material studies

Many of the objects held by museums of science and medicine are significant because they have been used in the production of knowledge and scientific enquiry. This blog post discusses how we might display such objects in ways that draw on their potential to generate scientific knowledge as well as their cultural history and materiality. […]

As part of her Velux professorship in Copenhagen in September and October 2014, Professor Annemarie Mol will be offering a series of master classes on ‘Material semiotic explorations’ in conjunction with the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Health and Society (Center for Sundhed og Samfund – CSS). Below is information on the master classes and how […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

This post was originally published on the official blog of the International Congress of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, held in Manchester 22-28 July, as an appetiser for the paper “Understanding social media in STEM museums: the lessons from establishing a bio-hacking laboratory” that I co-authored with Karin Tybjerg and which Karin presented in the […]

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 […]

I wrote the other day that taking down museum exhibitions could be as much fun as building new ones. That was a pretty spontaneous tongue-in-cheek comment triggered by our conservator Nanna Gerdes’ enthusiastic twitter series of images (see @NaGerdes and storified here, here and here) from the process of taking down three old exhibition rooms […]

As part of the upcoming workshop “It’s Not What You Think: Communicating Medical Materialities”, we are delighted to announce that the pioneering bioartist Oron Catts will be giving a public keynote lecture on Friday March 8th at 17.00 in the auditorium at Medical Museion. Oron Catts is a prominent and defining figure in the emerging […]