visual studies

In late March, Rikke Schmidt Kjærgaard (which several of us here at Medical Museion met when she gave a seminar here a couple of years ago and who is now working at the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit, University of Cambridge) is organising a meeting of great relevance for anyone interested in biomedicine on display, whether in […]

My email inbox is continuously inundated with announcements for workshops, seminars, colloquia, conferences and other kinds of academic gatherings, covering all possible shades of the academic spectrum. Everything of the slightest interest for our job here in the museum gets some attention. I must admit that over and over again I get a feeling of deja […]

Ever noticed that the uniform resource locator (a.k.a. url) of this blog is www.corporeality.net/museion? I’ve just realised there is a url-alike in the same business as ours, namely www.CORPOrealities.org. CORPOrealities is the website of a research project “situated on the very boundary of visual and performative arts and biomedicine”, which free-lance Viennese sociologist and artist Christina […]

I was supposed to give a presentation at the one-day meeting ‘Stories Between Art and Science’ in Oporto, Portugal, next week but had to decline because I’m on paternal leave with my youngest daughter in September and October. Anyway, the programme has just been distributed and it looks tantalising. Speakers include: * Michael Punt: Provisional […]

Michael Kimmelman’s article in yesterday’s New York Times on why so few museum visitors seem to take their time to really look at things is inspirational. Not to mention the 419 readers’ comments. If you ever needed a set of arguments for the benefit of more intense looking in museums, here they are. Next question is — what […]

Ever wondered why hospitals are associated with the colour green? Green surgery scrubs, green operating theatres, green-painted instruments, and so on and so forth. A temporary exhibition called ‘Artifact Spotlight: The Colour of Medicine’ at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa shows how the colour green conquered the hospital world during the 20th century: Green was a […]

In addition to Split and Splice, we have recently opened another and smaller exhibition in the reception hall — Eye Catchers and Swagger Images: Research in Poster Format (Danish: Blikfang og blærebilleder: forskning i posterformat) — with a selection of our collection of scientific posters, from the mid-1980s to the present. The idea behind the exhibition goes back to August 2007, when we […]

The Institute for Cultural Inquiry/Kulturlabor and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin are opening the exhibition ‘Hothouse Archives’ by visual artist and theorist Suzanne Anker tomorrow at 7pm. In one of the photo suites, “Laboratory Life”, several layers of images are superimposed on top of one another in the form of a palimpsest. Images […]

A new issue of Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science is out — with, among other things, a thematic section about science at the nanoscale edited by Isaac Record. For example, Joachim Schummer points out that science can be popularized by its ethics (engineering ethics is often propaganda for emerging technology); Joe Pitt explores the rhetorical and […]

One of my longheld convictions is that the individual life trajectory is both one of the most neglected and most exciting aspects of biomedicine, not least when it comes to collecting and displaying biomedicine in museum exhibitions. Documents, images and objects from individual scientists, doctors, engineers and patients is a rich resource for museum curators — the individual and personal perspective […]

Artist Phillip Warnell (see earlier posts about his movie ‘The Girl With X-Ray Eyes’ and his pill camera installation) is just now visiting Medical Museion, where he is researching possibilities for a number of visually and conceptually driven projects. Firstly, Phillip is guest-editing an issue of The Performance Research Journal on the theme ‘Transplantations’ (see more here). As well as inviting contributions from an […]

Our colleagues at the Norwegian Technical Museum in Oslo are opening a new exhibition, Kroppen/Usynlig Verden (The Body/Invisible World) next Friday. Looks like it’s worth a travel! We may be back with a review (or if someone else writes a review, let us know).