- possible roles of Med-Art in communicating contemporary scientific process with the general public in digital age

Thought experiment and democratising science
A conventional mission of museums is to preserve objects of the past and to evoke appreciations towards historical events represented by the objects. In this sense, historical process of science progress is naturally a long-standing theme. Also naturally, the progress of technoscience, or more precisely, impact of technoscience and its interaction with contemporary life, should be taken into account in the context of contemporary digitalisation. Herein challenges arise from the changing scales and appearance of historical objects – most masterpieces of significant biomedical improvement are microscopic scale, and the appearances of their relevant “artefacts”, if macroscopic, are reduced to something lack of immediate emotion-eliciting effects, such as a bio-chip . Lack of visibility and recognisiblity makes contemporary biomedical artefacts scarcely fulfil the raison d’être of museum in traditional sense, albeit narratives that contextualise the artefacts in the fabric of knowledge production might provide additional values .

However, thanks to digitalisation that challenges museum curators with microscopic scales, Sci-Art/ Med-Art has been sprouting, embodying the idea that scientific images are messages and inscriptions to be transformed and re-interpreted through various media. In a genetic way of speaking, Med-Art creations emerge from cross-linking and exchanging of information borne in biomedical artefacts, despite their extents of visibility. In a way, such creation has been practised in Sci-Fi production for a long time, where certain key concepts of biomedicine can be concretely visualised, and the visualisation would then be transformed and/ or converted in order to be incorporated into plots. When “elements in science” are talked about in Sci-Fi, it is the element to be extracted and converted, but not its direct contribution to revealing the truth, that concerns scriptwriters and producers. These elements are not necessarily situated within particular web of knowledge production as scientists know it. Therefore, they are free to be used as raw materials for thought experiment with no confinement in scientific routine.

Whether Sci-Fi conveys science-based imaginations or merely responds to some vague, “general” science fantasies remains controversial. However, science communicators should find that owing to Sci-Fi, there are two concepts to be implemented. First, using “snapshots of science” as raw materials of thought experiment has been successfully introduced to Sci-Art and not running the risk of shallowness. A certain number of Sci-Art work are produced by scientists, who appreciate aesthetic values implied in science, or from collaborative art project with academia. Second, popular Sci-Fi producers appeal to audience with reflections on some social connections and emotions. This explains why Frankenstein-alikes never die on screen but evolve alongside progress in genetics and biotechnology. In the cases of Med-Art as shown below, it is also the connection between life experiences and the artwork that triggers emotional engagement with the displayed content. Whilst contemporary biomedicine increasingly seems to be a “buzz idea” that attracts popular science fans, one should keep in mind that the inter-subjective interactions might actually develop a long-term impact on the audience .

Recent studies show that computerised images displayed on traditional media have created potential routes to democratic science by engaging a wide range of groups . Publicly accessible images provide room for re-contextualising and re-interpreting scientific information by a variety of audiences. Thus there enters inter-textuality of scientific images into the sight of communication studies and science studies . Meanwhile, historical studies of science show that messages inscribed in image might pose higher independence from text in knowledge production, challenging traditional textualist view. Given their independence, can biomedical images on display go beyond the limitation to the end product of scientific investigation? Can they tell narratives about the dynamic process of knowledge production on the one hand, and on the other, induce re-interpretations by the audiences, leading to inter-subjective exchange?

In search of positive answers, I propose some discussions on communication role of biomedical artefacts on display, namely the role as boundary object amongst different arenas. One-on-one in-depth interviews with 1) curators of Med-Art, 2) biomedical practitioners, and 3) non-scientific professionals together suggest that Med-Art can elicit “implicit interactions” between the artefcts and different concerned groups. Interviews are Taiwan-based and benefiting from the fact that both digital Med-Art and science communication are in their infancy in Taiwan, leaving experiment on digital Med-Art as boundary object an untamed territory. The term “implicit interaction” is coined to refer to psychological, long-term effects of intersubjectivity between displayed artefacts and the audience. Such interaction is distinguished from physical interactions taking place immediately upon operating the artefacts. It is shown that intersubjectivity contributes to exchange not only between science and non-science, but also between esoteric and exoteric circles of particular science fields. Formation of esoteric and exoteric circles in biomedical sub-fields is a result of labour division, as well as disciplinary differentiation and fusion. Which attributes a web-like structure to decision-making process in contemporary technoscience, reshaping science communication to actions more than one-way flow of knowledge from science to non-science.

Present interviews suggest that audiences with diverse backgrounds possess autonomy of democratic attitudes towards biomedicine. The autonomy is obvious in Taiwan, where two-way science communication awaits development and the audiences did not encounter Med-Art with preconditions. As dialogues still happened through simply “seeing” digital Med-Art, I propose that it is possible for digital Med-Art to realise the spirit of web 2.0 by democratising biomedicine in, retrospectively, the latest stage of public understanding of science. Meanwhile, digital art may also be a solution to representing historical contingency in biomedical research.

Digitalised biomedicine, digitalised life
Digital technoscience have blurred the distinction between tangible and intangible in contemporary everyday life. In a wide range of life experiences, it does not require particular knowledge to interpret and acknowledge the “reality” conveyed by computer-aided representations: Visual memories of tangible things are consolidated in digital space. Such preserved memories seldom trigger doubts and serve as a basis of constructing our recognition of the past, whilst in this case, one thing could be considered as “material” in a pre-computer sense is the storage device. Through GPS one may believe that a street geographically remote does exist as shown on the screen. That is, one builds trust in the street’s material existence grounding on seemingly non-material evidence. Meanwhile, the hidden architecture of everyday digital technologies remains black-boxed but simultaneously subject to public openness and not encrypted as science is. The black boxes do not obscure what is visibly comprehensible. Interpretations rather happen in an intuitive way than rely upon prior knowledge.

Contemporary biomedicine has also witnessed the blurred line between tangible and intangible. Routine practices in biomedical enterprise often involve operations at molecular or subtler level. Regarding history of science, computerisation of biomedical research can be seen as an extension of instrumentation that raises enquiries in scientific data as messages transferred – and transformed – via new media. Numerous literatures have thrown light on instrumentation in modern science, but how computerised instrumentation has situated contemporary biomedicine in the web of information communication is missing, except for science communication studies concerned about a broader range of sciences. Nowadays biomedical practitioners perceive their explored reality with technoscience that is more sophisticated than their home digital video, and facts extracted from the former merit higher power to change public worldview. However, in digital age, the way of generating, storing, and sharing scientific data does not fundamentally defer from the way employed by the world outside biomedical laboratory. When technoscience has re-shaped the form of collective memory of the public sphere, it has done the same to scientists whose collective memory is formed and preserved by their research programmes.

Nonetheless, unlike everyday visual technologies, there could be reluctance to open the black-boxed process of imaging and to publicly release knowledge that constitutes the interpretative framework of biomedical images. Reading and interpretation of biomedical images do not happen intuitively but on a more knowledge-driven basis. Usually, messages borne in biomedical images are not reaching the public sphere until translated and/ or reformatted. More importantly, images are presented in the public sphere as rather scientific results than process, rather fixed than fluid. Only scientists can retrieve meta-messages of biomedical images and designate meanings to them within laboratory walls. The dynamics of imagery in ongoing investigation is muted in non-expert circulation of scientific images. Even scientists might ignore the fact that unpublished meta-images are messages, being transferred, reproduced, and interpreted from medium to medium , where images as epistemic objects would eventually be incorporated into a coherent system of explanation.

Asymmetry in access to the intermediate status of information between science and public is a norm in modern knowledge production. This resonates with asymmetries in assessment and reception of produced knowledge amongst social spheres. In the case of everyday visual technologies, one does not have to “conceive it right” before “perceiving it right”, but he/ she would encounter difficulty in building conceptual and emotional connections with a PET (positron emission tomography) scan image of his/ her own body, if he/ she was not an insider. One could hardly find out “how they see through the body and locate the problem” but accept the scientifically-approved interpretations as unproblematic. Moreover, as mentioned above, black boxes in biomedical techniques exist at the interface not only between science and non-science but also amongst diverse biomedical subfields. To borrow languages from communication studies, when scientific images travel inter-contextually from medium (e. g. computer 1 in fMRI room) to medium (e. g. computer 2 at neuroscience laboratory), encoded messages are repeatedly decoded, interpreted and again encoded into another black box to be further transferred. This could be taken for granted by both scientists and the public, albeit for different reasons.

To deal with the above asymmetries and neglected mechanisms of biomedical process, museums should give out narratives more than iconographic display of biomedical achievements. Let alone display instrument that the general audience – including the exoteric circle experts of a particular instrument – can by no means comprehend intuitively. Two-way communication must take place for the sake of actually situating contemporary, digitalised biomedicine in contemporary, digitalised life. New angles for understanding the practice and impact of biomedicine are to be inspired. A Med-Art curator pointed out during the interview, “The audience is not to be educated nor the terminal receiver of authorised knowledge.”
Namely, the audience should be a source of interpretations of biomedicine at work and in society. The former calls for creative decoding and “re-encoding” messages of biomedical images, and the latter implies that the subjectivity of the audience – as individuals – is to be highlighted in museological arena.

Democratic biomedicine, unstable biomedicine
Highlighting the subjectivity of the audience, or intersubjectivity between the audience and the displayed artefacts, may be done either implicitly or explicitly. Interviews show that both ways are appealing to audience, as they reveal the possibilities that individuals are not merely objects of biomedical exploration but capable of having dialogues with the authority of biomedicine. For instances of explicit inter-subjectivity, it is noteworthy that in Taiwan, such appeal is significant: due to conventional belief in medical objects as symbolic of bad health, senior audience seldom appreciate display of body part images, medical device and so on. However, according to interviews, senior audience have shown strong interest in display of/ TV programming on Med-Art, including cadaver images (displayed vividly in plastic), animated intra-cellular physiology, “body farm” creations inspired by genetic recombination, as well as interactive game operated by a wheelchair equipped with digital device and wired to computer. To the elderly in Taiwan, a wheelchair is conventionally considered as a symbol of the underprivileged group and to be stayed away from. But at a Med-Art exhibition, local senior audience talked about the wheelchair game with each other like this: ”this video game is so funny that you should come and try.” For another example, a retired science teacher, who had taken anti-depressants for a long period, responded to the curator that his anxiety about being “abnormal” was washed away by the idea that the boundary between “norm” and “abnormal” can be transcended.

Implicit inter-subjectivity engages the audience with less activeness. Despite the debates on McLuhan’s spectrum of “hot” and “cool” media , I borrow the “cool media” definition and “light-through” metaphor to describe Med-Art that induces implicit idea exchange between the audience and the displayed artefacts. That is, it requires active engagement and imagination to project one’s own life experiences onto the screen displaying a piece of Med-Art. Based on interviews, such projections and exchanges are obvious amongst audience who are often thought of “general experts”. They are used to intellectual thinking and not reluctant to deal with high-tech concepts. Although the details of biomedical imaging seem to vague to them, they confidently leave the complicated technical details behind and associate information in the artefacts to their own experiences. Quoting from interviews, implicit inter-subjectivity took place when the audience encountered biomedical images that trigger “imaginations about how it was like when I was an embryo” or “contemporary instruments are actually media that represent specific perspectives for the ‘truth’ inside my oral cavity”. A life science student, though familiar with anatomy of human brain, emotionally thought the CT (computerised tomography) scan image of a friend’s brain of “amazing. As seen on TV”. Another audience, who is also a Med-Art artist with life science background, addressed that Med-Art provides different ways of seeing and understanding science by extracting process and concepts from the seem-to-be unproblematic system of biomedical practice.

Amongst the potentials of Med-Art pointed out by present interviews, what is missing is exploration of historical fluidity in biomedicine. I suggest that such exploration cannot be restricted to introducing knowledge about frozen extractions of laboratory science. Instead, it can be inspired by preservation and display of process-based art, such as net-art. The reason to release biomedical process from merely “knowledge” is that, surprisingly, results from the interviews in some senses reverse a stereotyped manner of public understanding of science. The audiences have got engaged in their inter-subjective dialogues with biomedical concepts, without awaiting the flow of relevant knowledge from experts to their end. Implementation of “deficit model” or the idea “popularisation of science” might have been a consequence of knowledge gradient in the past, but it seems not to equal the prerequisite to democratic science. Then, getting back to the topic on the challenges contemporary biomedicine brings onto museum, is the abovementioned spontaneous exchange all we need to respond to the challenges?

I would like to suggest that biomedical research process, as well as the developments, be definitely incorporated into museological narratives in Sci-Art format. These stories are science histories that the museums owe the audience, and the dynamic but not Whiggish narratives should be there to remind of that historical contingents still occur in contemporary context. Sci-Art or Med-Art is a creative way to 1) decode the information taken for granted in routine practice and 2) generate aesthetic and emotional responses to rational and objective science. A piece of Med-Art work can be a recombination of snapshots and fragments of the dynamic whole. It can be a vehicle for visualising ongoing research from non-insider’s eye.

Experiments on displaying digital art have exemplify possible ways of collecting and displaying digitalised, microscopic biomedicine in artistic manner. Self-reflective representations of “digital art at work” did not spoil the allure of illusionary artwork but, to the contrary, enhanced the pleasure because sophisticated art skills are shown . Meanwhile, it is addressed that net-art preservation could borrow some strategies from archaeological museums where fragments turn resembles of unstable, contingent activities . To historians of science, it is not new to deal with science as human activity that interact with time and space. Scientific data and device act as rather transferable, epistemic objects in constructing explanations than documented remains of any closed questions. To scientists, instability also exists: documentation of data does not impede openness to future enquiries in present results. In the historical sense of scientific activity, it is always difficult to distinguish meta-data of particular research from the finalised version. Contingency should not be missing from museological narratives of science. When digitalisation offers approaches to capturing and re-contextualising biomedical data, and the real world is getting used to the blurring line between tangible and intangible, there seems to be no resistance to introduce digital Med-Art as an interdisciplinary solution in science museums.

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