visual studies

The registration deadline for the upcoming symposium on scientific visualization in Copenhagen, Tuesday 25 September and Wednesday 26 September 2012, is Friday 14 September. You Need To See This — Pushing the boundaries of scientific visualization should be of interest to everyone interested in how science is visualized, especially at the cellular and molecular level, in science, in […]

I fredags var jeg til symposium om web-tv og museumsformidling i Emdrup sammen med en hel del andre video-nysgerrige museumsfolk. Der var inviteret fine folk fra Tate og MoMA, der hver  især holdt oplæg om hvordan de havde taget deres første spæde skridt ind på videomediets røde løber (for flere år siden). Efter pausen kom […]

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 […]

The last issue of ICOM’s e-Newsletter (June-July 2011) carries a short summary of Peter Greenaway‘s presentation “The New Visual Literacy” at ICOM’s 2011 Annual Meeting, in which the British film maker showed images to encourage ‘visual awareness’ among museum people and support his dictum: ‘the image always has the last word’: Displaying his signature wit and stage presence, he spoke […]

I have just had a proposal accepted by Nordisk Sommeruniversitet who will be holding their Summer Symposium in Falsterbo, Sweden, July 30th – August 7th, 2011. NSU is organized by a Swedish non-profit organization sponsored by the Nordic Council of Ministers. It focuses on fostering cross-disciplinary research networks in the Nordic countries There are eight study […]

I am currently researching a piece on rollators. Based on artistic research investigating the aesthetics and materiality of these essential but perhaps under appreciated objects I am struggling with finding some further information. It is generally accepted that the first rollator appeared in the 1970s and was designed by Bernt Leander from Sweden. There is no […]

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 […]

Two weeks ago I mentioned that the Museums Journal had published Ken Arnolds and my Dogme 95-style manifesto for creating science, technology and medicine exhibitions, first presented last September at a conference organised by Medical Museion in Copenhagen. We have now received the journal’s permission to publish the full version of the manifesto. Enjoy and/or criticize! Just over 15 years ago, […]

Many of the most essential things in recent biomedicine are too small or too fast for the naked eye to see. At the session The biomedical invisibles, at the conference in September, Henrik Treimo and Victoria Höög addressed the issue of how to represent such invisibles. How can we make objects, which escape an immediate […]

At the conference in September, Kim Sawchuk talked about why, in this micro-molecular age, we are still hanging on to the fantasy of travelling inside the anatomical spaces of our own bodies. Kim admits that she herself has become what she calls a ‘biotourist’, a person who visits medical museums in order to experience the […]

Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein’s presentation at the conference on “Contemporary medical science and technology as a challenge to museums” in Copenhagen last month was about the politics of knowledge production, with medical museums as a case study. One of Roger’s arguments was that the museums, by placing their historical objects in new, global contexts, […]

Instead of saying that we investigate an object, we often use the verb ‘inspect’. According to my dictionary, the ‘in-‘ prefix is an intensifier and the ‘-spect’ suffix is derived from the Latin verb specere, meaning ‘to look at’, ‘to see’. To ‘inspect’ then is more than just seeing or looking at something. It means […]