Biomedicine on Display

V2_ , the Institute for the Unstable Media is, in their own words

an interdisciplinary center for art and media technology in Rotterdam (the Netherlands). V2_’s activities include organizing presentations, exhibitions and workshops, research and development of artworks in its own media lab, distributing artworks through its Agency, publishing in the field of art and media technology, and developing an online archive.

They just released an e-book called The Era of Objects (the pdf of the book is here) which contains some fascinating and surreal attempts at ‘futurescaping’, mapping out “a heterogenous topography of unevenly-distributed futurity; infinitely extendible; punctuated with features and landmarks.” It draws on everything from ANT to design theory to science fiction – even Bruce Sterling appears with an essay in the anthology. Well worth the read for anyone interested in materiality studies – and also very symptomatic for the sense in which we are finding ourselves to be waking up inside an object.

I have just had a paper accepted for a very interesting symposium called Representing the Contentious, organized in London 14 October by Bronwyn Parry, Ania Dabrowska and Wellcome Trust People Award.

My presentation contains many images from my PhD Delineating Disease: a system for investigating Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva that were not presented to the public for reasons I will discuss.

Drawing hidden truths

How do you show disease in a way that reveals new insights, is clear, informative, is understandable to members of the public as well as to medical experts, and yet remains respectful to the subject? And what if this research is also set within the context of the medical museum where processes of preparation and display must also be considered?

In an artistic research PhD, a system using drawing as a valid research methodology to investigate a rare disease was developed. It presented a breadth of experiences of a disease called FOP and also revealed the disease within the context of museum conservation and display. The activity of drawing was shown to both initiate the act of looking and evidence the journey of understanding taken during this process. It involved actually spending time in the presence of people and objects, and forming relationships. This commitment maintained dignity and respect for people and objects, and the drawings were seen to be informative and sensitive. Drawing was used not merely to record, but as a participatory activity. Evidence showed the research revealed new insights, confirmed medical opinions about the progression of the disease and presented a far greater breadth of experiences of FOP than previously seen.

But the impact of this research also had unexpected consequences. Certain drawings were not included in the exhibition that formed part of the final research exposition, as they were deemed unsuitable. Medical experts were ‘shocked’ by drawings presenting the methods involved in preparation of donors with the disease. These processes integral to the research, hidden behind the scenes of the museum, were not what the experts had expected to see.

But the greatest impact was on the people with FOP. I was completely unprepared for their reactions when they saw drawings of the disease. Their responses to being drawn were positive. They appreciated someone looking at them without staring, spending time with them, bothering to see them. Despite having seen their own X-rays, CT scans and read medical books, when they saw other drawings of FOP they were shocked. Unlike medical imaging, which requires training and experience to ‘read’, they ‘understood’ the drawings and felt their clarity revealed the hidden, terrible truth. They acted like a mirror. Conversely, they also felt it was vital the research was shown to make people aware of this rare disease.  The responsibility of this is something that has weighed heavily on me. Despite the research being seen to be valid, insightful and useful, it also had unseen consequences. What form of exposition should these contentious elements take, should they be shown at all?

Watch out for Nina Bjerglund’s new blog on public health science comunication via social media: http://bjerglund.wordpress.com/. She is posting frequently, the content is serious and well-written, and the topic is extremely important — because communication with the general public is a sina qua non for public health research.

Jessica Palmer (Bioephemera blog) is leaving ScienceBlogs to start on her own again. And ends her last post with the classic words ascribed to Dorothy Parker: “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity”. She’s so right. Keep up the spirit!

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.

I would like to announce the programme for the forthcoming workshop on 29th and 30th September.

I have been overwhelmed by the amount of interest this workshop has generated as it grew from an idea to have a small informal seminar where the object is understood sensuously and placed as central to research, to become a two day international workshop. It is now more like a full time collaborative project working with all the presenters and their ideas, and an opportunity for objects in the collections at Medical Museion to be used in new ways.

Presenters come from research fields as diverse as design and technology, history of medicine, architecture, anthropology and choreography, and geographically span Denmark, Italy, Austria, England, Scotland, Sweden, United States, Egypt and United Arab Emirates.

The event is full and a reserve list for participants still wishing to come is growing longer. With the diversity of presenters and presentation formats, I think it will prove to be an interesting two days.

Programme:

THE SENSUOUS OBJECT WORKSHOP: how we experience material objects through our senses

THURSDAY 29^TH SEPTEMBER

09:00 Coffee and registration

09:30 Welcome – Lucy Lyons

09:40 Mats Fridlund – Security in a Box: Recovering Material and Discursive Phenomenologies of Forgotten Hopes and Fears

10:15 Secil Ugur – Tactile and visual perception on wearable technology

10:35 Discussion

11.05 – 11.35 COFFEE

11:35 Jan-Eric Olsén – Outlines of touch in the history of blindness collection

12:05 Discussion

12.25 – 1.25 LUNCH

1:25 James Edmonson – Making sense of sound: the early stethoscope and the physical examination

1:45 Linda Thomson – Can object handling make you healthy?

2:05 Discussion

2.25 – 2.55 COFFEE

2:55 Laura Gonzalez – The material sensuousness of a hysteric’s performance

3:25 Discussion

3:50 Bernd Kraeftner – Who cares?

4:10 Jennifer Nomura van der Grinten – From Face to Clitoris

4:30 Discussion

5.00 – 6.00 DRINKS RECEPTION

During the reception “Video Lab”, a short film by Astrid Møller-Olsen will be shown

FRIDAY 30^TH SEPTEMBER

09:00 Ansa Lønstrup – Mediate Auscultation: listening to the “voices” of the human and other bodies through the stethoscope and through percussion.

09:30 Discussion

09:55 Eduardo Abrantes – A voice as a sound object?

10:15 Brian Dougan – A sensuous reciprocity

10:35 Discussion

10:55 – 11:20 COFFEE

11:20 Per Roar – performance – This is my body 2     (In Reception room)

11:50 Discussion

12:05 Carsten Friberg – Body and Space

12:35 Discussion

12:55 – 1:40 LUNCH

1:40 Marlene Little –Tacit encounter: Materiality and the sensuous object

2:00 Louise Whiteley – Scan, scanner, scanned                 (In X-ray room)

2:20 Discussion

2.40 – 3.00 COFFEE

3:00 Anette Stenslund – Abra-Cadaver: Aseptic (un)covering of life and death

3:30 Discussion

3:55 Anne Krefting – Smell and Narration: Objects as a performative structure

4:15 Jenny Carlson – Sensuous slurry

4:35 Discussion

CLOSE

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Some more ramblings inspired by How We Became Posthuman (other post is here).

The interface that was to transform us turned out not to be the human/machine coupling, but instead the human/biology coupling, in which the transformation of biological life inside and outside of us is the key.

The Technicolor wonder of the man-as-machine has faded for the integration of man into the world in its entirety. Machines turned out to not be a specific category in the world, just as man was not. Hayles details in her book the late 20^th century obsession and anxiety with androids and AI that complicate the boundaries of subjectivity and the human subject. But today, this boundary making just does not seem to be of the same significance, as more and more we come to realize that subjectivity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. From a materialist perspective, here represented by Jane Bennett in her book Vibrant Matter:

“The philosophical project of naming where subjectivity begins and ends is too often bound up with fantasies of a human uniqueness in the eyes of God, of escape from materiality, or of mastery of nature; and even where it is not, it remains an aporetic or quixotic endeavor.”

And further:

“The story will highlight the extent to which human being and thinghood overlap, the extent to which the us and the it slip-slide into each other. One moral of the story is that we are also non-humans and that things, too, are vital players in the world.”

This is why the machine/man-boundary troubles implied by How We Became Posthuman (and other boundary problems which are prevalent in a lot of STS) is not really going to cut it these days. As Timothy Morton notes in a particularly grumpy blog post on a recent collection of ecophilosophy (Integral Ecology):

“We just don’t have time for another remix of nature and culture […] It’s not a matter of picking and mixing from the best of “Nature” ideas and “Culture” ideas. Let me just level with you for a moment. Here is my very, very condensed version of Ecology without Nature [Mortons own book] for those of you who don’t have the time: The concepts Nature and culture are fucked. Fuck them. It’s over.”

Could not agree more.

Sometimes conference announcements only become interesting in the very last sentence. Like this one for “Frenemies: The love-hate relationsship between science and society”, taking place at Universiteit Twente on 14 September.

Science is put in the dock, so it seems. Experts are under attack, there is public agitation on the internet. Yet we cherish expertise as never before, and cite expert sources whenever they suit us. Are we friends, or enemies, or both? [...] This symposium looks at the dynamic role of expertise in our society. How should we understand the notion of expertise? What operates as credible expertise, and when? Is scientific expertise overrated, and are other forms of expertise too easily dismissed? Or is it precisely the other way around?

Seems like any other conference on scientific expertice to me. But then comes the interesting part:

And what, if anything, does this mean for communicating science and technology?

If you plan to attend, send an email to pauline.teppich@utwente.nl with subject REGISTER #FRENEMIES.

Although the United States seems be on the track of turning into an intellectually and economically failed nation, some of their universities are still among the best in the world. And among the best of the best is Yale University. Readers of this blog may therefore be interested to hear that Yale invites applications for a tenure track Assistant/Associate or tenured Associate/full Professor in the History of Medicine beginning July 1, 2012. Applicants with interests in the history of the biomedical sciences, experimental life sciences, or clinical practice since 1800 are particularly encouraged to apply.

The search committee will begin considering applications on October 15, 2011. Applicants should send a curriculum vitae, three letters of recommendation, a statement about their work and professional plans, and a sample of their scholarly writing such as a dissertation or book chapter or article to Professor John Harley Warner, History of Medicine Search Committee, c/o Ewa Lech, Section of the History of Medicine, Yale University School of Medicine, P.O. Box 208015, New Haven, CT 06520-8015, USA. More info from Ms. Lech, ewa.lech@yale.edu (don’t ask questions in the comments section below, this blog is just the humble announcement board).

One of the inspirational sources of Oslo terrorist Anders Behring Breivik’s peculiar manifesto ’2083: A European Declaration of Independence’ is the anonymous blogger Fjordman, who has been a leading intellectual in the international anti-Jihad movement for almost a decade.

In a recent circular mail, Oslo historian of science Vidar Enebakk draws the attention of his Scandinavian colleagues to the fact that Fjordman has not only written about history, religion and politics in general, but also quite a lot about the history of science and medicine to ‘prove’ that modern science and medicine could only have emerged under the umbrella of European Christendom, and definitely not in Islamic cultures.

I’ve now read a few of his many articles (originally published on a variety of extreme anti-Islamic blog). One thing is Fjordman’s extremely one-sided anti-Islamic and pro-Christian interpretation; another thing is that he/she is quite well-read in the history of science and medicine. I’ve made a few Google searches on random stretches of text, which show that Fjordman doesn’t seem to have cut-and-pasted, but apparently has written these articles him-/herself. It’s not original research, but from a technical point of view it’s quite well-written popular history of science and medicine.

Probably only a person with a basic academic training in history of science could have written these texts. As Enebakk points out, we’re probably talking about a person who many Scandinavian historians of science and medicine may already know as a colleague or (former) student, and he therefore suggests us to take a closer look at the texts — analysing arguments, interpretations, stylistic features, etc. — to try find out who hides behind the Fjordman pseudonym.

Part of my summer reading has been N. Katherine Hayles very interesting and stimulating book, How We Became Posthuman – Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. The book details the rise of the informational logic of life from the rise of the cybernetic paradigm in the late 1940s and onwards. Hayles writes the book in order to caution against a disembodied and anti-material view of information. She details how an informational mode of thinking came to foreground pattern and randomness over presence and absence, and gave way to a systematic devaluation of materiality and embodiment. As she notes in the introduction:

“A defining characteristic of the present cultural moment is the belief that information can circulate unchanged among different material substrates. It is not for nothing that ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ has become a cultural icon for the global information society.”

What I find most striking in reading the book, however, is that despite it only being published a little more than a decade ago, it gave me an odd feeling of a cautionary vision of a future that never arrived. The science fiction dreams of downloading our consciousness to neural networks or of humanity being overtaken by artificial intelligence or other such visions of a digital world just does not seem to hold the same purchase in our collective unconsciousness today . The undercurrent of fear about the catastrophic effects of a complete disregard for the qualities of embodiment that motivates How We Became Posthuman seems less dramatic a decade later. Partly, I think, because we have woken up inside an object, not a digital mirage.

I am also inclined to read Hayles’ book in this way because I have been reading a series of articles about Marshall McLuhan, who would have turned 100 recently (you can read some of them here and here ). McLuhans ideas about the medium being the message sheds new light on why the future did not turn out exactly as the informationalists envisioned.

Having all the information in the world at ones fingertips turned out, at the end of the day, not to be particularly interesting in itself. Rather, the interesting bit is how the interactions between the materiality of the informational medium change our embodied materiality – a standpoint Hayles would be in complete agreement with, I believe. That which makes us different is not the information itself but the forms of life engendered by the materiality of technology.As Douglas Coupland noted in the Guardian recently: “Let’s face it, Google isn’t making us stupider, it’s simply making us realise that omniscience is actually slightly boring.”

In a sense, then, reading Katherine Hayles’ book confirmed the sense that we have entered a post-informational age, in which information in itself is of less interest than the material forms and routes the information takes. The medium is the message might seem a bit like a cliché but we are only beginning to scratch the surface of what this insight actually might mean for the way we live. Technology changes us not through its content, but through its form – because we are form through and through.

I forgot to tell that Biomedicine on Display is having a short summer vacation. Back again sometime in August.

Here’s the final (and somewhat extended) call for presentations at the workshop ‘The Sensuous Object to be held at Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, 29-30 September, 2011

‘The Sensuous Object’ is an interdisciplinary, participatory workshop concerned with ways we actually engage with objects and aimed at researchers in all disciplines interested in the materiality of actual artefacts and ways of understanding objects through the senses (smell and touch, ambience, aesthetic, visual thinking, tacit knowledge, sound and seduction).

1. An actual, material object must be central and a present part of the workshop. This artefact should be or relate in some way to objects found in medical museums.

You are welcome to arrange to choose an object from Medical Museion collections,
or bring your own,
or if you send a photo of an object from another medical museum I can try and find an equivalent here,
or if we can’t find it you can use an image of an object.

2. Engagement is vital; emphasis is on demonstration, experimentation and participation.

3. This is an opportunity for presenters to try out ideas and test new formats in a friendly environment where the starting point for discussion is the object present rather than previous research results.

We anticipate the definition of sensuous and approaches to presenting understanding of materiality of objects to be varied, even experimental!

How we experience and understand objects as sensuous objects that have been realized, produced, consumed through and by our senses, and how they impact on us and how we impact on them, are just a few of the expected discussion topics. By inviting participants to choose actual objects and use them as central to their presentations, the aim is to challenge established concepts and reveal new possibilities in our experiencing of and understanding through objects, using sensuous approaches. It will provide opportunity for presenters to test ideas, try out new formats of presentation and discussion, and examine their own research through the sensuous object.

The idea for this workshop began as a way to research objects from Medical Museion’s collections and for the objects themselves to form the basis of further research. Medical Museion is a university museum at the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Copenhagen, with an extensive collection of historical medical objects from the 18th through 20th centuries and with internationally award-winning exhibitions. Its field is the history of health and disease in a cultural perspective, with a focus on the material and iconographic culture of recent biomedicine. Research at Medical Museion is seen as essential to underpinning university teaching strategies for collection and conservation of medical heritage, exhibition making, and other material-based communication practices.

Speakers are invited to present their understanding of an object in terms of their methodological approaches and areas of research. Research areas of confirmed participants include senses of smell and touch, ambience, aesthetic, visual thinking, tacit knowledge, sound, and seduction.

Confirmed speakers:
Laura Gonzalez (Glasgow School of Art)
Ansa Lonstrup (University of Aarhus)
Anette Stenslund (Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen)
Jan-Eric Olsén (Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen)
Carsten Friberg (Aarhus School of Architecture)
Mats Fridlund (University of Gothenburg)

Organisers:
Postdoc Lucy Lyons (lucyly@sund.ku.dk) and PhD student Anette Stenslund (astenslund@sund.ku.dk), Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, 18 Fredericiagade, Copenhagen (www.museion.ku.dk).

More information:
If you are interested in presenting, please email a 200 word abstract by 15 JULY. If you would like to participate but do not wish to present, please email a paragraph about your area of research by 5 September. Contact: lucyly@sund.ku.dk.

‘The Sensuous Object’ workshop is free and Medical Museion will provide tea and coffee breaks and host lunch on both days and a drinks reception on 29 September. Participants will need to arrange and pay for their own travel and accommodation.

Who would have thought that the torrential rain during the dramatic storms seen in Copenhagen this weekend would have had such devastating consequences? The collection stores here at Medical Museion bore the brunt of it. In some places the water rose to 90 cm.  Dedicated members of the team arrived on Saturday and worked in the evening while the rooms were pumped. On Sunday, many others arrived to plough through the black gooey sludge and salvage more precious boxes.

On Monday, we were organized into groups, some carrying heavy boxes filled with flood damaged artefacts that still remained in the basements. Water was still leaking out of the soaking walls and the humidity did not help the situation. Others have been removing bones from sodden boxes, attempting to dry them a little and repack them temporarily in safer conditions before they will be packed more permanently. Paper, medical photos and other precious documentation was carefully peeled apart and placed between conservation papers and put under weights.  The smell is terrible and the actual cleaning of the damaged rooms will be a whole new and different problem. One floor has completely split open and cracks have appeared on the walls of these beautiful old buildings.

Everyone is working to salvage what he or she can. There is great sadness, determination and a sense of camaraderie.