Museion concept

One of the problems for museums that want to display contemporary medicine is that many medical devices are hopeless as museum artefacts because they are so damned anonymous. Take CT scanners for example: huge white or light blue plastic/metal boxes, that’s all. People who have been scanned for some serious condition may have strong personal feelings about such artefacts — but for […]

The name of this blog was chosen without thinking too much about it. We had some discussions a couple of years ago about the somewhat vague term ‘biomedicine’, but felt that Alberto Cambrosio and Peter Keating’s definition in Biomedical Platforms, 2003 (see earlier post here) was useful. The ‘display’-part never gave rise to any discussions. I guess it seemed pretty straigthforward — we […]

At last, here’s my final post in the series of rationalities for bringing art and science together in science, technology and medical museums. This one also has to do with the issue of identity formation (see last post), but now among museum curators. Here’s the argument: In the eyes of the general adult public, STM-museums are usually […]

In five earlier posts I have discussed why science, technology and medical museums are increasingly employing art in their exhibitions. The fourth reason in my list of ideal-typical rationalities for bringing art and science together goes like this: If you believe in what some sociologists have recently called ‘biocitizenship’, i.e., the biomedical version of what European bureaucrats […]

The third item on my list of ideal-typical reasons why museums want to bring art and science together is that art is a great cross-disciplinary integrator. The argument goes like this: As culturally established factories for the production of meaning in the knowledge society, the humanities have a strong disciplinary function. In other words, our research practices […]

As I wrote in the last post, our co-operation with the Danish Museum of Art and Design in 2004 was the founding rationale for our pilgrimage into art, design and science. Then things went rapidly. In 2006 we engaged Canadian-British artist-curator Martha Fleming to help us organise a workshop on ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum […]

Which were Medical Museion’s reasons for going into art and aesthetics? The first on my list of ideal-typical rationalities is what I call “once-aesthetically-corrupted, always-corrupted”. The argument goes like this: As Sepp Gumbrecht pointed out in his seminal 2004 book The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, most humanities scholars, including historians, are engaged in […]

Why has art and aesthetics then entered the science, technology and medicine (STM) museum sector? This was not the case 15 or 20 years ago. What has happened in the last two decades? I will not attempt to give any historical, sociological or political explanations for the flow of art and aesthetics into STM-museums; that’s […]

Museums are a significant part of the global science learning and experience economy. There are many hundreds, maybe thousands, of science, technology and medical museums and science centers around the world. The Association of Science-Technology Centers presently lists 447 institutions, but they don’t list small, regional and local museums. This STM-sector of the museum industry (let’s forget about science […]

If I were an American I would probably have rushed to my computer already last Tuesday night to proudly announce on this blog that I and Medical Museion had been given Medicoprisen. The prize has been awarded annually by the industry organisation for medical devices in Denmark (Medicoindustrien) since 2001. The industry exports for more than 40 billion DKK per […]