Biomedicine on Display

After more than half a year of budget negotations, Medical Museion is now officially part of the EC 7th FWP programme-financed project StudioLab.

Inspired by the merging of the artists studio with the research lab to create a hybrid creative space, STUDIOLAB proposes the creation of a new European platform for creative interactions between art and science. STUDIOLAB brings together major players in scientific research with centres of excellence in the arts and experimental design and leverages the existence of a new network of hybrid spaces to pilot a series of projects at the interface between art and science.

Science Gallery in Dublin, Le Laboratoire in Paris, Ars Electronica in Linz, Royal College of Art in London, and MediaLab Prado in Madrid are the five major partners — and the rest of us, including Medical Museion, are six associated partners (which means we get less money — but also have less responsibility).

StudioLab will involve activities along three key dimensions: incubation of art-science projects, education and public engagement. Medical Museion’s part of the contract is to create a public engagement-oriented installation and event about synthetic biology (i.e., the next hot topic in the life sciences).

So now we are on the outlook for good ideas! And I thought we might get some inspiration from the seminar titled ‘Organizing collaborations: Synthetic biology, social science, art and design’ that Jane Calvert from INNOGEN, Edinburgh, is giving here in Copenhagen on Thursday:

Something that makes the emerging field of synthetic biology particularly interesting is that diverse groups including social scientists, ethicists, lawyers, policy makers, artists, designers and publics are becoming involved in the field from the outset. In this presentation, Jane Calvert explores the opportunities and challenges provided by these new forms of collaboration, drawing both on her own experiences as a social scientist studying synthetic biology, and on the Synthetic Aesthetics project, which brings synthetic biologists together with artists and designers.

This is very much along the lines we’ve been thinking in the StudioLab context.

The seminar takes place Thursday 22 September, 3-5 pm, in room K4.41, Kilevej 14A, Copenhagen Business School. Be sure to register for the seminar by email to cf.ioa@cbs.dk before 19 September.

According to the Urban Dictionary, jizz is a slang word for the male semen. But bird-watchers sometimes use it in another meaning, namely to describe the overall ‘at-a-glance’ appearance of a bird that makes it possible to identify it in the field in a split-second. (There’s probably no connection between the two meanings of the word jizz :-).

For birders, jizz is a combination of features like the bird’s voice, its posture, the way it flies or moves, the habitat where it’s found, etc. The ‘alchemy’ of jizz is that experienced bird-watchers can usually make fairly reliable rapid identifications of birds that way. It’s not an analytical description of all its fetures, but rather a kind of tacit knowledge identification, often down to species level.

It struck me that museum exhibitions too can be described and evaluated in terms of jizz. You don’t really need to read the wall-texts or the labels, or watch the displayed objects closely, in order to get an overall understanding of what’s going on. You can walk through the rooms rapidly in a few minutes, throw a few glances at a dome of the objects that catch your immediate attention, read the headlines of a couple of wall posters, and watch the other visitors — their gestures, the way they speak and behave.

Of course, this ‘at-a-glance’ evaluation of an exhibition is not a substitute for the close reading of the texts and the careful inspection of the objects and images on display. But it nevertheless reminds me about the fact that even the most painstakingly curated and research-based exhibition — with meticulously proof-read texts and exquisitely chosen and cleaned artefacts — is a missed opportunity if it doesn’t have that overall quality which makes easily definable and understandable as a whole.

So even though the details are good, the overall impression may be one of confusion. The term jizz is a reminder of the importance for curators to secure the impression of the whole. In a glance, what is the exhibition actually about? You shall not have to read anything in the catalogue or more than a few wall-texts or seen moe than a couple of artefacts to understand it.

It’s notoriously difficult to display invisibles in medical exhibitions. And what’s more invisible than pain? When you break a leg, the lesion is visible, but the pain is not. A mostly subjective sensation, chronic pain has few, if any, visible physical correlates. How do you display headache?

I came to think about this when I heard about the Birkbeck Pain Project, which invites contributions to a workshop organised by Daniel S. Goldberg, titled “The History of Pain Without Lesion in the Mid-to-Late 19th Century West”. The workshop will deal with the social, cultural, and medical status of what we might now refer to as chronic pain sufferers, including labels and complaints, like neuralgia, neurasthenia, hysteria, railway spine, spinal irritation, spinal concussion, headache, dysmenorrhea, and pain without lesion.

Read more here. If you consider attending, send up to 450 words submissions + cv to painproject@bbk.ac.uk, not later than 30 November, or contact the organiser directly, goldbergd@ecu.edu.

We have just submitted an application for a major new gallery based on our anatomical and pathological specimen collections — and the in-house discussions are already becoming vigorous.

How to find conceptually interesting ways to display cancer tumours, conjoined twins, and twisted torsos? What’s the balance between spectacular engagement and ethical concerns? How to make the historical collections of the macroanatomical past work together with the microanatomical and molecular collections of present biobanks?

During the next couple of years we will embark on a more detailed planning process — we will engage medical experts, medical historians/sociologists, museum colleagues and the general public in a discussion about the best ways to build such a gallery and how to combine it with other activities in the museum.

One of the interesting perspectives is to what extent such a gallery might still play an educational role. Browsing the literature for inspiration, I fell upon an article in the journal Anatomical Sciences Education suggesting that despite the current emphasis on digital learning, some medical schools and many of their students still find collections of anatomical and pathological specimens useful for educational purposes.

As the authors remind us, anatomy and pathology collections (‘medical museums’) were central to medical education in the 19th and throughout most of the 20th century. But the role of such collections have diminished dramatically in recent years, mainly, they suggest, because of the use of information technology and web-based learning.

Accordingly, many medical schools have abandoned their museums and/or given away the collections. A few schools still think their museum collections are important, however, and some have even updated them and equipped them with new technological gadgets to support the interaction with the objects.

The authors point to the Anatomical Museum of Leiden University Medical Center and the Medical Museum of Kawasaki Medical School in Kurashiki as two prime examples of such upgraded museums.

The main use of the Leiden museum, says its website, is for medical and biomedical instruction, but high school biology teachers and pupils can visit it too. The showcases above contain over 800 medical specimens and models and were set up in 2007.

The Kawasaki museum (below) is huge, with about 2700 specimens on display on three floors in a specially designated building that focuses on contemporary medicine:

I guess most Western medical gallery curators would consider such displays terribly out of fashion. But although both these museums are a far cry away from what we here at Medical Museion will probably think of when we design the new gallery, we shouldn’t forget that such displays may work well for educational purposes. Actually, surveys at the Leiden museum suggest that virtually all students found audio-guided museum tours in the collection ”useful for learning” and that a majority (87%) of the students found guided tours in them “to be clinically relevant”. (On the other hand, 69% felt that “museum visits should be optional rather than compulsory within the medical training curriculum”; quotes from the abstract).

I’m definitely not a fan of visitor survey ‘research’, nor do I think the main function of a medical museum today is educational — but it’s nevertheless a perspective worth keeping in mind when we start discussing the design of the new gallery in more detail.

I was in London last week to attend a workshop organised by Robert Bud and the medical curatorial staff at London’s Science Museum.

They had invited some 20 people from a variety of academic backgrounds to discuss the future redevelopment of their medical galleries.

The day before the workshop we prepared ourselves by a guided tour to the present medical galleries:

• Science and Art of Medicine from 1981, which the museum describes as “an object rich treasure trove that relates the history of Western Medicine according to a broadly chronological (‘Plato to Nato’), encyclopaedic approach”; a later addition to ‘Science and Art of Medicine’ called ‘Living Medical Traditions’, which examines four contemporary non-western medical traditions.
• Glimpses of Medical History from the late 1970s, which “examines the changing patient-practitioner encounter through a series of dioramas” and also features the ‘Mind your Head’ psychology exhibit.
• The Health Matters gallery from the 1990s, which focuses upon “the unique practices of modern medicine – the technologies of clinical medicine; the application of epidemiology and population statistics to public health; and the proliferation of basic and applied medical research”
• The recent Who Am I? exhibit in the Wellcome Wing building, which explores “how scientists are trying to understand human identity, however medical and human health improvements via genetics, genomics and neuroscience feature prominently” (quotes from Science Museum material distributed before the meeting).

All these galleries are very impressive, of course, like everything the Science Museum does. They are extremely object-rich — containing almost every significant medical scientific and technological artefact from ancioent times to the late 20th century, mostly things collected when Britain was a leading imperial scientific and technological power — and very skilfully curated. But they are also (sorry to have to say this!) pretty boringly designed. British science, technology and medical museums have not been famous for their approach to exhibition design, and although not as badly designed as most of their American counterparts, the Science Museum galleries clearly need an overhaul in this respect.

In my view, it’s difficult to think about the content of museum galleries isolated from their design. Marshall McLuhan‘s famous slogan ‘The medium is the message’ may be a gross exaggeration, but it’s at its truest when applied to museum exhibitions.

In this meeting, however, design questions were almost absent. The academic group around the table included medical historians, general historians, scientists, and a few science communication people, but few exhibition curators (unless yours truly could be classified as one :-).

The planning group’s initial ideas about the future medical galleries focused on content too, with a strong bias towards the history of medicine. In their view, the future galleries will be based on “a broad definition of medicine”, be “global in scope”, and “feature a better balance of stories relating to mental and physical health”, and they “will feature a plurality of voices and perspectives” and continue to utilise “a chronological classification but introduce more thematic approaches”. Furthermore they will use the history of medicine website to ”engage audiences with our collections in an encyclopaedic way” and finally what they call “Public history [i.e., participation in a broad sense] will play and integral part within the gallery development process” (quoted from Science Museum material distributed before the meeting).

Based on this general frame for the future galleries, the planning goup asked us to discuss a number of questions, like:

To what extent should we continue with a chronological structure? What are the strengths or weaknesses of such an approach?

To what extent might we adopt a thematic structure? Incorporating broad taxonomies such as Trust, Belief, Evidence and Practice, Controversies and Orthodoxies, Infectious disease, Chronic illness, War and Accidents?

Should future galleries be broadly shaped around our encyclopaedic collections or should they be more directed by people and stories?

Should extensive collecting – particularly of contemporary material – play a significant role in guiding the development of the new galleries?

How ‘global’ can we really aspire to be? What should the place of non-western medical/healing traditions be within the future galleries?

Should we characterise biomedicine as one tradition alongside others?

What weighting should be given to the presentation in the Science Museum of ‘the history’, ‘the contemporary’ and ‘the future’ of health and medicine?

What extent of coverage should we give to more contemporary medical practices (ie post-War to now) and how should it be represented?

Should concepts of ‘health’ sit at the foreground or be more in the background of the medicine galleries?

Where do we want to draw the boundaries between ‘health’ and ’medicine’?

To what extent should future displays consciously foreground the history of its collections – specifically the act and intention of collecting and representing medicine?

All in all, great questions, which all medical museums ought to answer before they embark on new galleries.

Unfortunately, I cannot relate the discussions in any objective way. But I posted a stream of Twitter posts (see here, scroll down to 30 June), which reflect my immediate impressions as the round-table developed in the course of the day. I will return to these impressions in later posts.

Thanks Robert et al. for a very inspirational meeting!

Just saw this on Danny’s blog. Artist meta-comment on entire museum: 

The former London home of Sigmund and Anna Freud, now the Freud Museum, is enveloped in a cats cradle of rope made of dolls’ hair. Standing as it does on a prosperous suburban street of imposing redbrick villas, the bound house looks like a scene from a dream itself, a dream of home denied. Such dreams are typically untangled on a therapeutic descendant of the very couch that sits inside the museum; the fairytale Rapunzel tress-ropes also suggest the kind of psychological decoding of myth and culture that Freud indulged in.

It’s interesting how an entire exhibition can transform and be experienced in a whole new way through one persons art-work derived from subjective associations. She hasn’t changed anything in the exhibition, just put the doll-hair-ropes around like a giant meta-comment.

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’).

These are some of the reasons to love museums found on twitter yesterday:

• Museums help you ask new questions. You get a little knowledge and crave more.
• Because they make me feel excited, like a child. They open up the world and expose the tiny little bubble we all live in.
• Museums are for EVERYONE. They are somewhere to shed our skin and set free the inquisitive child in each of us.
• They promote creativity, freedom of choice, questioning, reason, understanding and identity!
• Because they’re a conversation between what has happened, what could happen, and what will happen.
• Who says I love museums? Sometimes they get me so frustrated I guess only love would be reason for staying.
• Museums attract passionate, clever and interesting folks with many a story to tell.
• Because I love looking at beautiful / interesting / entertaining things that exist in the real world not just cyberspace.



• Museums help people learn how to learn, are not just about teaching facts but experiencing life, feelings and emotions.
• Sometimes you go so often, you get to know things so well they become part of your life.
• A killer combo of wonderment and escapism.
• I love museums because they represent a door to the past and a gateway to the future.
• They’re time machines anyone can use- just walk in and they start.
• Because real objects connect us to the past in ways that narrative alone (including mine) can never match.
• I love ‘em for serving as windows to worlds I won’t otherwise get to explore.
• Because you can learn without being preached at.

Read all of the twitter people’s reasons to love museums here.

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)

The installation Genomic Enlightenment, which was pre-showed last night for a specially invited scentific audience interested in “deep sequencing” , has involved a lot of work.

This is a movie about the skills, joy and team-work that went into making and putting up the beautiful, glimmering wave of microarrays.

The installation can be seen in the entrance hall of Medical Museion from Wednesday 23 March. Stay atuned for news about the official opening.

Has any readers of this blog seen Harvard University’s exhibit ‘Tangible Things’, which “brings together 200 objects from the back rooms and Z-closets of Harvard’s museums and libraries”?

The idea behind the exhibit is the contemporary-traditional critical view of the ordering and categorisation of things:

Questioning the modern Western intellectual categories that distinguish art from artifact, specimen from tool, and the historical from the anthropological, Tangible Things brings together materials from Harvard’s museum and archival collections. Beginning in the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, the exhibition introduces visitors to established ways of organizing things and challenges them to classify an assortment of objects according to these conventions. Where in the university do items like John Singer Sargent’s palette or the beads and dress of a Camp Fire Girl belong? Why? Armed with these questions, visitors are invited to discover the many guest objects carefully inserted into exhibitions of Harvard’s public museums.

(are we supposed to read Foucault between the lines here?)

The exhibit, which opened in late January and is running until 29 May, is organized by Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments and forms the basis for the university’s general education course ‘Tangible Things: Harvard Collections in World History’.

More here and here. If someone would like to write a review, please let us know.

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

There is a strong disciplinary element in science, which university politicians, research foundations and science managers prefer to emphasise.

What they usually don’t understand, but what most (younger) scientists know very well, is that there is also a strong playful and anarchistic dimension in scientific practice. Somewhat akin to the dichotomy between apollonian and dionysian.

A feature article in the last issue of The Scientist suggests that “creativity, do-it-yourself individualism, anti-establishmentarianism and attitude” make science more akin to punk music than most people would believe. Here are some quotes:

• “Punk ethos is typified by a passionate adherence to individualism, creativity and freedom of expression with no regard to established opinions … Good scientific discipline is also typified by such qualities, including inquisitiveness and curiosity, with no entrenchment to established beliefs”.
• Punk is “about the freedom to express what you want to express,” 
• Both punk and science also value individualism and are not always embraced by society: “In that sense, I think both of them have a subcultural aspect to them.”
• “We’re always looking for discoveries that challenge current thinking … Punk rock is like that, too”
• “Scientist or not, anyone with an open mind [and a] passion for life has the punk ethos.”

Agree. But this scientific attitude isn’t restricted to punk music. The world is full of cultural activities of that kind. A lot of modern art, for example. Experimental theatre. Much of contemporary writing. Not to speak of a whole array of political movements.

But — how do you make an exhibition about the dionysian element in science? How do you display an attitude with the help of material and visual objects?