curation

Careful readers of this blog may remember we opened an Investigation Room here at Medical Museion in connection with the Copenhagen Culture Night in October 2010. The room originated on the initiative of postdoc Lucy Lyons as a public venue for her project on drawing as a method to communicate experience with museum objects: Medical Museion’s Investigation Room […]

Then you could apply for the job as their Collections Assistant, working with personal material associated with Florence Nightingale, items relating to the Crimean War and nursing artefacts, a letter archive, and a rare book collection; in addition to curatorial duties the job involves working with a wide range of people, including academic researchers and family historians. Contact the Director, Natasha […]

A couple of months ago, I announced a three day meeting titled ‘Cultures of Anatomical Collections’, which some of our good medical museum colleagues in Leiden were about to put together for mid-February 2012. Their aim was to explore anatomical preparations and collections as cultural heritage rather than scientific collections; they were interested in what the technical details of anatomical preparations tell us about […]

My idea for organizing the Sensuous Object workshop began over a year ago. It originated with my interest in (re) placing the object as central and focusing on the sensuous object, i.e. how we sense objects, come to know them, are affected by them and their presence, how objects can become outcomes of research, how […]

Let me start with a quote: We need to acknowledge at the outset that museums are in the object acquisition business. New acquisitions are the lifeblood of museums. Like sharks that will die if they stop swimming, museums must collect to stay alive. These were the words of Tufts University art historian Andrew McClellan in […]

Philosopher Ian Bogost recently posted this lecture that he gave a month ago at the Third Object Oriented Ontology symposium held at The New School in New York. In the talk, he discusses the photographer Garry Winogrand, who is famous as a street photographer, documenting life in mid-20th century America through hundreds of thousands of […]

I love playing Angry Birds when I’m tired, but I never thought I would play a game that helped curate a museum collection. But now I know better after having read an interesting post on the Open Objects blog by Mia Ridge (Open University) about the session on ‘Entrepreneurship and Social Media”, which she chaired yesterday at the Museums Galleries Scotland conference. Mia’s […]

Eventually, the final program for the annual Artefacts meeting (this year in Leiden), has just been sent out. Three of us here at Medical Museion (Louise Whiteley, Niels Vilstrup and myself) are going — here are Louise’s and my abstracts: Louise Whiteley: Preserving the material culture of functional neuroimaging: Objects of process Functional neuroimaging research […]

I thought of sending this abstract to the Artefacts meeting in the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden, 25-27 September (this year’s theme is ‘Conceptualizing, Collecting and Presenting Recent Science and Technology’): COLLECTION IMPOSSIBLE: Distributed curatorship as an alternative to centralised acquisitioning Centralised collecting of the artefacts from contemporary science, technology and medical (STM) visual and material culture […]

How to display artefacts that cannot be touched or sometimes even seen, is an issue that has cropped up frequently in museums, particularly in medical museums wanting to exhibit molecular, chemical and genomic items. Thinking about this was part of the inspiration for the Sensuous Object Workshop in September here at Medical Museion. So it was […]