Museion concept

I’m thinking about one of the points that Joel Garreau brought up in an article titled “Is There a Future for Old-Fashioned Museums?” in The Washington Post two months ago (7 Oct). Referring to Wiliam J. Mitchell’s (director of the MIT Design Laboratory) writings about the digitalization of urban environments, Garreau points out that “the vast choices available on the Web […]

As I hinted at a couple of days ago, Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the ‘Museum’ has stimulated my thoughts about how the activities here at Medical Musieon could be understood in terms of a global ‘Museum-at-large’. The ‘Museum’ is only one side of our coin, however. The other is that as a unit at the University of Copenhagen we belong to the large subfamily of institutions around the world known as ‘university […]

Medical Museion’s first large temporary exhibition — “Oldetopia: On Age and Ageing” —  opened last Thursday (11 October) and the following night (which was the Copenhagen Culture Night) we had about 2500 visitors in six hours between 6pm and 12pm. Here are some photos from Friday night (click for more here): 

Calum Storrie, who participated in the workshop “Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context” here in Copenhagen three weeks ago, has just sent the following post-workshop responses to our future plans for Medical Museion as they were presented during a tour around the exhibitions and storage facilities (I have added the links): ——— I wanted to clarify some things that were implied […]

The Annual Report of Medical Museion (Årsskrift for Medicinsk Museion) has just been published and is about to be distributed. This post has been created for readers’ comments. You can choose to air your ire or stimulate our vanity receptors. (You can write in English or in any Scandinavian language.) If you are not on our snail mail distribution list (which […]

The Faculty of Health Sciences at our university has a “Great Clearance Day” on Thursday 21 June. The purpose is to prepare for the big faculty building reallocation exercise that is going to take place in the summer and early autumn. The faculty’s technical dept writes: This will be the day when we will clear our shelves and the […]

Since 2004 Medical Museion has used a common commercial microarray (Affymetrix’s GeneChip®) as an icon for our collecting and display efforts. The GeneChip has many of the features that characterise the ongoing biomedical ‘revolution’: it symbolises molecularisation and digitalisation of medicine (at least in diagnostics) and it’s a fine example of the progressive miniaturisation of […]

Next week is a busy ‘presence’ week at Medical Museion. As already announced we are arranging three public events — 1) a seminar with Paris-based author and curator Jens Hauser on Tuesday at 2pm; 2) a guest lecture with Sepp Gumbrecht, Stanford University on Wednesday at 3pm; and 3) the  workshop ‘Making Sense or Sensing the Made’ on Thursday morning. For details, […]

(Semi-internal discussion in Danish:) Jeg synes diskussionen om Sørens plan for indsamlingsprocedurer på seminaret i går var meget interessant, og Ion og jeg snakkede lidt opfølgende om det her i formiddags. Som flere var inde på, så kredsede diskussionen mere eller mindre direkte omkring integrationen af forskning, indsamling og samlinger.

On Monday 29 January 2007, we (the Medical Museion research group) will present our research project on the historiography and museology of contemporary biomedicine at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm. Here’s the program: Thomas Söderqvist: Introduction: The Problem Søren Bak-Jensen: Out of Time: Collecting and Storing Kidneys for Transplantation. Hanne Jessen: What is a Laboratory Animal? A […]

It’s only two weeks left before Medical Museion enters the centenary year 2007. Our earlier incarnation — the Medical History Museum — was established in 1906-1907. Strictly arithmetically speaking the centenary was in 2005-2006 — but like everyone celebrated the year 2000 as the Millenium year (and not 1999, which strictly speaking was the 2000th year after zero), […]

Kulturnatten mindede mig om en gammel diskussion vi har haft igennem årenes løb — nemmelig, hvorvidt vi skal modernisere eller lade være. Måske er det sådan, at mange af vores besøgende kan lide stedet netop fordi det ikke er 100% tip-top istandsat og professionelt. Dvs. at de vender tilbage kulturnat efter kulturnat fordi huset bærer […]