Biomedicine on Display

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(thanks to Ingeborg for the tip)

A new issue of Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science is out — with, among other things, a thematic section about science at the nanoscale edited by Isaac Record. For example, Joachim Schummer points out that science can be popularized by its ethics (engineering ethics is often propaganda for emerging technology); Joe Pitt explores the rhetorical and heuristic role of metaphor in nanotechnology (e.g., the information system and the machine metaphors); and Natasha Myers discusses how the metaphoricity of life is shifting from computer programme to machine metaphors. Other interesting contributions to the nano-theme inlude Otávio Bueno’s paper on the visual evidence at the
nanoscale and Eric Winsberg’s piece on nanoscale models and simulations. SponGe is an open access (peer-reviewed) journal and all papers are downloadable here. Enjoy!

One of my longheld convictions is that the individual life trajectory is both one of the most neglected and most exciting aspects of biomedicine, not least when it comes to collecting and displaying biomedicine in museum exhibitions. Documents, images and objects from individual scientists, doctors, engineers and patients is a rich resource for museum curators — the individual and personal perspective in exhibitions adds a dimension of engagement similar to how biographical writing engages readers in a way that other forms of historical writing don’t.  

Therefore I was quite curious when I read about The Digital Lives Research Conference that will be held at the British Library, London, next week (9-11 February). The aim of the meeting is to bring archivists and curators together with scientists, historians, writers and IT specialists to discuss the challenge of organising and preserving personal digital archives. It will focus on the latest approaches to curating digital objects and archives, on the development of such archives from the point of view of the creators and researchers — writers, scientists and historians — and give an overview of current life-online and digital archives. The organisers are asking how libraries and archives can help people whose lives are becoming increasingly digital to secure, preserve and organise their personal archives of digital photographs, documents, correspondence and multimedia, and, second how to establish relationships with providers of online services and social systems technologies. Read more on www.bl.uk/digital-lives/confreg.html (btw. the conference is free).

I wonder how museums and individual material collections fit into this and similar initiatives? There is obviously more to individual lives than digitalizable photos, documents, correspondence and multimedia. Material things have always loomed large in most people’s lives, but as lives are becoming increasingly digital-based, the non-digitalizable material residue becomes, I believe, increasingly precious. How can museums help secure, preserve and organise such personal material collections? How can such collections be organised and preserved through social technologies? What is the museum 2.0 counterpart to digital lives?

Artist Phillip Warnell (see earlier posts about his movie ‘The Girl With X-Ray Eyes’ and his pill camera installation) is just now visiting Medical Museion, where he is researching possibilities for a number of visually and conceptually driven projects.

Firstly, Phillip is guest-editing an issue of The Performance Research Journal on the theme ‘Transplantations’ (see more here). As well as inviting contributions from an interdisciplinary group of academics, artists, biomedical researchers etc, the plan is to have a photo-editorial series of inserts, with images corresponding to broad notions of transplantation. Phillip is therefore working with Medical Museion’s collections on visual research forms, sourcing material that can be appropriate for publication in this context.

Secondly, Phillip has for some time been generating material towards the development of a theatrical/peformative project on the simultaneous spread of theatre and the plague across Europe. In 2007, whilst researching at Hotel Dieu in Lyon, he came across a pattern for an original plague doctor mask, part crow, part breathing apparatus. He have had three such replica masks manufactured, and is hoping to combine these photographically (at a later date) with the enigmatic plague ambulance held in the collection (a black synergy), along with undertaking collaboratively some more ‘forensic’ research into the rather mysterious origins of the ambulance itself.

Finally, he is working in a project financed by Leverhulme Trust (a fellowship) entitled ‘The Anxious Object’, looking for points of connectivity between objects and their properties (material and psychic), psychology, invisible phenomena or other discreet supplements. The model for this idea has been his performative group portrait working with the sole surviving baquet of Franz Mesmer, housed in the Museum of Medicine and Pharmacy in Lyon. This portrait involved photographing separately, and assembling digitally, a group who collectively surround this extraordinary therapeutic object, intended to balance one’s animal magnetism. The current research, significantly, draws from a number of biomedical archives and personal collections, assembling what may become a part publication, part sculptural project, one highlighting the essentially a-visual.

Our colleagues at the Norwegian Technical Museum in Oslo are opening a new exhibition, Kroppen/Usynlig Verden (The Body/Invisible World) next Friday.

Looks like it’s worth a travel! We may be back with a review (or if someone else writes a review, let us know).

Just a comment triggered by the announcement for the 3rd annual graduate student conference at the Department of Comparative Literature, Stanford University, 10-11 April 2009 on the theme avatars, personae, heteronyms and pseudonyms.

The organisers take the Sanskrit word avatāra as their point of departure (in Hindu theology, an avatar is a deity that descends into a lower realm, i.e., what Xians call an incarnation): ”How do we make ourselves visible, or readable, to the world at large? How do we portray or define ourselves­ to ourselves?”:

The virtualization of certain areas of our societies has provided new fora for experimenting with and reflecting on the images we construct and project, the personae we mimic and adopt, and the ways in which we interact with each other. That said, virtual culture may merely highlight issues that have emerged in different forms through visual art and literature both transnationally and transtemporally: for example, the use of gender-altering pseudonyms as a method of alternative self- representation; the adoption of myriad personae as a tool in artistic creation and performance; and the veneration of icons both religious and social.

Accordingly, the conference is proposed to deal with “the various descents, ascents, descendants and ascendancies of the avatar, as well as the various representational iterations of alternate or constructed personae, such as pseudonyms”, i.e. papers might include topics like:

• oracles and prophets
• icons as objects, icons as people
• masks
• poetic personae
• literary hoaxes; invented authors and their reception
• ghostwriters
• female writers with male pseudonyms and vice versa
• gender, performance, corporeality, drag, self-portraiture
• digital personae; dystopic/utopic movement toward the virtual
• archetypes (Jungian, etc.)
• “personality” or celebrity self-construction, “avatars” of human ideals, cultural “icon” worship, public personae and the culture of self-representation
• orality vs. textuality; textual history & hermeneutics
• hiding/obscuring vs. highlighting/exaggerating

For some reason it all reminds my of Richard Satava’s late 1990s notion of ‘medical avatar’. Satava — who had been in charge of the US Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA) combat care program and later their telemedicine project — had a vision of a multi-dimensional 3D-scanner representation of the whole body, which recorded all possible kinds of patient data — brain waves, blood flow, heartbeat, inner organ structure etc. — in real time:

The patient will walk through a doorway, like the security scanner at an airport, and we will get all the information we need from a true suspended hologram. You can actually feel the beat of the floating heart even though nothing is there

Forget about bloodless avatars in Second Life; Satava’s ‘medical avatar’ was a bloody realistic avatar. The head above (made by Alexander Tsiaras, founder and CEO of AnatomicalTravelogue) is taken from a critical paper by Claudia Reiche where it is accompanied by a quote from Satava:

What you are looking at here is bits and bytes. Zeros and ones. But it’s also a living, breathing, caring human being. This may well be a way to introduce the future to you.

Would be interesting to see if somebody will use the occasion of the Stanford meeting to follow the notion of ‘medical avatar’ through the last ten years of multidimensional medical imaging literature. If so, send an 500 words abstract to avatarsconference@gmail.com by 10 January.

If you are interested in visualization in biomedicine (and read German) you might want to take a look at the autumn 2008 issue of the journal Die Gegenwort that focuses on visualization in science. Some articles look relevant for medical museum curators, for example:

• “Was heißt ‘Iconic/Visual Turn’?”, in which Doris Bachmann-Medick asks if the iconic/visual is opposed to words.
• “Visuelle Evidenz in der Biomedizin”, in which Frank Rösl takes a look at the Western Blot
• “Unter Beobachtung”, in which Ingeborg Reichle looks into the laboratory
• “‘Nature’ über ‘Pictures’”, in which Horst Bredekamp takes a close look at Nature magazine’s piictures.

More here: http://www.gegenworte.org/heft-20/heft20.html