RT Journal Article T1 Museums theme – making Split + Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine A1 Martha Fleming YR 2018 VO IS Autumn 2017 K1 Biotechnology K1 Dibner Prize K1 exhibition design K1 exhibitions K1 Foucault K1 Interdisciplinarity K1 medical humanities K1 Museum Visitors K1 Personhood K1 Research-led Museum Practice AB The wide-ranging personal experiences of medicine that people bring with them on their visits to medical museums arguably give medicine an advantage over the histories and material culture of other technologies and sciences. No other science has ‘content’ that is held quite so deeply inside the visitor’s conscious substance and psyche. But if mis-handled through sensationalism, this can easily backfire, catapulting the visitor into a state of fear and abjection. This article outlines a sustained and award-winning temporary exhibition project that aimed to engage visitors by locating them in the engine room of biomedicine rather than the operating theatre. Four post-doctoral historians of contemporary medicine and a creative director worked together with exhibition designers in a research context to show how epistemology can be dovetailed with aesthetics to bring theory and practice together for a wider public at Medical Museion, Copenhagen. NO The curators of Split + Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine were Søren Bak-Jensen (administrative project leader), Susanne Bauer, Martha Fleming (creative project leader), Sniff Andersen Nexø, Jan-Eric Olsén and Jonas Paludan (curatorial assistant). The designers of the exhibition were Mikael Thorsted (exhibition designer) and Lars Møller Nielsen (graphic designer). Significant contributions to the exhibition were made by Medicinsk Museion Staff: Ion Meyer (collections and conservation manager), Nicole Rehné (conservator) and Bente Vinge Pedersen (outreach). NO Vision Statement from the Medical Museion website: http://www.museion.ku.dk/da/om-museion/vision/ (accessed 17 April 2017 in Danish only; translation by the author with help from Google Translate) NO The exhibition was one of a number of outcomes of the five-year grant; others included research workshops and conferences, publications, and collection enhancements. A list of publications which gives a greater understanding of the important research effected by the post-docs who co-curated this exhibition and other colleagues at the Medical Museion can be found at: http://www.corporeality.net/museion/publications/ (accessed 17 April 2017). NO Some of the medical technologies that we addressed with the exhibition were, in a range of registers: antibody production, diagnostic techniques, measurement and data generation, optical devices such as microscopes and endoscopes, visualisation techniques, computation and computer technologies, epidemiology, information management, chemical and spectroscopic analysis, sampling, printmaking, tissue conservation, magnetic resonance imaging, dissection, storage and biobanking, IVF treatment, PCR DNA amplification, temperature control of life processes, wet work benches, cold rooms, regulatory regimes, biohazard and clinical waste management, psychopharmacology, medical pedagogy, and more. NO ‘Brecht’s Epic Theatre was an attempt to stimulate the audience’s critical thought processes, not their emotions, by calling attention to the aesthetic and political frameworks that produce stories and characters. Brechtian distanciation refers to the destruction of theatrical illusion for the purpose of eliciting an intellectual response from the audience’, Pramaggiore, M and Wallis, T, 2005, Film: A Critical Introduction (London: Laurence King Publishing), p 70 NO As this is article mainly covers the process of creating an exhibition and is not about the final exhibition, you may wish to see images of the exhibition itself, available on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/27649130@N03/sets/72157619842919111/show/ (accessed 17 April 2017). See also: Fleming, M, ‘Thinking Through Objects’, in Lehmann-Brauns, S, Sichau, C and Trischler, H (eds), 2010, The Exhibition as a Product and Generator of Scholarship (Berlin: Max- Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftgeschichte), pp 33–47; Fleming, M, ‘Split + Splice: an experiment in scholarly methodology and exhibition making’, in Analyzing Art and Aesthetics, Volume 9 of Artefacts: Studies in the History of Science and Technology (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press) NO The Biomedicine on Display strand of Danish Biomedicine: 1955–2005 had already involved a range of exploratory meetings, workshops and seminars towards the creation of an Exhibition Brief. Two of the major events in 2007 were: • ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context’, a three-day closed workshop bringing together over thirty biomedical practitioners, medical historians, philosophers of science, artists, exhibition designers, material culture experts, etc. • ‘Biomedicine and Art’, a one-day public conference collaboration with the Royal Danish Art Academy showcasing exhibition makers, art historians, artists and biomedical practitioners who work with artists. NO Exhibition Brief, May 2008 (6pp). The Exhibition Brief was followed by a more developed Exhibition Outline, October 2008 (66pp); a Design Plan, December 2008 (41pp); Interpretive Texts (27pp); Catalogue Texts; Final Report and Lessons Learned (32pp); as well as a variety of briefs for designers and others, and a range of interim documents. All are unpublished. NO Exhibition Limit Parameters (May 2008). Realism is a representational genre with a deep history in medicine: recent critiques of the ideological deployment of the truth claims of realism in modern medicine would include Dumit, J, 2003, Picturing Personhood: Brainscans and Biomedical Identity (Princeton University Press); Gilman, S, 1988, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Cornell University Press); Elkins, J, 1999, The Domain of Images (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press); and Objectivity, by Daston, L and Galison, P, 2008 (New York: ZONE Books); as well as wider research by critics and philosophers such as Auerbach, Barthes, Benjamin, Pierce, Sekula, Sontag, and others. NO Exhibition Brief (May 2008) NO This issue was addressed in depth in a conference presentation I made in collaboration with two of the co-curators of the exhibition, Susanne Bauer and Jan-Eric Olsén: ‘Displaying Observational Practice: Split + Splice as a mirror structure between laboratory and museum’, at ‘Wissenschaft im Museum – Ausstellung im Labor’ organised by Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft, Universität Tübingen with Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin (Tübingen Universität Tübingen with Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin, at the University of Tübingen, April 2010). The proceedings volume from this conference has been published as Wissenschaft im Museum – Ausstellung im Labor (edited by Anke te Heesen and Margarete Vöhringer and published by Kadmos in 2014). NO For a sense of the scale of the research potential of University Museums and their collections, see the collections list of ICOM’s International Committee for University Museums and Collections (UMAC ICOM) http://university-museums-and-collections.net/ (accessed 17 April 2017). Concerning the financial, managerial and logistical difficulties encountered by museum professionals working in University Museums, explore the Committee’s publications and reports, http://umac.icom.museum// (accessed 17 April 2017). NO In the Design Brief (October 2008, unpublished) we outlined our unusual approach to audience, and distinguished our project from those which proceed from ‘audience fragmentation charts’ and other statistico-behavioural processes. ‘This exhibition was not conceived with the intent of developing audience numbers or altering the demographic of audience types. The concept of the exhibition is to approach directly the subjectivity of each individual visitor, making a direct appeal to his/her sense of self through the human sense apparatus and attendant phenomenologies. Thus the exhibition “develops” its visitor base in an innovative way which is not based on marketing or behaviourism: it develops audience depth, which we hope will ultimately produce an increase in the number and type of people who will want to come here precisely because we assume nothing about them.’ NO The particular item which we studied is produced in Finland by Serres Hospital Products. ‘Serres hospital products consist of compatible and reliable products and accessories for suction procedures taking place in operating theatres, ICUs and other hospital units.’ http://www.serres.com/ (accessed 17 April 2017) NO I am authoring a paper which addresses the microwell as a biomedical instrument and an exhibition object for an anthology to be published by Medical Museion; Curating Biomedicine: Collecting, writing and displaying contemporary medicine: Susanne Bauer, Jan-Eric Olsén and Thomas Söderqvist, editors. Microwells, or microplates, are ubiquitous life sciences instruments with extraordinary versatility. They can move specific, highly identifiable and traceable materials between analytical apparati such as spectrometers and genome sequencers and over to production instruments such as a PCR machine. The high degree of standardisation and interoperability they have means that they are used for cell culturing, optical analysis, filtration, separation (in centrifuges, etc.), storage of biomaterials and more. NO Design Brief (October 2008) PB The Science Museum Group SN 2054-5770 LA eng DO 10.15180/170813 UL https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/making-split-splice/ WT Science Museum Group Journal OL 30