Medical Museion

Frokost og web-TV på Danmarks Medie- og Journalisthøjskole

Astrid Mo — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:22:17 +0000

Statens Museum for Kunst og Danmarks Medie- og Journalisthøjskole arbejder i øjeblikket sammen om at undersøge erfaringer med web-tv/online video i kultur- og museumsformidling. I den forbindelse havde jeg den ære og fornøjelse at blive inviteret på frokost af Journalisthøjskolens Peter Østergaard Sørensen i deres hovedkvarter i Emdrup.

Vi havde en dejlig åben snak om web-videoernes flydende og troløse univers, men det jeg fik mest ud af, var Peters meget direkte spørgsmål ind til hvad det er, der inspirerer mig i mine videoer.

Som hjemmedyrket kamera-jonglør har jeg ikke den faglige og tekniske bagage, der på godt og ondt kan skubbe ens visuelle udtryk i bestemte retninger. Så hvad går der gennem hovedet på mig når jeg filmer og redigerer og vælger den vinkel, det take, den lyd frem for de andre?

For mig er videomediets store tiltrækningskraft dets umiddelbarhed: Jeg ser noget fedt, jeg filmer det, jeg deler det. Hvis lyset er godt og motivet er fedt, så spiller mine tekniske evner en mindre rolle end min evne til at være på det rette sted på det rette tidspunkt (en pointe Magnus Kaslov fra projektet også har her), samt mit blik for hvad der gør sig godt i levende billeder, hvordan tempoet skal pulsere og hvordan jeg vælger de situationer ud, som kan påvirke mig og måske også andre.

Mine yndlingsvideoer indenfor medicinkultur når jeg klikker rundt på youtube, vimeo og andre steder falder i to meget forskellige kategorier:

1: Håndholdt hjemmevideo. Her bliver jeg ikke talt ned til, forklaret noget eller underholdt med svulstige dramaturgiske greb. Det er personlig entusiasme; der er en der gerne vil vise mig noget. (f.eks. denne her, simpel og fin, jeg er vild med kommentarerne. Eller denne her.)

2: Helt skæve konceptfilm/kunstfilm der vender tingene på hovedet uden at give nogen begrundelse eller bagtanke. Især hvis de lader sig lede af mediet i stedet for omvendt. (f.eks. her hvor Herwig Turk får laboranter til at sortere deres instrumenter efter vægt)

Tak til Peter for en spændende frokost-snak. Jeg ser frem til videre diskussion på det kommende symposium om web-tv/online video i museums og kunstformidling.

Logos and other adventures

Louise Whiteley — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:50:19 +0000

If you’re out and about in Copenhagen this week you may see one of our new events postcards in a cafe or bar, featuring a paper-cut style plan of the museum, and listings for our upcoming event series, Close Encounters of a Material Kind, on the back. The absence of ‘writing room’ on free postcards is a personal bugbear I was amused to find shared by many people at Museion, so we left lots of scribing space too…

The image is based on a plan of the house originating in one of the architect’s drawings (Tabula VII: Tværsnit gennem Chirurgisk Academis bygning, Peter Meyn, 1786), and which currently features on the Museion homepage and exhibition floorplan. The image is appealing to us as it highlights the old surgical amphitheatre at the heart of the museum – a space that powerfully links the history of the building with events exploring contemporary biomedical culture – and the quirky ‘reveal’ of the sectioning is visually intriguing. Yet it doesn’t scale down well or pop out visually, and the complex beauty of the image makes it difficult to create a rapid symbolic link to the institution as a whole. So over the last couple of months, I’ve been working on translating the floor plan into an image that can be used more flexibly, and to help increase familiarity with our expanding programme of activities. Below I’ve highlighted some of the thoughts and questions that came up during the process:

Communicating Content or Place?

At Medical Museion we have a plethora of visually intriguing objects that have featured on leaflets in the past. But in this project we moved away from photographs of the museum’s contents, as a single object doesn’t easily communicate the range of activities, and the temporal span of collections, we want to evoke. Instead we focused on the space itself, hoping to nourish some of the shoots of recognition we already have for the auditorium. In looking through online galleries of museum logos, I was surprised how few evoke their uniquely recognizable buildings – I’d love to see examples.

Simplicitly vs. Usability

One question that came up was how simple a design has to be to be a logo; the house designs are evidently not a Nike swoosh or IBM icon. Perhaps the key function of a logo is its ability to aid recognition; you see the logo, you think of the place. In itself, this doesn’t require extreme simplicity. It’s more the need to be able to place, reproduce, and instantly ‘read’ the logo in venues relevant to your audience that usually favours simplicity. For us, venues of interest are primarily online and social media, and larger scale printed postcards and posters. We therefore wanted an image that was rich enough to carry a postcard or poster by itself, as well as scaling down for blog post thumbnails, but didn’t have to worry about stringent brand identity requirements, letterheads and so on. A nice surprise when I began experimenting with scale was that the little versions seem to retain their identity whilst also obtaining a hint of anthromorphic cuteness. I wonder if in our link-rich, social media culture, the notion of the super-simple unconscious ‘pow’ of recognition will become less obligatory for logo design – especially for less commercially driven enterprises.

Architectural Evolution

I hope that basing the designs on the architectural plan will provide a basis for evolution; we can produce more or less simplifed versions, using different mediums, or interleaving particular colours or collaged elements for special events or programmes. Google Logo Gallery is a powerful (if aesthetically mixed) example of this kind of approach, and The Louvre’s website nicely demonstrates the use of an architectural feature as background texture in a way we could emulate.

Democracies of Style and Hue

Logo design is a complex craft that often includes researching audience response – with limited resources, I treated the flow of staff and guests through my office as a barometer (see the final iteration of my whiteboard in the snap). It was quite surprising to me how much intuitions about colour, style, and text varied, even within what you could consider a rather limited demographic. And this made it challenging to reach fixed points; to pull together and tie-off the threads of opinion in the fabric of my own responses. One such fixed point was the decision to use an aesthetic that communicates the handmade; the silhouette/papercut aesthetic that inspired the design is part of a current trend of using traditional crafts in contemporary settings; a nice resonance I think for Museion. Colour is something I’ve not worked with much before, and here Ane and Bente, aided by the delicious Pantone colour bridge and the inspiration of a large-scale photograph of an operating theatre, led me to a palette of ‘medical’ colours evoking surgical gowns and sheets.

We’d love to hear your thoughts or about similar processes – here, or on a postcard…

With thanks to Benny Thaibert, Ane Pilegaard Sørensen, Bente Vinge Pedersen, and everyone else who was accosted to give their opinion on colour schemes and design.

Del din genotype – så betaler vi

Daniel Noesgaard — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:12:33 +0000

Ville du dele dit genom med resten af verden?

Inden du svarer på spørgsmålet, læs lige her. OpenSNP er et non-profit projekt som tilstræber at samle så mange genotyping-resultater som muligt og at gøre dem tilgængelige for forskere og andre som skulle have interesse i dem. Dataene oploades af interesserede sammen med en valgfri mængde fænotypiske data (altså f.eks. fysiske træk som øjenfarve, blodtype, hårfarve, højde, nikotinafhængighed, osv.) og herefter kan hvem som helst boltre sig i data og lave analyser på kryds og tværs. I dag har omkring 120 personer uploadet deres genotyper og suppleret med fænotyper.

Men udover forskere med gode hensigter, kan man jo også forestille sig at andre med knap så gode hensigter kan hente dataene. Måske et forsikringsselskab eller en fremtidig arbejdsgiver? Et sæt genotyping-data indeholder i dag rå og ikke-annoterede oplysninger om omkring 1 mio. SNPs i genomet. Forestil dig, at en af disse SNPs en dag i fremtiden bliver associeret med en alvorlig sygdom og at du har den pågældende variant. Det er ikke svært at forestille sig, hvad en sådan oplysning kunne (mis)bruges til.

OpenSNP har netop fået penge til at tilbyde gratis genotyping til et begrænset antal frivillige. Hvis du er frisk og har lyst til at dele, har du nu chancen. Jeg har selv allerede fået lavet en genotyping, men overvejer stadig om jeg skal lægge mine data på hos OpenSNP. Hvad synes du?

(Husk i øvrigt vores event om hvordan disse genetiske data bliver til!)

What’s the point of this “academic twittersphere”?

Nina Bjerglund Andersen — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:43:43 +0000

“I don’t have time to Tweet.” “I’m not interested in what various celebrities are doing.” “I don’t know what I would get from it.”

These are typical responses I encounter when I ask academics if the are on Twitter. And I don’t blame them for their replies. Until you’re into the Twitter world it is difficult to grasp what it is all about and how in the world it can be of any use in professional academic life. For some reason it is just really hard to explain in words. The LSE Twitter Guide called Guide to using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities is a great starting point, but explaining what it is useful for is still difficult.

On the LSE Blog Impact of Social Sciences, Mark Carrigan, a third year PhD student in Sociology at the University of Warwick, gives an attempt at explaining the point of Twitter in an “academic twittersphere”. He outlines what academics can get out of the social media service and tries to illustrate that motives for academics to be on Twitter may be no more different from what motivates academics to give presentations at conferences. The reasons to go onto the podium and give a presentation or a talk may be different from person to person:

Twitter is no different. It’s a spot on the internet that’s staked out as yours. What you do with it is up to you. Some people choose to wander over to their podium every now and again, make an announcement and then wander off. Some people give their presentation at the podium and then leave, only returning when they want to give another. Some do their presentation but thrive on the Q&A afterwards. Some might not like the feel of the podium and eschew a formal presentation to go and chat more directly with their audience. Likewise some people just want to listen and ask questions of other speakers. Others would rather ditch the conference and go straight to relaxing at the pub.

Most academic users of Twitter fall into one or more of these categories. Likewise people move between categories. But the interpersonal dimensions of it are fundamentally no different to a conference

Illustrating reasons to use Twitter for academic purposes by passing on the experience from various academics gives a good feel to what Twitter can be all about and why a lot of people end up finding it incredibly useful.

Academics who are not yet on Twitter, but are considering it may find reading Mark Carrigan’s blog post useful. I at least found some good arguments to use next time I enter into a Twitter discussion with a non-tweeter.

Museion & the Web – program

Daniel Noesgaard — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 13:40:01 +0000

As previously announced we’ve been planning a staff event with the aim of “creating and nurturing a common culture of exploiting online social media as daily working tools”. The program draft is now ready and although this is an internal event, we’re putting it out here for everyone to see:

13:00 – 13.30 Introduction talk – Social Media overview

What’s out there? New, old, good, bad?

13:30 – 14:45 Group discussions – examples of use

To help us answer the question “why would we use social media in our daily work life?” we will break into groups and each present a couple of examples of social media use and discuss them.

14:45 – 15:00 (break)

15:00 – 15:30 Summarizing group discussions

15:30 – 16:45 Plenary discussion

Museum objects and social media:

Objects that go viral
Can ugly babies save museums?

Scientist who blog – or bloggers who do science:

I’m having a blogsistential crisis!

16:45 – 17:00 Roundup

In preparation for the event we’re asking all participating staffers to bring good examples of how social media might have benefited them in their work, or just examples of good social media usage (bring screenshots!). Everyone should also read the blog posts to be discussed in plenary session. We’ll be tweeting using the tag #medmus.

I for one am really looking forward to this event!

Åbne op for den æstetiske produktionsproces

Thomas Söderqvist — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 19:07:09 +0000

Klassisk musiker og musikleder Peter Hanke skriver indsigtsfuldt om behovet for at åbne kulturens sorte boks og se på hvordan klassisk musik produceres:

Hver uge arbejder 100 højtuddannede specialister sammen i et musikalsk laboratorium om at forstå dybden af civilisationens æstetiske mesterværker.

Denne interessante proces er skjult for publikum, som normalt først inviteres med ind, når produktet er salgsklart og smukt indpakket i overensstemmelse med koncertkulturens normer.

Arbejdsprocessen i symfonisk musik ligner mange andre professionelle processer, dvs. “udforskning, tvivl og kriser undervejs kan være uhyre interessante at bevidne, måske endda overgå oplevelsen af luksusproduktet ved afslutningen”.

Og derfor skal vi åbne op for den sorte boks:

I prøvelokalet kan musikalsk elite og befolkning mødes på lige vilkår. Og den mentale osteklokke kan åbnes uden tab af æstetisk storhed, men med enorme positive virkninger på dannelsesniveauet, hvis befolkningen inviteres til at overvære udforskningsprocesserne.

Behøver jeg at tillægge at samme argument selvfølgelig kan bruges for forskning og museumsvirksomhed? (Og at videnskabshistorikere og ‘science and technology studies’-forskere igennem de sidste 30-40 har arbejdet netop med at vise hvordan forskning produceres).

The responsibility of public health people to communicate

Nina Bjerglund Andersen — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 15:13:22 +0000

Public Health is a broad field, and finding ones place in the palette of colours that public health consists of is tricky. I have been around many corners ranging from international health, health statistics and information systems to planning of care, health policy and governance. And lately public health communication. I don’t know if I have found my shelf, actually I kind of hope not, but I must say that the communication side of public health is crawling under my skin. Perhaps because it seems such a natural part of public health and in many ways a neglected part.

As I blogged about earlier this month, I have been reading “The Panic Virus” by Seth Mnookin. It’s a book that takes you through a historical journey from the invention of vaccines to its successes, failures and not least the role communication played/plays in both. Ranging from the communication done by experts, the media to laypeople and celebrities. The book is well written and based on a great amount of research. I finished reading it yesterday and despite having enjoyed it a lot it also left me with a slightly discouraged feeling. It is a perfect example of how panic can grab a bunch of worried parents, about how ‘Mommy instinct’ becomes superior to scientific research and how the media at times can put aside rationale in order to follow the conflict, the emotional story and forget the premises of scientific research which makes giving absolute ‘yes or no’ answers extremely difficult. My discouragement was very much: Well what do we do about this, how can we take on mommy instincts and heart breaking stories and scientists who do not apply to scientific standards? Risk is difficult to communicate, communicating all the things we don’t know makes risk seem even more scary. So what do we communicate, how much do we communicate and in what way? And where does public health communication specifically fit into all of this?

I then realised that public health communication is perhaps exactly where some of the communication in the whole vaccine story went wrong. The media attention was taken over by people who took their starting point in individuals – in their own nine patients, their own child or grandchild or their own gut feeling. Even though organisations like the CDC, whose focus is population health, of course did and are doing their best to communicate the benefits of vaccines both to individuals and societies and draws attention to what the majority of the research findings is telling, I believe it is to some extend is still the failure of public health communication that may be to blame here. As I was taught from the very first day in my very first class in Public Health, Public health is exactly about the population perspective and we should be obliged to be much better at communicating this. Public health people should be the holders of that expertise – it is not the responsibility of the medical doctors or the statisticians or sociologists. We should be better at communicating risks and what they mean and be better at explaining what it is we don’t know. Most of public health research, whether it is done by numbers or by qualitative methods is about finding trends, causation in large groups etc that we can utilise to ensure or improve the wellbeing of the individual as well as the broader population. And we need to be better at communicating this. Not only to the public but also across scientific disciplines, across levels of society from decision makers to funders of health initiatives etc.

Taking my own public health training as my reference, I must admit, that I was not given much guidance on the communication side of public health. I was told that my expertise is that I have an insight into many disciplines and can bridge these disciplines, but how actually to carry out this bridging function I wasn’t given tools for. I hope I can be able to ‘catch up’ on this skill and that I can share my experiences with others. To a start I recommend people to read “The Panic Virus” and learn what the consequences can be if we don’t pay attention to the communication side of public health sciences.

6229

Thomas Söderqvist — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:32:31 +0000

6229 scientists have so far joined the boycot against Elsevier — see the boycot page here. They will not publish in any Elsevier journal, or will not referee articles for them, or will not do any editorial work.

It all started with mathematician Timothy Gowers open letter against Elsevier’s exorbitant prices, unreasonable subscription policy, and stubborn support for the Research Works Act.

It’s not just about one publisher that abuses the proprietary scientific journal system. Elsevier is the tip of the iceberg. Many scientists think the current century-old system of scientific publishing has reached its limits. What will replace it? Open access journals? A new kind of social media kind of platform? We don’t know — the future of scientific publishing is an exciting field for futuristic speculations.

(added 17 feb: see also Neil Stewart’s post on the LSAe Impact blog: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/02/15/after-elsevier-boycott-green-open-access/

PS: An hour after I wrote this the number of signatures has increased to 6246.

(image by Michael Eisen)

Hybrid Space and Surface Tension at Science Gallery Dublin

Louise Whiteley — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:59:41 +0000

At the end of January, Karin Tybjerg and I visited Dublin’s Science Gallery for the closing event of their exhibition ‘Surface Tension: The Future of Water’. The exhibition is one of Science Gallery’s contributions to the EU funded StudioLab platform, which brings together institutions including Le Laboratoire (Paris), Royal College of Art (London), Ars Electronica (Linz) and MediaLab Prado (Madrid) to “pilot a series of projects at the interface between art and science”. Medical Museion is also a partner in StudioLab, and we went to Dublin in part to meet the team there and get some inspiration for our contribution to the synthetic biology theme of StudioLab – I’ll be writing more about this soon. But we were also keen to see Science Gallery itself, which has been making a big splash on the science museum scene and was recently awarded a cool $1 million from Google.org to develop a global network.

So what’s new about Science Gallery? Why is Google so keen? And why were us Museion-istas keen to leave our beautiful old building and attics full of mysterious objects for a glass-walled space with no collections at all? The clue is in the name – director Michael John Gorman and his team aim to merge science centre with art gallery, an idea whose appeal is reflected in the increasing popularity of arts projects that engage with (and are sometimes funded by) scientific research, the bringing of cultural events into museum spaces, and writings on the potential for creativity, innovation, and even profit in interdisciplinarity.

Yet it’s surprisingly difficult to pick apart the appeal of the ‘hybrid space’. Perhaps one element is that placing objects from the science centre and art gallery alongside each other points to what the other doesn’t do – contextualizing scientific facts in engagements with what they might mean or make us feel, and grounding artistic engagements with science in the toothed constraints of the technical. Setting aside for a moment the problems with this heuristic dichotomy, I think it’s essential to ask why it seems like a good thing. The argument I’ve just given implicitly assumes that straightforward didactic science communication is bad, and conversely that art that engages with science ought to communicate something about it. This reflects a broader shift from promoting public understanding of science, to encouraging public engagement with the process, context, and culture of scientific research. Indeed, Science Gallery describes itself as;

“a new type of venue where today’s white-hot scientific issues are thrashed out and you can have your say. A place where ideas meet and opinions collide”.

There’s been much written on the shift from understanding to engagement, and its Janus-faced backbone: is public engagement founded in democratic intentions to make science more responsive to public opinion, or in cynical attempts to simply make it appear so? There has been less written on what engagement looks like in practice, why it should be done, and how we know when people have ‘been engaged’. As I touched on in my recent post on participatory theatre piece The Body, there’s a danger with framing all hybrid activities in terms of public engagement; it can seem to demand that whatever you present is structured in a form that encourages debate; presenting the topic as an “issue” to be “thrashed out” – and this can be an unproductive, even crippling constraint for both more purely artistic or even didactic displays.

Science Gallery demonstrates an important sidestep from this dilemma; a topic can take the form of a debatable issue outside the form of display objects: in text, additional media, tour guide presentations, or associated events that take the exhibitions as a starting point for engaging audiences in experiences or dialogue about associated “white-hot issues” such as research ethics, funding, environmental impacts, changing conceptions of self and society, and so on. By having a thematic thread such as The Future of Water all players in an exhibition are free to address the topic as they choose. The collection of objects then provides a tinderbox for discussions, encounters, and events, their juxtaposition multiplying opportunities for exploring the meanings and motivations of their production.

So how did this play out in Surface Tension? Like many of Science Gallery’s exhibitions, it was founded on an open call for contributions, with curators selecting submissions from artists, scientists, designers, engineers, local groups, school or university projects, and so on. This open call process seems essential to generating Science Gallery’s impressive output, and also reflects its status as a university and community-focused institution. But there were also signs in the exhibition of the curatorial challenges an open call presents – reliance on the quality and range of submissions, selection under a number of perhaps conflicting criteria, and the question of coherence. The exhibition spanned mediums very effectively; from innovative design prototypes to a range of artworks engaging with scientific principles as a route to working with the materiality and aesthetics of water, or as a source of playful future possibilities and conceptual resonances. Perhaps unsurprisingly though, I found it a little fragmented. And whilst the rather didactic wall panels about water supply and global inequalities were thought-provoking, I think they would have been better placed as a single installation, to avoid the feeling of an imposed take-home message. For me, the strongest theme of the exhibition was rather the clash between attempts to technologically control water, and the deep ineffability of its quantity and form.

Another sticky thread in the current appeal of art/design/science hybrids is the promise of innovation; the idea that we can break through existing barriers in each domain by harnessing the skills, tools, and outlook of the others. Alongside Le Laboratoire in Paris and as part of the StudioLab framework, Science Gallery aims to ‘incubate’ new research and design, including projects displayed in their exhibitions. For instance, following Surface Tension a group of students have been working on a smartphone app to locate free drinking water around Dublin. I think here we find an echo of the question of who public engagement is for; what are we trying to incubate, and why? What messages about value (and even virtue) do we put forward in suggesting that creativity can be harnessed and monetised? Of course, one can provide spaces for artistic experimentation with no financial constraints, but I wonder how much the framing device of innovation and incubation subtly influences the directions this might take.

Hybrid spaces like Science Gallery demonstrate, in physical form, an underlying commitment to science, design, and art having potentially productive relationships. But of course this physical proximity doesn’t determine what is communicated about the nature of the relationship. One of the exciting things about Science Gallery is that the answer can be different each time – without naively suggesting that there’s no editorial line, the diverse submissions, changing events programmes, and open themes invite experimentation. Maintaining a balance between openness to experimentation, alongside critical, open reflection on goals that may themselves develop over time, is I think key to a genuinely hybrid practice. We’re looking forward to grappling with some of these issues further in our own StudioLab project, but in the meantime recommend you pay a visit to Science Gallery if you get the chance (and don’t forget to sample their award-winning cafe).

Crowdsourcing experiments with scientific research?

Adam Bencard — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 19:29:22 +0000

The gaming industry is monstrously big business. But it is also infested with much love and enthusiasm, both by those in the industry itself, and from those who use its products.

One example of this is an interesting venture by the established gaming developer Double Fine Productions. The company started this drive on the innovation/crowdsourcing website kickstarter – the world largest funding platform for creative projects, as they call themselves – to collect money for the development of a new point-and-click adventure game (a genre in which the developer has a venerable track record with games like Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango). In less than 24 hours, they raised the 400.000 dollars they were aiming for. They started the drive for reasons that resonate with some of the concerns of science communication:

The world of video game design is a mysterious one. What really happens behind the closed doors of a development studio is often unknown, unappreciated, or misunderstood. And the bigger the studio, the more tightly shut its door tends to be. With this project, we’re taking that door off its hinges and inviting you into the world of Double Fine Productions, the first major studio to fully finance their next game with a Kickstarter campaign and develop it in the public eye.

They want to share and open up how it is actually being done, rather than being overruled by marketing departments wanting to put a spin on everything. They are going to film the entire developing process and make it available as it progresses. As they say, it will be

an unprecedented opportunity to show the public what game development of this caliber looks like from the inside. Not the sanitized commercials-posing-as-interviews that marketing teams only value for their ability to boost sales, but an honest, in-depth insight into a modern art form that will both entertain and educate gamers and non-gamers alike.

Here is an extended (and quite funny) video presentation of the project:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pSteVDn78s

I wonder if one could do similar crowdsourcing experiments with scientific research — designing an experiment, getting the funding to do it through crowdsourcing and documenting and publishing the entire process.

Anyone know if something like this has already been done? It would make for a great experiment in science communication and open up (at least a little bit) the black box that scientific research has become for many people.