earlier posts here and here) — these beautiful glass sculptures by Luke Jerram

just arrived in the mailbox. “Smallpox, HIV & Flu, which together form an installation called ‘Past, Present and Future’”.

One of the potentially most interesting workshop titles I’ve seen announced so far this year is ’Biodigital lives: making, consuming and archiving the lives of technoscience’.

The meeting — convened by Kate O’Riordan (Sussex) and Adrian Mackenzie (Lancaster) and hosted by the Centre for the Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen), the Centre for Material Digital Culture and the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex on 14 July — will “examine issues and questions about digital and biodigital life, lives and identities framed by biosciences, contemporary media and biopolitical cultures”:

From the lives of scientists to the technologisation of life, ‘Biodigital lives’ will analyse biotechnological and bioinformatic forms and practices of identifying, archiving and storying the living. It will discuss diverse forms of new/digital mediation and informatics as they pertain to the lives of people, plants, animals, microbes, viruses and ecosystems entangled in global media, biopolitical institutions and bioeconomies.

Topics might include:

• How digital/life history and genetic genealogies intersect
• Biomediation and biotechnological media in reading and writing lives
• Biodigital memory, narration and identity (e.g. memory and archive, genetics and life story, digital life practices)
• Genomic databases and biobanks as biographical resources
• Techniques of writing, reading, editing and publishing the lives of species and populations
• Life archives and life histories of humans and non-humans
• Synthetic biology and bioinformatic communities from the perspective of biological literacy, design and participation
• Genomes as digital/media artefacts - new media/biotech convergences and commercial genealogies
• Genetics and genomics as/in life narratives and popular culture
• Aesthetic encounters in biodigital life in sci-art, film, games, software, art etc
• Genealogies and critical potentials of bioart/digital media art intersections

The workshop will be arranged around short presentations and will favour discussion and broad participation. 300 words abstracts + short bios to Kate O’Riordan (k.oriordan@sussex.ac.uk) by 20 April 2009. Final confirmation and draft programme by 11 May.

Apropos Colin Rennie’s glass sculpture of ATP synthase: visual artist Luke Jerram and glassblower Brian Jones have created these two non-coloured glass sculptures of the smallpox virus.

The artwork is based on a number of scientific representations of the virus, and is made in consultation with virologist Andrew Davidson at the University of Bristol.

(top right image from here, below from here)

Luke Jerram’s artwork coincides with the 30th anniversary of the eradication of smallpox, which was once one of the most dreaded epidemic diseases but which is now an ‘extinct’ species (except for some live virus strains in ‘virological gardens’).

There is a more interesting aspect to these sculptures than mere memorialization, however. Luke, who defines himself as “a colour blind installation artist, who fuses his artistic sculptural practice with his scientific and perceptual studies”, says that they were

designed for contemplation and to consider how the artificial colouring of scientific imagery affects our understanding of phenomena.

Similarly: before doing these sculptures, Luke — who is right now artist in residence with FACT in Liverpool — made avian flu virus and HIV sculptures, also together with virologists. The HIV sculpture work, now in the Wellcome Collection, London, was his response, he says, to the constant bombardment with coloured images of viruses in the media:

Many of these images are designed to communicate fear. The artificial colouring of images also affects what we think a virus looks like. How many people believe a virus to be bright red and yellow? (quoted from here)

The question of pseudo-colouring in biomedicine — and also its use for science communicative purposes — is a vast and very interesting topic, which would be worth an independent research project (cf this PhD project). What is its epistemic value, if any? How does the choice of different colours affect their reception? How are colour conventions negotiated? What kind of ‘presence’ do pseudocoloured images have that ‘naturally’ coloured specimens don’t?

The Institute for Cultural Inquiry/Kulturlabor and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin are opening the exhibition ‘Hothouse Archives’ by visual artist and theorist Suzanne Anker tomorrow at 7pm. In one of the photo suites, “Laboratory Life”,

several layers of images are superimposed on top of one another in the form of a palimpsest. Images garnered from scientific laboratories form the technological base layer. An image of a transparent garden is then transferred as a top layer. The chance provokes questions concerning our enchantment with both nature and technology.

The show is open until 6 March 2008 in the library of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry on Christinenstrasse 18/19. More info here.

(thanks to Ingeborg for the tip)

One of the great attractions here at Medical Museion right now is Colin Rennie’s glass sculpture of ATP-synthase.

We have placed it in the basement area to the left of the main entrance — we didn’t dare put it on the ground floor because we were afraid the 18th century wooden floor construction would collapse under the 900 780 kilograms of assembled glass plates. It’s lit by a single spotlight which gives the small and dark room a crypt-like ambience, and increases the presence of the sculpture. An object of secular awe.

Below Colin is polishing one of the 30 glass plates measuring 1×1 meter. You can see how the structure of the sculpture is made out of nothing, i.e., holes in the glass plates made by a water jet stream cutter:

And below Colin and Jim Patton are putting the sculpture together, one plate on top of the other:

And finally, Colin presents the work to our student guides (docents):