Adam Bencard

In the recent issue of Curator there is an interesting and empirically well-founded paper on visitor experience of exhibitions, entitled IPOP: A Theory of Experience Preference. It lays out a typology called IPOP of what draws people to exhibitions – Ideas, People, Objects and Physical. The authors claim that an individual’s relative attraction to the […]

We are (very!) happy to announce that Canadian researcher/artist Francois-Joseph Lapointe will be in residence at the Museion and the CBMR Section for Science Communication for three weeks during May and one week during October. Francois-Joseph is head of the laboratory of Molecular Ecology and Evolution at Université de Montréal and full professor in the […]

A good friend of mine (thanks Zacha!) alerted me to this wonderful and very metabolically relevant passage from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol: “You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost. “I don’t,” said Scrooge. “What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?” “I don’t know,” said Scrooge. “Why do […]

On of the (many) issues when trying to think about object agency (as I’m trying to do at the moment – read more here, here and also here and here) is that it necessitates thinking about what consciousness and intentionality are and that leads down a rabbit hole of philosophical debates spanning decades, multiple traditions […]

As I wrote last week, Thomas and I are trying to work up a paper on the rhetoric of object agency (preliminarily entitled ‘Do Things Act?’). Here are a few thoughts from the reading process: Most reasonable and clearheaded account of object agency so far: Lambros Malafouris’ work on nonhuman agency. He has co-edited a […]

In 2010, Thomas and I wrote a paper titled ’Do Things Talk?’, published in Susanne Lehmann-Brauns, Christian Sichau, Helmuth Trischler (eds.), The Exhibition as Product and Generator of Scholarship (the volume is available as a .pdf here). In the paper, we discussed the problems and pitfalls surrounding the still current ‘things that talk’ rhetoric. Our […]

Datoen for vores arrangement Jeg kæmper, derfor er jeg nærmer sig. Vi glæder os til at invitere indenfor i auditoriet på Medicinsk Museion til en aften om filosofi, kampsport og livet i kroppen. Du kan bestille billetter og se praktiske detaljer her. Kamp, kamptræning og filosofi Arrangementet er en del af Golden Days festival om […]

I am currently in the process of formulating some thoughts on objects in collections (read more here and here) which I hope will coalesce into a proposal for an object-oriented exhibition.  While thinking and reading about what happens when objects are put in exhibitions, I came across a useful concept from film theory: The Kuleshov […]

Mia Ridge wrote a very nice blog post recently on object-centered and object-driven approaches in the context of online exhibitions. Mia asks whether the object-driven exhibition format that most museums employ might clash with the object-centered practices that most often drive online exhibition. I won’t comment directly on Mia’s interesting question of whether there is “a […]

A few months ago, I gave a small talk at an internal seminar here at Museion where I presented some thoughts about how to further our engagement with objects and how to take materiality more seriously. Here is the talk: Not just a museum with things, but a museum about thingness – possible strategies for […]