haptics

As the It’s Not What You Think: Communicating Medical Materialities workshop in March, we experimented with different formats – from quick-fire intro presentations to break the interdisciplinary ice, to a hands-on object investigation session. In the object session (video here), participants were sorted into four groups, and entered an empty exhibition room to find one table per group, […]

Here are some of the objects that were demonstrated (touched, fingered, fondled, caressed, stroken etc.) during the touching seminar yesterday. Here are bundles of hair from an often-caressed cat: And here is a toy:    At least two participants brought coffee/tea mugs, and two of us chose to bring small objects that they like to […]

During the last 48 hours my mind has mulled over the latest announcement for Medical Museion’s internal Thursday lunch seminar series — with our own PhD student Emma Peterson, who will present her work on methods for investigating tactile aesthetics. It’s a PhD project within the framework of Jan Eric Olséns project on the history of blindness from a […]

Some of us from Medical Museion are going to try a new session format at this year’s Swedish STS-meeting, which takes place at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, 2-4 May. Titled “In Medias Res: The aesthetics of scientific, technological and medical things”, the idea of the session is to present some of […]

At an internal workshop here at Medical Museion, we recently discussed the problematic aspects of distributing objects from the collection on the web. The web surely poses a great opportunity for museums to get stuff out there and thereby to reach a broader audience – hopefully then inspiring them to an actual museum visit – […]

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 […]

Some of us here at Medical Museion have been talking about submitting a proposal for a workshop at the annual Swedish STS meeting, which Nina Wormbs, Sabine Höhler and Adam Netzén at the Division of History of Science and Technology are organising at the Royal College of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm 2-4 May next year. The theme for […]

Our own Lucy Lyons and Anette Stenslund are organising a two-day workshop titled ‘The Sensuous Object’ here at Medical Museion, September 29-30. ‘The Sensuous Object’ is an interdisciplinary, participatory workshop concerned with ways we actually engage with objects and aimed at researchers in all disciplines interested in the materiality of actual artefacts and ways of […]

Our own Jan Eric Olsén has received 3.2 mill DKK (about 400.000 euro) from the Velux Foundation for a research project on the history of blindness, titled “Vision and touch: a material history of the world of blindness”. Drawing on archival sources from the Danish Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired, as well as the big ophthalmological and blind-historical collections in Medical Museion, the […]

There must be a literature on touch somewhere. Someone must have recorded in a diary or a letter the fugitive moment of what they felt when they picked up a special object or touched another being. There must be a trace of their hands somewhere. Touch tells you what you need to know. It tells […]