Museion concept

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 […]

Medical Museion and this blog is closed today (Monday) and tomorrow. We are going to a conference center 30 km north of Copenhagen for a two-day internal department/museum conference to discuss how we can improve the integration between our different activities (research, teaching, collecting, public outreach and exhibits). Here’s the venue: the Magleås conference center, a perfect place for small (10-35 people) workshops.

Medical museums do not necessarily need to be in dialogue with contemporary science and technology; they can remain safely embedded in the past. But if they have the ambition—like we do—to contrast possible biomedical futures with the medical past (so as to be able to create some really engaging exhibitions), medical museums are well advised to make some educated guesses […]

On Friday 7 March scholars from Medical Museion at University of Copenhagen, the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden, the Wellcome Collection and the Science Museum in London, and the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM) at University of Manchester will come together to discuss how we can bring our research and collections dealing with late 19th and 20th century medicine […]

Speaking about biomedical animation and displays: iMed Studios have also just released this 2 min. holiday greeting promotional video which is useful New Year’s fuel for imagining how biomedical animations could be incorporated in future medical museum settings. For example, I like the holographic display of the heart model. Maybe this could be done as augmented reality (see earlier post here) as well? It’s also […]

In my humble opinion, transhumanism is one of the most interesting intellectual movements today. It attracts some philosophers; quite a few high-ranking people from the fields of nanotech, biotech, information tech and cognitive science; and some accomplished artists and writers as well, like Michel Houellebecq. It has also drawn some severe criticisms, for example from Francis Fukuyama (in Our Posthuman Future, 2002). Yet it […]

I think it would be worthwhile to think a little more about ephemera in a contemporary biomedical context (cf. yesterday’s post + Jessica’s and Mike’s comments to it). The term ‘ephemera’ (n. pl. of ephêmeros = short-lived) is often used by collectors for documents that were produced for the moment and not for long shelf-life: posters, recipes, advertisements, […]