Biomedicine on Display

At last, here’s my final post in the series of rationalities for bringing art and science together in science, technology and medical museums. This one also has to do with the issue of identity formation (see last post), but now among museum curators. Here’s the argument:

In the eyes of the general adult public, STM-museums are usually perceived as either nerdish, unsmart, dusty, serious (in the bad sense), etc.—or childish. In other words, our kind of museums either appeal to specialists with a deep interest in scientific instruments or, more commonly, to children, especially if we display dinosaurs, robots, human skeletons, and so forth.

In other words, our kind of museums have difficulties appealing to a generally educated, culturally interested audience between the age of 16 and 96. Grown-ups rarely visit STM-museums, unless they are specialists or are accompanying children.

The remedy for this is art. Art is smart, art is chic, art is sophisticated. Art draws an adult audience and thus helps raising the prestige of STM-museums—from being collections for afficionadoses or amusement parks disguised as museums, to becoming serious (in the good sense) and respected members of the museum world.

This, I believe, is the major reason why STM-museums will soon begin to compete among themselves for all the exciting wet-art that is being produced right now—from Oron Catts’ tissue cultures to Shawn Bailey and Jennifer Willett’s Bioteknica stuff. Recent exhibition successes like Jens Hauser’s Sk-interfaces in Liverpool is setting new milestones for museums.

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Summing up, these five rationalities do not exclude each other. They can operate simultaneously, in different degrees, in different museums. And the list can probably be made much longer. I would be grateful for hearing some other suggestions and arguments for or against some of these I have mentioned here, before I deepen the argument, put the appropriate footnotes in and write the whole thing up for the jopurnal Museum and Society (and doing so, I will consult Paolo Palladino and Adrian Mckenzies’s thoughts on bioart, which I have deliberately stayed away from in order to sort out my own ideas first).

—

Finally, as I wrote last week, this and the preceeding six posts on “Why do museums want to bring art and science together?” are parts of a paper I gave at the session “Rethinking Representational Practices in Contemporary Art and Modern Life Sciences” organised by Ingeborg Reichle for the Society for Literature, Science and Art (SLSA) meeting in Berlin a couple of weeks ago under the title “Five (good and bad) reasons why a medical museum director wants to bring art and science together”. The other speakers in the session were Suzanne Anker (New York) and Rob Zwijnenberg (Leiden) (see photo here).

And here is part of our audience a few minutes before we started the session:

In five earlier posts I have discussed why science, technology and medical museums are increasingly employing art in their exhibitions. The fourth reason in my list of ideal-typical rationalities for bringing art and science together goes like this:

If you believe in what some sociologists have recently called ‘biocitizenship’, i.e., the biomedical version of what European bureaucrats call ‘scientific citizenship’ – then, STM-museums are among the most crucial media institutions involved in the formation of such citizenship (cf. Elam and Bertilsson, 2004). This is the phenomenon of ‘governmediality’, to use Christoph Engemann’s term.

There is of course a strong discursive aspect to the formation of biocitizenship. In other words, it is partly through texts that individuals are socialized into the conceptual world of biomedicine and biotechnology and form their basic identity (like “I’m a cancer patient”, rather than “I’m Swedish”). But there is also a less discursive aspect, which is probably as important, or perhaps even more important. Ridley Scott’s movie ‘Blade Runner’ is a major piece of 1980s art which probably meant more for the formation of many people’s identity as potentially bio-engineered bodies than all textual media taken together.

Thus, the fourth rationale for incorporating art works in medical museums is that they know, consciously or unconsciously, that such museums are efficient tools for the formation of biocitizenship. In other words, as museums we are employing a strategy that will keep all the powerful stakeholders of ‘Empire’ (pace Michael Hardt and Tony Negri) happy – that is, we help translating the ‘multitude’ into biocitizens of the emerging transnational Empire.

[the next and last part of the series of “Why do medical museums want to bring art and science together” posts will follow tomorrow].

The third item on my list of ideal-typical reasons why museums want to bring art and science together is that art is a great cross-disciplinary integrator. The argument goes like this:

As culturally established factories for the production of meaning in the knowledge society, the humanities have a strong disciplinary function. In other words, our research practices tend to lie within the disciplinary boundaries of pre-established conceptual power-games (philosophy, sociology, political science, history etc.). Such games are keeping our universities orderly and are holding professors and students safely away from the scandal of real global problems. (I guess Slavoj Zizek could have said this.)

And here is where art comes in. Thinking about biomedical laboratories and practices in aesthetic terms can help us raise our awareness of seeing biomedical objects phenomenologically, seeing them outside pregiven disciplinary boundaries. Instead of explaining objects in terms of disciplinary conceptual structures and narratives, museums ask their audience to engage with the objects in a bottom-up process, thereby providing opportunities to formulate new questions about the biomedical world (cf. Daniel Miller’s book, The Comfort of Things, on this).
[the next post will be about art and scientific citizenship]

As I wrote in the last post, our co-operation with the Danish Museum of Art and Design in 2004 was the founding rationale for our pilgrimage into art, design and science. Then things went rapidly. In 2006 we engaged Canadian-British artist-curator Martha Fleming to help us organise a workshop on ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context’, followed by a public conference on ‘Art and Biomedicine: Beyond the Body’ hosted by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.

We also began experimenting with different kinds of art exhibitions and installation, for example the street exhibition ‘The Face of Disease’, the photo collage exhibition ‘100 Light Years’, and the installation ‘Labyrinthitis’, a medical technology-inspired installation by Berlin-based sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard.

In this process, we were, in my ideal-typical reconstruction, entertaining another rationality for bringing art and science together, namely that art is a way of representing the new biomedical invisibles (see Martha’s article ‘The huge invisibles’). Medical museums have traditionally dealt with visible artefacts at a phenomenologically accessible macrolevel. The audience loves to see all these highly evocative objects: amputation saws, trepanations sets, pickled tumours, and so forth. But the armamentarium of contemporary biomedicine (HPLC columns, gene chips, etc.) are not particularly evocative, and the body they help researchers to represent is invisible (mainly protein interactions).

Hence another reason why art enters into the strategy of medical museums these days. Art is considered a way of bridging the everyday world and the invisible cellular and molecular domains.

This is what the annual Wellcome Image Awards are about: “the winning pictures”, they say, “show a wide variety of subjects, normally invisible to the naked eye, revealing new layers of complexity and making the ordinary extraordinary”. They probably mean making the extraordinary ordinary, though :-)
[the next post will be about art as a great cross-disciplinary integrator]

Which were Medical Museion’s reasons for going into art and aesthetics? The first on my list of ideal-typical rationalities is what I call “once-aesthetically-corrupted, always-corrupted”.

The argument goes like this: As Sepp Gumbrecht pointed out in his seminal 2004 book The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, most humanities scholars, including historians, are engaged in interpretative and hermeneutic practices. But rarely in aestethic practices, i.e., what he calls the ‘production of presence’. Same for historian-as-curators in the world of science, technology and medical museums: Most STM-curators see their museums as sites for historical narration, interpretation and contextualisation, but rarely as sites where visitors are engaged in sensual and aesthetic experiences, in presence-production.

What changed our minds, from seeing our museum as an institution for meaning-production only, to an institution involved also in presence-production was when our neighbour, the Danish Museum of Art and Design in Copenhagen, was setting up an anniversary exhibition in 2004. Since we were, and still are, good neighbours, their curators went over to our place to take a close look at our collections, and they went back with over 60 artefacts which we had, until then, routinely classified as historical objects. But they decided these were aesthetic objects.

That was our aesthetic epiphany, our moment of entrance into the aesthetics of medical objects. And since then our museum has never really been the same. Suddenly we saw things that medical historians have never really seen. And more generally speaking, I believe that this is one of the rationales for why STM-museums in the last 15-20 years have, more or less by default, begun to incorporate aesthetic approaches and art in their exhibitions:  Once you have tried it, there is no way back.

Once the discursive rationality of the historian has been corrupted by the irrationality of aesthetic judgement, you cannot really undo it.

More and more of us, former science, technology and medical history museums, are becoming fallen historical angels.
(Photo: Snowrunner 2006, from Flickr; creative commons)

[next post will be about biomedical invisibles]

Why has art and aesthetics then entered the science, technology and medicine (STM) museum sector? This was not the case 15 or 20 years ago. What has happened in the last two decades?

I will not attempt to give any historical, sociological or political explanations for the flow of art and aesthetics into STM-museums; that’s a topic for a serious research project and even a book. Instead I will take on a more preliminary task: I will try to reconstruct a handfull of ideal-typical rationalities for why STM-museum curators around the world are engaged in bringing art and the biomedical sciences together.

I hasten to add that I haven’t done any fieldwork, or asked curators to fill in any questionaires. The reconstructions that follow in the next couple of posts are based primarily on websites and occasional discussions, and especially on my own experiences as the director of Medical Museion in Copenhagen.

Sizewise, Medical Museion is somewhere between the Jurassic midgets and the contemporary Power giants. We are placed in an old 18th century palace-looking building (the former Royal Academy of Surgeons) in the Copenhagen inner city area, with approx 4000 square meters of storage, exhibition and office space. Our biggest asset, besides the building, is a huge collection of medicotechnical artefacts, wet specimens and hard human remains — actually one of the biggest collections in northern Europe — ranging from 18th century medical curiosities to 20th century everyday medical care objects. We believe we have a total of around 200.000 objects plus another 60.000 images.

Like many other similar medium-size traditional medical history museums around the world, our museum was – until recently, when it was still called the Medical History Museum at the University of Copenhagen – content with taking care of and displaying the old treasures. Some medical history museums are in fact still quite satisfied with such a role; they are not interested in becoming engaged with the rapidly changing biomedical landscape, i.e, all these revolutionary things that are happening on the interface between postgenomic cell biology, pharma production, medical technology, biotech industry and computer science. It’s a messy world, so I think it’s perfectly legitimate (and probably even quite wise) to stay away from it.

But we decided to jump on the life science bandwagon, to engage with the hurly-burly of the contemporary life science world. So in the last four-five years we have turned both our research efforts, our acquisitions of new artefacts, and our temporary exhibitions towards investigating and displaying contemporary developments in the biomedical field. And a few years ago, a private Danish research foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, decided that this approach was worthwhile supporting.

So now we are in the midst of a combined research and curatorial project called ‘Biomedicine on Display’. I say ‘combined’, because we seek to integrate research, the acquisitions of the material and visual culture of biomedicine, and the creation of exhibitions. And we do indeed have a great interest in bringing art, aesthetics and medicine together.

So in a sense, we are not just a medical history museum anymore, but a medical museum. That’s one of the reasons we changed our name to Medical Museion. So, which were our reasons for going into art and aesthetics?
[I’ll be back tomorrow or the day after tomorrow].

Museums are a significant part of the global science learning and experience economy. There are many hundreds, maybe thousands, of science, technology and medical museums and science centers around the world. The Association of Science-Technology Centers presently lists 447 institutions, but they don’t list small, regional and local museums.

This STM-sector of the museum industry (let’s forget about science centers) spans everything from small, regional, amateur-driven collections and displays run by retired scientists, engineers and medical doctors to large professional-driven institutions supported by state grants and having hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of visitors each year—like the Science Museum in London, the Science Museum of Minnesota, and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, just to mention three big STM-museums on three different continents, who are among the significant actors in the global cultural and experience economy.

Whether they work on a small scale or as large operations, many STM-museums nowadays are involved in bringing art and science (art and technology, art and medicine) together. This is true both for the very small, queer and curiousities-filled ones, like my personal favourite, the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. It’s true for the middle-sized ones, like the Wellcome Collection in London which is deliberately exploring the art-life science connection. And it’s true for the Big Ones, like Cité des sciences et de l’industrie in Paris which has even published a guide to their own artworks.

Why then has art and aesthetics entered the STM-museum sector? In a number of posts over the next couple of days I will discuss five possible reasons why museums are increasingly bringing art and science together.

These posts are parts of a paper I gave at the session “Rethinking Representational Practices in Contemporary Art and Modern Life Sciences” organised by Ingeborg Reichle for the Society for Literature, Science and Art (SLSA) meeting in Berlin a couple of weeks ago under the title “Five (good and bad) reasons why a medical museum director wants to bring art and science together”.

The other speakers in the session were Suzanne Anker (New York) and Rob Zwijnenberg (Leiden). Above are Rob, Susanne and Ingeborg before we started the session.
[to be followed]

If I were an American I would probably have rushed to my computer already last Tuesday night to proudly announce on this blog that I and Medical Museion had been given Medicoprisen. The prize has been awarded annually by the industry organisation for medical devices in Denmark (Medicoindustrien) since 2001. The industry exports for more than 40 billion DKK per year, which is quite hefty, given the small size of this country (population 5,5 mill).

This year, the award was given for the work we have done here at Medical Museion to collect, preserve and display the medical industrial heritage. As you may have noticed, some of the collected artefacts have been displayed on this blog over the last couple of years (some of them are also displayed on our official website; in Danish only)

I didn’t rush to the computer, however, because in Scandinavia it is still somewhat suspicious to write too much about oneself (ever wondered why there are so few bloggers in Denmark :-). The Danish word for this is ’selvfed’ which is not only untranslatable (literally ‘auto-obese’), but also a kind of behaviour which invites to a certain ridicule, so it has taken me almost a week of reeeally hard emotional work and much support from friends and colleagues to wrestle down my innate Jante Law censor.

After this ritual three paragraph opening caveat, I must admit that I’m quite pleased by the award. We have worked hard for several years now to turn this old museum into an institution that is more oriented towards contemporary medicine and medical technology. We are in the process of formulating a new acquisition strategy based on an awareness of the importance of medical industrial design both for the curation and the design of medical artefacts, and we are interested in opening up for co-operation between the university, the industry and the museum world. Our senior curator with responsibility for acquisitions, Søren Bak-Jensen (a specialist in the history of late 20th century kidney transplantation procedures) plays a central role in these efforts. 

So here are some ‘auto-obese’ images from the prize ceremony. First, yours truly with the award, a small, but very solid (and heavy!) bronze sculpture by the Danish artist Peter Hesk Møller:

And then in conversation with Helge Sander, the Danish Minister for Science, Technology and Development, who handed over the award on Tuesday 6 May:

(there is a less flattering pic on our official website, as well).

(all photos by Michael Altschul, Visuel-medie)

Medical Museion and this blog is closed today (Monday) and tomorrow. We are going to a conference center 30 km north of Copenhagen for a two-day internal department/museum conference to discuss how we can improve the integration between our different activities (research, teaching, collecting, public outreach and exhibits). Here’s the venue:

the Magleås conference center, a perfect place for small (10-35 people) workshops.

Medical museums do not necessarily need to be in dialogue with contemporary science and technology; they can remain safely embedded in the past. But if they have the ambition—like we do—to contrast possible biomedical futures with the medical past (so as to be able to create some really engaging exhibitions), medical museums are well advised to make some educated guesses about what these futures might be.

One source to such guess-work is the National Academy of Engineering’s list Grand Challenges for Engineering. The current list of 14 challenges includes blockbusters like making solar energy economical, providing energy from fusion, providing access to clean water, securing cyberspace, preventing nuclear terror, and restoring and improving urban infrastructure. And there are, of course, medical and health challenges on the list as well: advancing health informatics, engineering better medicines, and reverse-engineering the brain.

But hey, something’s lacking!? As Partial Immortalization (Attila Csordas) points out, life extension is not among the 14 frontrunners of NAE’s grand engineering challenges. Disappointed, Csordas seems to have given up on government and academy committees ability to lobby for human enhancement. He thinks life extension should be a private business instead, “not something left to governmental policies and think thanks”.

So he puts his hope on the Google founders. When Brin and Page grow older, he thinks, they will hopefully get tired of personal genomics and 23andMe (see earlier post here), and begin supporting “everything healthy and biotech”, and thus become ”the decisive player in life extension technology”.

The rest of the argument hangs in the air, although Csordas promises to get back to this story later. I can hardly wait, because his hint of a new chapter in the contemporary history of converging technologies—that is, the fusion of Google and transhumanism—would in my mind be the perfect topic for an exhibition of a sublime medical future. Unless Michel Houellebecq comes first!

On Friday 7 March scholars from Medical Museion at University of Copenhagen, the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden, the Wellcome Collection and the Science Museum in London, and the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) at University of Manchester will come together to discuss how we can bring our research and collections dealing with late 19th and 20th century medicine to new audiences. The workshop is organised by CHSTM with the following programme:

09.30-10.30 Introductions (chair: John Pickstone)

• Introduction to the issues – John Pickstone
• Introduction to the Medical Museion – Thomas Söderqvist
• Introduction to the Boerhaave Museum – Dirk van Delft
• Wellcome Collection: a new public venue – Lisa Jamieson
• Introduction to the University of Manchester – Emm Barnes

10.30-12.00: London & Manchester (chair: Thomas Söderqvist)

• “‘Sleeping and Dreaming’ at Wellcome Collection” – Katie Forde (Wellcome Collection, London)
• “Communicating Medical Research: Updating the Health Matters Gallery at the Science Museum” – Katie Maggs (Science Museum, London)
• “Big Machines and Small Wonders: Ingenuity in Adapting Equipment and Engineering Skills to Create Total Hip Replacements” – Francis Neary (Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge)

13.00-14.30: Leiden & Copenhagen (chair: Carsten Timmermann)

• “Exposing ‘My Skin’: Communicating Body History” – Mieneke Te Hennepe (Boerhaave Museum, Leiden)
• “Age on Stage: The Making of the Exhibition Oldetopia” – Camilla Mordhorst (Medical Museion, Copenhagen)
• “Making Sense or Sensing the Made: from historical interpretation to material presence in biomedical museum settings” – Thomas Söderqvist (Medical Museion, Copenhagen)

15.00-16.30: Copenhagen (chair: Emm Barnes)

• “Curating biomedical software: the case of epidemiological risk assessment tools” – Susanne Bauer (Medical Museion)
• “Pill cam visions: endoscopic diagnosis as public spectacle” – Jan-Eric Olsén (Medical Museion)
• “How to make contact with the materialities of recent biomedicine” – Søren Bak-Jensen (Medical Museion)

16.30-17.00: Closing discussion

For more info, contact Emm Barnes. 

Speaking about biomedical animation and displays: iMed Studios have also just released this 2 min. holiday greeting promotional video which is useful New Year’s fuel for imagining how biomedical animations could be incorporated in future medical museum settings.

For example, I like the holographic display of the heart model. Maybe this could be done as augmented reality (see earlier post here) as well?

It’s also amazing to see how the collaborative touch screens which Tom Cruise sci-fictionally handled in Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002) has become a feature in a pharma advertising company promotional video! (They sort of exist IRL too.)

Otherwise I must admit that I’m a bit sceptical about bringing too much holography and touch screen visions into museum planning. There’s a risk that the high tech stuff will kill the raison d’etre of museums which is, after all, the good old material artefacts. True, these can be augmented by the gadgets – but one has to strike a careful balance here.

What does Charlotte and the digital museum colleagues at Museer og digitalisering think about this?

In my humble opinion, transhumanism is one of the most interesting intellectual movements today. It attracts some philosophers; quite a few high-ranking people from the fields of nanotech, biotech, information tech and cognitive science; and some accomplished artists and writers as well, like Michel Houellebecq. It has also drawn some severe criticisms, for example from Francis Fukuyama (in Our Posthuman Future, 2002).

Yet it is a publicly rather neglected intellectual movement. True, the social, political, ethical etc. consequences of some specific aspects of its technoscientific base — the so called ‘converging technologies‘ (i.e., nano-bio-info-cogno, or nbic for short) — have given rise both to scholarly research and to some public debate. But alas the movement as such and its credo has not been under much public scrutiny.

Unfortunately, because if one understands some of the ambitions and hopes that makes individual transhumanists tick — and thereby make them behave collectively as loosely defined anticipatory intellectual movement – one will probably also understand some of the drives behind the contemporary convergence of nano-, bio- and information technologies — and as a consequence some of the phenomena of today’s university and knowledge politics.

After all, what happens in laboratories today is not just a question about publish-or-perish or about venture capital investment — there is most probably also individual and collective cultural visions behind. And, for better or for worse, transhumanism is a good candidate for such a collective cultural vision. 

One of the key historical documents that throws some light upon the movement and its constitutive technologies is the proceedings (Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, 2002) of a strategic workshop organised in December 2001 by the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Commerce on the potential impact of the nbic-field ”on improving human capabilities at the microscopic, individual, group and societal levels” (pdf-file here).

I think transhumanism could be a great conceptual frame for a critical museum exhibition on future medical technologies and human enhancement. Such an exhibition won’t be easy to make. The constitutive topics of nano-bio-info-cogno are technically difficult to make sense of. Much of their material base in invisible and intangible. And much the visual material only exists in the brains of the members of the movement. Like many anticipatory intellectual movements it exists primarily in the form of dreams — and in words.

Yet, the movement is very real, and the technoscientific base (nbic) is very real too. So it would be a rewarding exhibition for an STM museum to take up on its program. 

I think it would be worthwhile to think a little more about ephemera in a contemporary biomedical context (cf. yesterday’s post + Jessica’s and Mike’s comments to it).

The term ‘ephemera’ (n. pl. of ephêmeros = short-lived) is often used by collectors for documents that were produced for the moment and not for long shelf-life: posters, recipes, advertisements, pamphlets, postcards, stamps, labels, etc. Ephemera have always been favourite objects of collectors; e.g., in a medical history context the William H. Helfand collection of proprietary health pamphlets and his collection of pharmaceutical trade cards are famous, and have been shown in several temporary displays, e.g. the exhibition ‘Here Today, Here Tomorrow … Varieties of Medical Ephemera’ at the National Library of Medicine in 1995.

Biomedical material culture also has its durables and its ephemera. A hundred (or even just fifty) years ago, most laboratory utensils were constructed from durable materials and were made to last. One was supposed to wash them, sterilize them and use them over and over again. Our collections are filled with such durables, made of brass, glass, stainless steel, hardwood, ceramics, etc.

Today’s laboratories, on the other hand, are filled with short-lived things made of plastic to be used for the moment. Lots of disposable plastic items: cups and caps, centrifuge tubes, suction catheters, syringes, culture flasks, cover slips, urine collection bags, vials, gloves, petri dishes, etc. etc., to be used once and then thrown out. To the extent that contemporary biomedicine could be described as an ephemeral culture.

To the material ephemerality of the lab could be added a documentary ephemerality, for example in the form of web-based electronic publications instead of books and bound journal volumes. And even the laboratory itself is becoming ephemeral and disposable: whereas the traditional lab has concrete walls, floors, benches and centrifuges, lab-on-a-chip technology represents the ultimate ephemeralization of the biomedical lab space (Richard Buckminster Fuller seems to have used the term ‘ephemeralization‘ in a somewhat different sense).

So I would like to see a collection and exhibition of biomedical ephemera — not of tradecards and pamphlets, but of Eppendorf tubes and plastic tubings mixed with lab websites and felt-tip pens.

I’m thinking about one of the points that Joel Garreau brought up in an article titled “Is There a Future for Old-Fashioned Museums?” in The Washington Post two months ago (7 Oct).

Referring to Wiliam J. Mitchell’s (director of the MIT Design Laboratory) writings about the digitalization of urban environments, Garreau points out that “the vast choices available on the Web punish places that try to be all things to all people”, and favor instead small specialized “places for the cognoscenti”.

This tendency may be valid for museums too, he suggests:

The lesson for museums is that nimble upstarts can win big. Large, long-existing players complacent in their old formulas can die.

An encouraging prospect for small mammals like Medical Museion (and Jim’s place in Oxford) who are competing with Science Museum dinosaurs!

What attracts the cognoscente/connoisseur is of course the exquisite artefacts. So, in a world of big digitalizing-frantic omnibus museums, the specialized thing-centered museum will perhaps thrive. Maybe (so believes Garreau) because it speaks to the squirrel collector inside us.