Biomedicine on Display

I love playing Angry Birds when I’m tired, but I never thought I would play a game that helped curate a museum collection.

But now I know better after having read an interesting post on the Open Objects blog by Mia Ridge (Open University) about the session on ‘Entrepreneurship and Social Media”, which she chaired yesterday at the Museums Galleries Scotland conference.

Mia’s session was largely about crowdsourcing and her own approach was crowdsourcing through games. Mia has worked at the Science Museum in London, where she researched and developed ‘Museum Metadata Games’ to explore “how crowdsourcing games could get people to have fun while improving the content around ‘difficult’ museum objects”. As she points out, most collections websites are not that interesting to the general public, partly because of a ’semantic gap’ between everyday language and curators’ catalogue language. Her solution was a crowdsourcing interface that worked like a game (after all 250 million people worldwide play social games; some even play museum games, like Wellcome Collection’s High Tea and the National Library of Finland’s DigitalKoort which had 25,000 visitors complete over 2 million individual tasks in two months. Here’s Mia’s example of a curating game called ‘Dora’s lost data’:

Eventually, the final program for the annual Artefacts meeting (this year in Leiden), has just been sent out. Three of us here at Medical Museion (Louise Whiteley, Niels Vilstrup and myself) are going — here are Louise’s and my abstracts:

Louise Whiteley: Preserving the material culture of functional neuroimaging: Objects of process
Functional neuroimaging research aims to reveal the physical basis of the mind. Since the late 1980s, functional neuroimaging has been a prominent player in contemporary neuroscience, and its strong public profile and invocation in policy contexts also argue for the importance of preserving and engaging with its material culture. Yet brain scanners are not natural museum objects; huge, heavy, and expensive, their most salient sensory qualities derive from the operation of a giant magnet cooled by helium gas and encased in a shielded room. Here I argue that attending to the trajectory from experiment design to data presentation offers us an array of new objects to consider, and new possibilities for engagement with this potent technology. I discuss the collection of computer tasks designed to recreate phenomena such as love or religious experience in the scanner; of objects such as vats of earplugs, restraining cages, and stimulus delivery devices; and of brain scans considered as contingent endpoints of fluid, computational analysis. Finally, I consider how distributed curation of such ‘objects of process’ could bring into productive interaction the interests of neuroscientists, visitors, and a developing critical discourse about the social implications of neuroimaging that is already challenging boundaries of expertise.

Louise Whiteley is an Assistant Professor at Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen. She has a PhD in Neuroscience and MSc in Science Communication, co-directed the Wellcome Trust funded public engagement project Interior Traces, and recently completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Neuroethics. She is interested in using qualitative research to both study and shape public engagement with the social, ethical, and philosophical ‘implications’ of contemporary biomedical science.

Thomas Soderqvist: COLLECTION IMPOSSIBLE: Distributed curatorship and crowd-sourcing as alternatives to centralised collecting
Centralised collecting of the artefacts from contemporary science, technology and medical (STM) visual and material culture seems to have rather bleak prospects. The looming financial and social global crisis is not conducive to centralized efforts by big museums to save the contemporary STM heritage, not least because the modern state-subsidised museum institution is running out of funding (at least in the West). What can curators then do to uphold their professional obligation to rescue the contemporary STM heritage for future generations? In this paper I will discuss two alternative collecting strategies: distributed curatorship and crowd-sourcing. I suggest that the major aim of STM museum acquisition curators should rather be to raise the general awareness among scientists and the engineering and medical professions of the importance of preserving ‘their’ artefacts (heritagemindedness). Drawing on a historical analogy (biological standardisation in the 1950s), I also suggest that this aim might be achieved best by working out guidelines for the collection, preservation and curation of artefacts to be distributed to individual scientists, doctors and engineers in research institutions and private companies, and to interested members of the public. Presently, social media is probably the best vehicle for producing such guidelines and spreading them widely.

Thomas Soderqvist is professor in the history of medicine and Director of Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen. His research specialty is the history and historical methodology of 20th century life sciences and medicine (e.g., The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology, co-ed, 2007), and he has also written about the problems of collecting and displaying contemporary medical science and technology.

I thought of sending this abstract to the Artefacts meeting in the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, 25-27 September (this year’s theme is ‘Conceptualizing, Collecting and Presenting Recent Science and Technology’):

COLLECTION IMPOSSIBLE: Distributed curatorship as an alternative to centralised acquisitioning

Centralised collecting of the artefacts from contemporary science, technology and medical (STM) visual and material culture seems to have rather bleak prospects. The looming financial and social global crisis is not conducive to centralized efforts by big museums to save the contemporary STM heritage, not least because the modern state-subsidised museum institution is running out of funding (at least in the West). What can curators then do to uphold their professional obligation to rescue the contemporary STM heritage for future generations? In this paper I will discuss two alternative collecting strategies: distributed curatorship and crowd-sourcing. I suggest that the major aim of STM museum acquisition curators should rather be to raise the general awareness among scientists and the engineering and medical professions of the importance of preserving ‘their’ artefacts (heritagemindedness). Drawing on a historical analogy (biological standardisation in the 1950s), I also suggest that this aim might be achieved best by working out guidelines for the collection, preservation and curation of artefacts to be distributed to individual scientists, doctors and engineers in research institutions and private companies, and to interested members of the public. Presently, social media is probably the best vehicle for producing such guidelines and spreading them widely.

Any views? If you want to take issue with it, do it before 15 July, please? (Or in Leiden, of course).

How to display artefacts that cannot be touched or sometimes even seen, is an issue that has cropped up frequently in museums, particularly in medical museums wanting to exhibit molecular, chemical and genomic items.

Thinking about this was part of the inspiration for the Sensuous Object Workshop in September here at Medical Museion. So it was good timing that in the space of one day I received two emails. The first was about The Museum of Non-Visible Art and the second was a call to submit work for an exhibition at the Manifest Gallery called Go Ahead…Touch Me!

Both events are held in New York City:

The Museum of Non-Visible Art (MONA) comprises of artworks that are not visible but only conceptualized. The work is in the form of ideas that are described. It is through the description and experience of the imagination that the artworks are understood.

The Manifest gallery invites the opposite. Described as ‘An international exhibit exploring works that invite physical interaction’ the Go Ahead…Touch Me! exhibition seeks to display the physical, not just the conceptual.

This exhibition is on until September 9^th — I wonder if I could interest someone from the exhibition to come and demonstrate the event at the Sensuous Object Workshop a few weeks after this.

I am not convinced either of these are solutions, but they make one think and suggest that perhaps art can show museums the way.

A very special artefact from Medical Museion’s collections in on display in a new exhibition at the Copenhagen Post and Tele Museum, celebrating the centennial of the Danish Association for the Blind.

The insect compund eye looking thing is actually a Braille version of the writing ball patented by Rasmus Malling-Hansen in 1870.

Selling well in Europe (Remington was the favourite typewriting machine in the US), it received prizes at a number of international exhibitions, including the World Exhibitions in Vienna in 1873 and Paris in 1878.

The most famous owner of a Malling-Hansen writing ball was in fact Friedrich Nietzsche, who got one in 1882, but apparently didn’t use it much. (More about the writing ball on the Malling-Hansen Society website.)

Malling-Hansen’s Braille writing ball is part of a collection of more than 4,500 material artefacts (and a number of braille-typed books) associated with the history of blind therapy and training that was acquired by Medical Museion last year when the Danish Museum of Blind History, one of the largest of its kind, was closed down.

One of our conservators, Charlotte Vikkelsø Hansen, has cleaned the writing ball thoroughly before sending it over to our colleagues in the Post and Tele Museum:

The physical writing ball can be seen here from 8 June until 30 November.

(See also the earlier post about Jan Eric Olséns research project ‘Vision and Touch: A Material History of the World of Blindness’).

The upcoming one-day conference ‘Curating Science’ at Kingston University in London on 6 May — bringing together curators and communicators from museums, galleries and new sites of engagement to explore the role of science in the exhibition — looks sort of interesting

• Intersections in Art, Science and Society: Nicola Triscott, Director, The Arts Catalyst
• Turning the Museum Inside Out: exploring the challenges of interfacing scientific research with public engagement at the Darwin Centre: Louise Fitton, Senior Interpretation Developer, Natural History Museum
• Good Conversations: exhibits to encourage dialogue and reflection: Kat Nilsson, Contemporary Science Manager, Science Museum
• Curating ‘Lab Craft’ : digital adventures in contemporary craft: Max Fraser, Design Writer and Curator
• Art-object/science-object: a narrative of curating: Caterina Albano, Curator at Artakt and Fellow at CSM Innovation Centre
• Curating Earth: art of a changing world: Edith Devaney, Head of Summer Exhibition and Curator, Royal Academy

See more here: www.curatingscience.com; 10GBP tickets here: curatingscience.eventbrite.com

Actual and potential readers of this blog — that is, everyone with an interest in contemporary medical science and technology in museums — might be interested in this year’s meeting in the Artefacts series on the theme ‘Conceptualizing, Collecting and Presenting Recent Science and Technology’, to take place 25-27 September, 2011, in the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden.

The central questions for the meeting are:

• What intellectual and practical approaches should be developed to document and preserve the history of recent science and technology?:
• How can museums and academic communities develop an overview of the breadth and diversity of material culture associated with recent science and technology created at a variety of sites (universities, industry, government, and other venues) and scales of activity (local, national, and international)?
• How do we develop criteria of selection to capture salient themes and transformations?’
• What connections do we wish draw between artefacts as evidence and research questions of historians and other scholars?
• What are the practical challenges in collecting and storing the types of artefacts, images, electronic expressions, and other products distinctive of recent history?
• What forms of collaboration among museum and academic communities might help in addressing these challenges?
• And, not least, how does such an effort relate to exhibitions and public outreach?

The organisers invite papers discussing the above questions and other themes dealing with the material history of recent science and technology. Paper presentations are limited to 20 minutes. The conference language is English.

Send abstract proposals of <200 words to Museum Boerhaave’s Head of Collections, Hans Hooijmaijers, hanshooijmaijers@museumboerhaave.nl before 1 July 2011. Also include a short biography highlighting main research interests (no more than 50 words).

The meeting will start in the afternoon of Sunday 25 September with a pre-conference tour around Museum Boerhaave, followed by a plenary lecture and drinks. Monday 26 and Tuesday 27 September will be devoted to paper presentations.

And for those who don’t know it yet, Artefacts is an association of historians of science and technology, mostly based in museums and academic institutions, who share the goal of promoting the use of objects in serious historical studies. This is done at annual meetings, in a book series and through encouraging the efforts of historically-oriented museums of science and technology.

Martha Fleming, who was head curator on our award-winning exhibition Split & Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine (2009-2010) will speak at the Danish Royal Academy of Art on Friday 1 April. The title of her talk is ”Museum as Material, Exhibition as Scholarly Publication”.

What does it mean to consider an institution to be a kind of ‘material’? What sort of research is it possible for an artist to effect inside a science museum? What does research itself mean in different scholarly contexts, and how does the artist facilitate interdisciplinarity beyond the studio and the gallery? This seminar will be of interest to those who want to know about intellectual and logistical issues of working with non-art museums, those whose conceptual work engages with science practice and history and philosophy of science, and those interested in the work that has come out of the radical aesthetics of 1980s site specific projects. Martha Fleming has made large-scale site specific installations, museum collection interpretation projects, and now works at the Natural History Museum in London. She will be speaking about her work as an artist, as a museum professional and as an historian of science.

The lecture takes place in the Italian Auditorium, 1 Kongens Nytorv, Copenhagen,  at 1 pm.

Some background reading:

• www.marthafleming.net
• Studiolo: The Collaborative Projects of Martha Fleming and Lyne Lapointe (Artextes 1997)
• “Feminisms is Still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices”. Editor: Malin Hedlin Hayden and Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe (Cambridge Scholars 2010)

Two weeks ago I mentioned that the Museums Journal had published Ken Arnolds and my Dogme 95-style manifesto for creating science, technology and medicine exhibitions, first presented last September at a conference organised by Medical Museion in Copenhagen. We have now received the journal’s permission to publish the full version of the manifesto. Enjoy and/or criticize!

Just over 15 years ago, Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg spearheaded Dogme 95, a manifesto to purify the art of film-making.

The aim was to engage audiences more profoundly and make sure they weren’t distracted by over-production. The Dogme manifesto ruled out special effects, post-production changes and other tricks in order to focus on the story and the performances.

Since then, writers, theatre directors and other arts practitioners have all found inspiration in Dogme 95’s back-to-basics philosophy. Dogme has been criticised, as have some of the films made according to its rules, but as exhibition producers, this classic vow of chastity has inspired us as a way of guiding and sharpening the creative practice of making science, technology and medicine exhibitions.

These rules have been written and published with almost indecent speed. They are deliberately provocative prompts for further discussion. This manifesto is not a definitive set of working proposals, but a draft, which will no doubt be modified and sharpened through challenge and feedback.

And anyone who knows the institutions we are based at will be aware that the exhibitions we have presided over have often not followed one or more of these rules.

This manifesto is almost reference-free, but this does not mean we think the ideas are purely our own. There are vast bodies of literature on science communication, exhibition making, art history and museology; we have read some of this literature and been influenced by it. We also have learned much from the museums we have visited.

1. Exhibitions should be research-led, not a form of dissemination

Curators should use exhibitions to find things out (for themselves and for their visitors) and not just regurgitate what is already known. Good curators are inspired and imaginative researchers who find and then build on the investigations of experts and colleagues, juxtaposing varied understandings about their chosen topic. They add their own insights and gradually come up with new ideas and perspectives.

2. A scientist should always be involved in the exhibition, a technologist if it is about technology

Don’t shy away from drawing on real expertise in interpreting a topic or finding exhibits. But this is not to say that the aim of the exhibition is simply to give voice to the views of these experts. They are not, nor should they be encouraged to see themselves as, the curators, but it is vital that their perspectives are present in the final exhibition.

3. Be clear about exhibitions being “multi-authored”

Exhibitions emerge from curatorial collaborations between experts and designers. But a show’s funders, the institutional context and other stakeholders have a bearing on the final outcome; it should be possible for exhibition visitors to find out about these influences.

The project teams who make exhibitions deserve to be credited. Those responsible for the show not only need to take a bow, they also need to be held responsible for its contents and impact.

4. Use only original material

Exhibitions should engage audiences with original material rather than reproductions and props. If you cannot illustrate a topic with original artefacts, images and documents, ask yourself if an exhibition is the best way to make the point. Models, replicas and reproductions can be shown, but only if this is the point of showing them.

Reproductions of artworks should not be used, unless the work’s natural medium is “facsimile” – for example, digital photographs. The use of scientific and medical images raises complicated questions, such as what is the “original” format of a microscopic image of a cell?

Most scientific images today are minted as digital data, and their final appearance invariably owes much to enhancements and cropping. How this material should be displayed and labelled needs consideration. It is often better to leave it out all together.

5. Never show ready-made science

Focus on the processes of science: science in the making; the triumph of discovery; the frustration and blind alleys explored along the way. Also, look at the social and cultural processes of scientific ideas becoming accepted and embedded.

6. Jealously guard a place for mystery and wonder

Exhibitions provide opportunities to explore topics in ways that bring new light to sometimes forgotten or less-well understood aspects of medicine, science, technology and their histories. But this urge to demystify subjects should not be allowed to render exhibitions earnestly didactic.

Deliberately include some exhibits about which less, rather than more, is known – curious exhibits that just cannot completely be accounted for. Visitors should leave exhibitions wanting to find out more.

7. Reject most exhibition ideas

Exhibitions represent the meeting point between subjects and material culture, and can be approached from either end – themes or objects first, or a mixture of the two. But often, topics that seem promising will not be worth developing because there simply aren’t good enough objects with which to explore or support them.

Similarly, many areas of material culture end up just not being interesting enough to make a show about. Too often, exhibitions are made from empty ideas of stupid objects. It is worth searching for a topic and a set of objects that harmoniously amplify and mutually enrich each other.

8. Leave out as much as possible

Less is usually more in exhibitions. Visitors will remember and enjoy looking at 10 carefully chosen things more than a 100 that are reasonably well selected.

The most important aspect of an exhibition is its outer boundaries, which keep out the mass of distractions that lie beyond. In the digital era, a core value of a museum exhibition is that it makes its point through displaying a few selected original objects.

9. Embrace the showbusiness of exhibitions

Audiences come to exhibitions in their leisure time and deserve to be lifted out of themselves. They will respond to the drama of the best exhibits, displays, design, writing and lighting.

Make sure that all of this is done well and given the greatest polish. This will enhance the presence of the objects and the impact of the ideas. Don’t be ashamed to admit that making exhibitions is, in part, a matter of putting on a show.

10. Celebrate the ephemeral quality of exhibitions

Catalogues, web-presence and filmed versions of exhibitions can lengthen the shadows cast by exhibitions, but they will never come close to keeping alive the actual experience of visiting a show.

This is an important part of the magic of exhibitions. Like good pieces of theatre, they gain much of their energy by being around for a limited time and then disappearing. The fact that they are time-limited gives their makers a degree of freedom to experiment and be daring. Grasp it!

11. Make exhibitions true to the geography of their venues

The principle is that knowledge is “situated” – the context in which we contemplate and acquire it can seem as important as the ideas or facts themselves. Exhibition makers need to think hard about how to work with the “place” of an exhibition.

Consider what is lost in touring an exhibition where the subject becomes detached from the local context. The country, the city, the venue, the room, and the set and design of an exhibition, even the showcases and the orientation of individual objects – all have a bearing on the meanings that audiences derive from them.

12. Avoid artificial lighting

Use natural light where possible. Start with the light available and build up from it. If possible, reveal the windows and keep the doors open. Let the natural layout of the building be apparent, make it clear where you have introduced false walls. This will enable visitors to keep a sense of where they are.

And don’t fall into the trap of imagining that the background for an exhibition has either to be a neutral black box or a pristine white cube. Ideally, a show should look and feel very different on a midsummer morning to a winter evening.

13. Always involve more than one sense

It is impossible for visitors to turn off their non-visual senses in an exhibition – they will hear, touch and smell things no matter what. So make sure that some of the tactile, audio, or olfactory experiences of an exhibition are curated. Exhibitions work by teasing their visitors into thinking that they could get close enough to what they see to touch it, even while making sure they don’t.

But curators should think about how to introduce at least a few objects that visitors can touch. Never use artificial sounds or odours, but try hard to find ways to enhance the audio and olfactory qualities of the original objects, getting visitors to use their ears and noses.

14. Make exhibitions for inquisitive adults

If you aim at educationally under-achieving primary school children, it will be impossible to engage anyone else (and you are unlikely to engage even your target audience). Many children and teenagers are keenly attracted to adult culture, but very few adults see the attraction of young material.

Never make exhibitions for educational purposes – other media and methods are more effective. It’s also worth bearing in mind that exhibitions are, by their nature, a “childish” medium, bringing out playfulness in all of us. This should be encouraged, but to focus deliberately on young audiences reaps diminishing returns.

15. Remember that visitors ultimately make their own exhibitions

Some visitors might not be interested in reading what the curators write, while others might not look at many objects. Some will be interested in aspects of a topic that the curators might not have come across.

Because of this, when an exhibition opens, it is only ever the second or third draft of an idea that will, through revision, reach maybe its eighth or ninth incarnation by the time it closes.

Exhibitions should be alive, and change is a vital part of life. Even in the most “stable” shows, lights will need adjusting and labels redrafting. An exhibit might even have to be removed or replaced. More radically, some exhibitions should be deliberately half-finished, or set up so that updates can be added halfway through.

16. Make exhibitions the jumping off place for further engagement

Good exhibitions are the point of departure for a longer relationship. The value of exhibitions should only partly be judged by analysing how many people come, how long they spent in a show and what they think of it. On this basis alone, most exhibitions are foolishly expensive ventures, particularly in these cash-strapped times.

Don’t forget that, just occasionally, exhibitions can really change visitors’ lives and this is worth a lot. Effective exhibitions can also bring in new objects to museums, have an impact on recruitment, add to shop sales, improve the organisation’s reputation, and provide a context for corporate celebrations. There is a virtual avalanche of cultural capital that can flow from them: this should be valued from the start.

17. Don’t be afraid to bend, break or reinvent the rules

We got this cuddly edition of the malaria parasite from Marco Herbst who was here visiting the museum last week, to get inspiration for his upcoming Malaria Museum in Berlin.

Marco’s approach to making a museum was refreshingly nontraditional. Far from being webbed up in museological concepts and theories, he builds on a growing fascination with his subject along with the human instinct to collect interesting things.

The former owner of a night club in Dublin and a bar in Berlin, Marco has some of the passion and personality of the renaissance collector with his cabinet of curiosities. I’m looking forward to popping by his museum for my daily gin and tonic – a drink originally invented to prevent malaria, as the tonic water contains the alkaloid quinine.

But of course background knowledge, and above all interesting objects, are essential. So Marco is at the moment traveling the world from Japan to Copenhagen, to meet malaria experts and museum people and ‘suck’ their knowledge.

This session at the conference in September circled around the role of art in the museum, and how museums and artists can and should work together.

The first speaker, Karen Ingham, emphasized that the concept of art in museums essentially refers to interdisciplinary happenings and should always be a product of dialogue. She talked about how museum- and other spaces speak to us, and how the space can function as a creative catalyst and a link between museums and artists. Read Karen’s full abstract here.

Silvia Casini explained how her work with the aesthetics of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) led her to undergo several scannings herself and how she in the end became an artist, video-maker, and curator in order to represent these very personal and yet elusive images. Read Silvia’s full abstract here.

The discussion afterwards focused on how art is incorporated into the museum. The question was raised whether, in the end, museum visitors will be able to tell a scientific object from a piece of art, and whether there has to be a difference. Comments were heard from Alex Tyrell, Lucy Lyons, Suzanne Anker, Thomas Söderqvist, John Durant and Victoria Höög.

See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

The challenge of how to display fetal bodies was attacked from very different angles at the September conference.

Morten Skydsgaard introduced us to the exhibition The incomplete child, in which the idea was to show the deviant body in its own right. He emphasized the importance, especially in controversial displays, of giving the visitors time and space for reflection afterwards. Read Morten’s full abstract here.

The next speaker, Sniff Andersen Nexø, talked about the meeting between research and exhibition making, as a desirable but not unproblematic way of curating an exhibition. She pointed out that it’s a great challenge to translate the theoretically informed academic research process into a display of physical objects and a minimum of words. Read Sniff’s full abstract here.

Suzanne Anker, the last speaker of the session, focused on the fetal body as a politically charged icon. We exercise power in the ways we choose to represent images of the fetus. The same object — a fetus — presented in different contexts and through different images sends very different messages. From thankfulness for diminished childbirth related death rates and cheers for scientific progress to calls for anti-abortion legislation and critiques of the psychological impact of prenatal diagnostics for handicapped people. Read Suzanne’s full abstract here.

In the discussion afterwards, the question of whether or not museums have any responsibility for the way their fetal specimens are represented elsewhere, was raised. There were comments from Thomas Schnalke, Karen Ingham, Thomas Söderqvist, Kim Sawchuk, Nurin Veis, James Edmonson, Wendy Atkinson and Nina Czegledy.

See a list of the abstracts here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

Another theme at the “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums”-conference was ‘investigating museum visitors’.

Can visitors’ experiences help us make our museums better? Should an exhibition be guided by what the curator is passionate about or by what she thinks the visitor might find interesting? Or should we simply ask visitors to co-curate exhibitions? This was some of the questions that Stella Mason and Alex Tyrrell put forth in their talks.

The short talks (read Stella’s abstract here and Alex’ here) were followed by a discussion about the different kinds of visitors and how there might be more than one voice (i.e. visitor or curator) present in an exhibition. It was pointed out that visitors react to the passion as much as to the knowledge behind an exhibition. But then again what do visitors think of exhibitions curated by people ‘like themselves’. It’s a nice idea, but does it make a nice exhibition?

The discussion (at the end of the video clip) included comments from Danny Birchall, Thomas Söderqvist, Nurin Veis, Yin Chung Au, John Durant, Wendy Atkinson, Adam Bencard and Ken Arnold.

See a list of all abstracts and video clips from the conference here. Read more about the EAMHMS video clip project here.

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.

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”.