Sam Alberti:
Using scientific museum objects in the later twentieth century
Just as studies of use enrich the history of technology, so too to understand museums we need to think about their users – visitors, researchers and others stakeholders. Scientific and technical objects’ afterlives in collections, their deployment and intended audiences, tell us a great deal about the place of science in museums and vice versa. Tensions and harmonies surface and re-surface between pure science and brute industry, between past and present, between entertainment and research.
Marking the first steps towards a larger enquiry into the recent history of science collections, this paper will concentrate on the later twentieth century, from the optimism of the Festival of Britain to the rise of the so-called ‘heritage industry’. Curators today work with the legacy of the post-War expansion of material and staff, yet it is seldom studied in museum history. To provide a route through the historiographical terra incognita the paper will focus on the Technology Department of the Royal Scottish Museum (now Science and Technology, National Museums Scotland). A national collection allows reflection on the role of science in the construction of national identities; the RSM’s interdisciplinary character reveals the contrasts between science and technology as well their status in the wider museum sector.
But the main concern will be how the collections were used – or intended to be used – and by whom. Many of the issues remain pertinent. In 1969 the RSM staged exhibitions on both the moon landing and on Enlightenment scientific instruments, as the museum tried to balance crowd-pleasing contemporary issues with showcasing its increasingly important historical collection. Were scientific and technical objects the reserve of the connoisseur or for ‘the ordinary man striving to adjust himself to a rapidly changing mechanistic world’ (as the RSM Director argued in 1954)? How important were museum collections to the post-war generation of historians of science on the one hand, and to scientists themselves on the other? Should displays be aimed at engineers or button-pressing schoolchildren? Who were science and technology collections for?
Julia Bloemer:
Heritage of Usage, Users of Heritage –Instruments of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in the Deutsches Museum
When the Deutsches Museum was founded in 1903, the institution was a novelty within the German museum landscape in many regards. One particularity among others to note: at that time, there was no collection to begin with. But as early as 1905, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities donated its physical and mathematical instruments to the newly established museum. This starting point that triggered the museum's main activities today is referred to as the "foundation collection". Hence, about 2000 objects not only changed their owner but were also set in new contexts of presentation and usage. During the build-up phase at the Academy in the 18th and 19th century, the accession of objects should serve four aspects of usage: for research in basic sciences, for teaching and education, for entertainment and representation, and for applications supporting craftwork and industry. The incorporation into the Deutsches Museum changed their interpretation and usage. From now on, the instruments served either as cultural icons praising scientific progress from a positivist perspective or for the development of hands-on exhibits. In this talk and within the framework of the foundation collection, we inquire into both the inheritance and the discontinuity of usage characteristics upon the integration of instruments into museum collections, raising more general questions on conscious or unconscious recontextualisation of scientific objects.
Maroula Bacharidou:
Embodied User Interfaces Towards a Tangible Material Heritage
In the history of material culture, haptic perception has been considered one of the most substantial senses, bearing an important part of the cognitive and somatosensory load developing during the interaction among humans and objects, and rendering artefacts the key warrants for human use and action. Despite its vast potentials towards the understanding and improving this interaction, the integration of practices involving a haptically informed user experience has not been traditionally prevalent among environments of engagement among humans and artefacts, such as museum spaces. Focusing on the investigation of concepts and tools that outdistance the problem of the intangibility of material heritage, rising through the establishment of the vision-oriented museum paradigm, this paper discusses the exploratory and performatory potential that haptic experience can introduce to the processes of sensory and perceptional engagement among humans and artefacts within museum environments. The concept of the user interface, a construction developed within the field of computer science and re-interpreted from contemporary science, philosophy, anthropology and media theory, consists the link between human perception and the three-dimensional, physical world of material objects, their forms, functions and characteristics. Examining the interpretations of the concept and the function of the user interface through diverse disciplinary perspectives, the paper addresses directions towards embodied types of interaction between humans and artefacts through the development of models of synchronization between hands-on interaction occurring in physical museum spaces and informational engagement occuring concurrently in virtual environments. Within the proposed model of interaction, the embodied user interface consists both a conceptual schema and a technological tool, approaching the visitor’s perception as an interfaceable process whose front-end involves gestures, senses, apparatuses and materials, while its back-end involves sensory-motor tracking, cognitive mapping, computer programming and user participation via haptic, visual and verbal feedback.
Eugenio Bertozzi :
Science and Technology Objects and Users: the case of the fully-automatized cloud chamber by the Officine Galileo in Florence
The paper presents a case-study of an object explored with respect to its use: a cloud chamber produced for teaching purposes by the Company “Officine Galileo” in Florence from 1948 to the late 1960s and designed by the Italian physicist Carlo Ballario.
I will show that, with respect to the original Wilson's cloud chamber introduced in 1911 and well-known for allowing the first visualization of alpha particles trajectories, the Italian instrument shows a proper identity, as fully-automatized apparatus.
Moreover - on the basis of a close study of the instrument carried out at the Fondazione Scienza e Tecnica in Florence, an analysis of published and published documents exchanged between the designer and the Company – I will argue that the fully-automatized character of the Italian instrument can be understood in terms of a specific performative goal for which the instrument was meant for: not only 'visualizing tracks' – something achievable with simpler and cheaper apparatus - but for ‘working on’ visualization itself by performing the full range of the different conditions of visualization for the tracks.
I will show that, in the light of this hypothesis, the automatic character of the instrument gets meaningful: all the typical elements of a cloud chamber (expansion, restoring, electric and magnetic field, illumination and flash) are lead back to the pressing of a single button except one, the expansion ratio, which is singled out and operated by means of a screw. I will discuss how this 'reduction to basic operative elements' - key-choice for providing a so sophisticated result in a “user-friendly” way – necessarily entails the materialization of experimental skills in the technology embedded by the instrument.
In the last part of the presentation, I will discuss that a lack of understanding about the real performative meaning of the instrument appears to have affected the phase of its circulation and played a role in the shutting-down of its production.
Julia Bloemer:
Heritage of usage, users of heritage – instruments of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in the Deutsches Museum
When the Deutsches Museum was founded in 1903, the institution was a novelty within the German museum landscape in many regards. One particularity among others to note: at the time it was set up, it had no collection. But as early as 1905 the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities donated its physical and mathematical instruments to the newly established museum. This starting point that triggered the museum’s main activities today is referred to as the ‘foundation collection’. Hence about 2000 objects not only changed their owner but were also set in new contexts of presentation and usage. During the build-up phase at the academy in the 18th and 19th centuries, the accession of objects was intended to serve four aspects of usage: for research in basic sciences, for teaching and education, for entertainment and representation, and for applications supporting craftwork and industry. Incorporation into the Deutsches Museum changed their interpretation and usage. From this point on, the instruments served either as cultural icons praising scientific progress from a positivist perspective or were used for the development of hands-on exhibits. In this talk and within the framework of the foundation collection, we enquire into both the inheritance and the discontinuity of usage characteristics upon the integration of instruments into museum collections, raising more general questions on conscious or unconscious recontextualisation of scientific objects.
Tim Boon:
The Synaesthrtic Museum
We often do a very odd thing in science museum displays, and this is particularly evident with displays of musical instruments: of objects that are made to sound – to play music – but which are presented as if sight is the appropriate sense to inspect them with. In this presentation, I argue that this is a synaesthetic kind of display, where one sense is expected to do the work of another. But in fact many displays of scientific objects in science museums are generically like this: As visitors, we are asked to use the sense of vision to explore machines and instruments which, in their working lives would very rarely have been looked at, and certainly not in the way that we curators want museum visitors to look at objects in the search for understanding. I would argue that the dominant historical meanings of most of the Science Museum’s objects lie not primarily in their appearance, but in the histories of their use; we collect them not because of how they look now, but on account of what they did then. But in our displays, the instrument is there, but you can’t hear the “music”. I therefore propose that we should explore histories of use as a research activity so as to find better ways to represent the full sensory past of the objects we care for.
Alison Boyle:
On the Shelf: Unused Collections
In 2005, the Museums Association’s Collections for the Future report lamented that ‘too many collections are unused - not displayed, published, used for research, or even understood by the institutions that care for them.’
While concerns over the accumulation of material have been raised by museum professionals for at least the last forty years, much recent literature has taken a present-focussed practical approach to finding solutions to the ‘too much stuff’ problem – for example disposal, or improving access to stored collections – rather than exploring how and why collections became unused in the first place.
This paper will attempt to historicise the category of ‘reserve’ collections and the idea of ‘too much stuff’ as applied to science and technology collections. By focusing closely on some objects in the Science Museum’s collections which have never been displayed or researched in any detail, it will explore who the original ‘museum users’ of these objects were, and how the objects came to be unused once they had entered the collections. It will also explore what (if any) future uses of such objects might be – does an object’s sustained lack of use affect how it might be researched, displayed, or preserved?
Jessica Bradford with Lauren Souter and Jane Rayner:
Audience participation and user-centric interpretation at the Science Museum
We live in a participatory culture – a culture of ‘likes’, shares, comments and co-production. For many years museums have recognised that to thrive, they must embrace deeper collaboration with their audiences.
The term 'participation' is widely used in museums, but has significantly different meanings in different contexts. It can sometimes refer simply to attendance: the act of visiting a museum or using an interactive exhibit. Meanwhile, terms like 'co-production', 'co-creation' and 'co-curation' denote power-sharing between museums and their users. Through major gallery developments, including Information Age (2014) and the up-coming Medicine Galleries (2019), the Science Museum has come to define ‘participation’ as all forms of collaboration between staff and audience groups which results in tangible and mutually-beneficial outputs. By working collaboratively the museum aims to create galleries which better reflect diverse audiences and produce content which is empowering for users of science, technology and medicine, as well as innovators.
Information Age tells the story of the impact of new communication technologies from the perspective of inventors, developers and users. A curatorial strategy which put people stories and user-generated technologies at the fore provided the ideal platform for the Science Museum to scale-up its participation ambitions. The team undertook eight projects with a range of audience groups – from Gulf War veterans, to retired telephonists and representatives of London’s Cameroonian community. For the new Medicine Galleries, four ambitious participation projects will capture powerful personal stories of medicine’s ‘users’: patients, people with disabilities and mental health service users.
This presentation will describe how a participatory approach has evolved at the Science Museum and its strengths and challenges as a tool for developing user-centric interpretation. It will also reveal how the inclusion of user stories generated through participation can, in turn, influence how the museum’s ‘users’ – its visitors – respond to and engage with content.
Simona Casonato:
Laboratory Life in Milan: An intangible heritage audio-visual documentation project about a museum object’s life.
The National Museum of Science and Technology Leonardo da Vinci of Milan (Italy) is opening a new exhibition about particle physics (July 2016) and plans to display a relevant object in its collections: a 1950s Cockcroft-Walton accelerator used in the laboratory of the first Italian nuclear physics research centre born after WWII, the “CISE” (Information, Study and Experience Centre).
CISE was founded in Milan in 1946 by young pioneer physicists and engineers who searched support both in the academic and in the industrial world. They succeeded in creating the most relevant applied research centre in the field in Italy, active until 1998 – but declining after 1987, when nuclear power development programs were cancelled in Italy.
The Cockcroft-Walton accelerator was acquired by the Museum in 1965, exhibited in the following years and then retired. The new exhibition is the occasion to bring it to a new life.
We made contact with some former CISE’s employees. With their help, an audio-visual documentation project was set in order to understand the uses of the machine in the past but also the value of its future use as a museum display.
Combining oral history and observational documentary cinema methodologies, we are now filming interviews and the dialogues between museum curators, restorers and CISE’s employees: discussing, elaborating and literally reconstructing the accelerator for the exhibition.
Filming here is intended as archival construction: this allows the museum to keep an appealing record of the decision making process around the machine transition from “laboratory tool” to “memory tool” and, eventually, to “scientific culture dissemination tool.”
Oral history of CISE’s laboratory life and practice, i.e. the machine original context of use, naturally emerges from the discussion about the correct configuration of diodes, while the process of “building” a museum object reveals its social and interdisciplinary nature, contributing to the safeguard of CISE’s both material culture and intangible heritage.
This is relevant not only for the history of science in Italy but also for the local industrial culture, in which the Museum itself is deeply rooted.
The project is part of a larger reflection about the UNESCO intangible heritage definition and the need to explore what happens when, to quote the anthropologist B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, that heritage is “not indigenous, not minority and not non-Western, though no less intangible” (2004).
Martin Collins:
Museums and visitor self-fashioning as a mode of “use”
When I first read the call for papers I was least certain about the value of one theme: of drawing analogy between the now extensive literature on users and objects to reflect on museums visitors as users of museums—the objects, exhibitions, and entire gestalts of these institutions. But on reflection (a “shout out” to the conference organizers for their insight), this is a critical topic for Artefacts.
So…as this conference invites special attention to the relationship of historiography and museum practice, I propose to explore how one might conceptualize museum visitors as users, but in which that “use” is fundamentally oriented toward the user/visitor in their own project/s of self-fashioning.
This point, of course, is now a staple of museum best-practice literature in which individual meaning-making is taken as a (if not the) critical goal of visitor experience. But this perspective exists in distinct tension both with the historiography of use and with the quasi-theoretical literature on museums as powerful social institutions that serve to create citizens/subjects as participants in particular “imagined communities”. Exemplars of such analysis include authors such as Benedict Anderson, Charles Taylor, Tony Bennett, and others.
My interest in this tension comes through my current effort to develop an exhibition on globalization, called Planet Earth, and how our curatorial/design team might position the visitor in the narrative/experience of this gallery, particularly vis a vis the role of science and technology in this story. I will draw on a range of Smithsonian evaluations, for the institution generally and for this exhibition specifically, to assess their assumptions about visitors, their relation to assumptions of identity/self-fashioning in the historiographic/theory literature sketched above, and the possible implications for exhibition development.
Carola Dahlke,
Jaume Sastre-Juan:
Biography of Use of a German SG-41Z Cipher Device
In 1941, the cryptologist Fritz Menzer (1908-2005) from the OKW/Chi (Signal Intelligence Agency of the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht) designed a mechanical cipher device that for certain would have complicated all decipherment efforts of Bletchley Park. Menzer was chief of communications security for the Wehrmacht, and his staff had criticized for a long time that the German coding devices (including ENIGMA and LORENZ SZ-42) had not been mathematically checked for security. Consequently, he insisted - against the ignorance of the troops and their command – upon the construction of an enhanced cipher device called "Schlüsselgerät" SG-41. But despite its highly sophisticated encryption, in fact far above the security level of ENIGMA, it was neglected by the army. In the end, only few machines were built and used by the Luftwaffe from 1944 until the end of the war.
In the year 2013, the Deutsches Museum acquired one of those rare SG-41 machines, namely a special model Z with ten figure traffic, meant to be used for encrypting weather reports. Our object was immersed in a lake at the end of the war, its rusty remains retrieved after 60 years, restored and sold at Christie's in London. Finally, it awaits its time in storage until it will be exhibited in our new cryptology gallery to be opened in 2019.
This talk will reconstruct the different stations in the multi-faceted lifetime of our SG-41Z, and illuminate the various uses it fulfilled. Special focus will lie on the change of functions. Beside questions concerning the conservation process and the preservation of its original parts, we will discuss the future presentation of the object in our gallery, and the balance between the preservation of authenticity and visitor experience will be addressed.
Jane Desborough:
Revealing Uses of Early Modern Clock and Watch Dials
This paper will offer a reinterpretation of early modern clock & watch dials by focussing on users. Despite a distinct lack of primary sources left by users, clock-makers or retailers, this paper will provide one method by which new meaning can be extracted from extant objects.
Before assuming a standard format in around 1770 dials varied enormously in terms of both the information conveyed and the way in which that information was arranged. I move beyond the traditional explanation of dial diversity based on aesthetic appeal and argue that in fact each aspect of a dial’s content and format was part of a wider context of knowledge transmission specific to the period in which it was made and used. This paper will provide a number of case studies of dials from different museum collections to show that dials mirrored printed texts in the early modern period. Both mediums shared a language of communication and knowledge hierarchy, which transcended national boundaries.
Stewart Emmens and Katie Gonzalez-Bell
Working with the Wounded: the co-curation of military mental health
The emergence of the phenomenon of ‘Shell Shock’ in the First World War has bequeathed little for the object collections of medical museums. Those that exist – such as electroshock apparatus – reflect the authority and control of practitioners of one strand of treatment, not of the experience of the soldiers who lived with the condition.
The Science Museum’s new temporary exhibition Wounded: Conflict, Casualties and Care places historical medical objects from the First World War in their wider context with the aim of engaging wider audiences. A key component to this exhibition is a Participation Project involving co-curation of a display zone, developed with military veterans of the Afghanistan conflict who have experienced PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) and who have selected their own personal contemporary items for exhibition. How can the experience of veterans of a recent conflict help us interpret the narrative of an historical conflict? How can their selected contemporary objects draw parallels and resonances with the experiences of a century ago? How can veterans help museum professionals navigate an area of ‘difficult’ medical history?
Jean-Baptiste Gouyon:
Do Not Touch, Please. Exhibiting for the blind at the Science Museum, 1948-1950
Between 1948 and 1950, three special exhibitions for blind visitors took place at the Science Museum in London. The 1948 display lasted a day, the second display was on for a week, the 1950 Special Exhibition for the Blind remained open a whole month. The idea for these displays originated in the Science Museum, but they were assembled in collaboration with the National Institute for the Blind.
Although these exhibitions did not become a regular fixture at the Museum (the 1950 one was the last show of this kind), the venture is very richly documented in the Science Museum archives. These papers offer a vivid and detailed picture of the conversations that surrounded the preparation of these exhibitions. Having to cater for the needs of very specific users who could not interact with the exhibits in the habitual way, visually, forced museum practitioners to reflect on their practices and articulate what it means to display objects of science. Particularly interesting here is the reflection on touch, as an exceptional mode of interaction with the objects presented. Curators had to discuss about what can be touched, what cannot and why, what meanings can be conveyed through touch, how touch differs from sight, etc. More broadly, having agreed to welcome a very specific kind of visitors, museum staff had to agree on the kind of users they were, and the kind of use they could make of the museum. This entailed imagining specific museographical techniques.
The paper will review the history of this unique endeavour in the history of the Science Museum in London and show how witnessing discussions about touch in the museum provides us with insights about how sight was understood as the norm of museum interaction.
Elizabeth Haines:
Colonial bureaucracy in action: using material culture to identify conditions of possibility
Performative approaches to historical material culture have become increasingly popular over the last decades. Following a growing body of scholarship that interrogates the archive as an active site; I propose that during nine weeks of archival work in the Zambian National Archives, I re-embodied the gestures of an African clerk in the early twentieth-century colonial Survey Office. This difficult proposition brings re-enactment in direct confrontation with critiques made regarding the ethics and epistemology of performative modes of historical research. The aim of the ‘re-enactment’ was to identify the conditions of possibility in colonial paperwork. The experiment fails in that respect. The paper sounds out the limitations, practical and conceptual that the task met.
In analysing these limitations I argue that performative techniques often fetishise the otherness of the past, whilst simultaneously romanticising material fragility and individual capacity, at the expense of considering how material stability, and social stability reduce human vulnerability. From Lusaka, I argue, it becomes easier to see how reconstructed experience needs to be considered in the register of ‘managed risk’, as well as in those of creativity and agency. In re-embodying gestures, the technique also places the researcher within contemporary geographies of vulnerability that require more attention.
Claire Jones:
Selling Smiles and the User Experience of the Toothbrush in Britain, c. 1870-1948
Today, tooth brushing is a common household practice, with UK consumers spending £440 million oral hygiene products annually. Yet, while the toothbrush is an integral part of current healthcare routines, its widespread use was far from inevitable. Prior to the 1870s, few had seen a toothbrush but by the eve of the National Health Service in 1948, it formed a key part of a growing mass-consumer industry for oral hygiene. This paper will examine how the user experience of this seemingly ordinary and mundane every day technology transformed the toothbrush from an obscure luxury good into a mass-produced consumer item prior to widespread state intervention into oral health under the NHS.
There has been little historical analysis of the toothbrush to date. Existing studies have integrated it into straight forward success stories of the dental profession’s triumph over dental plaque and decay throughout the twentieth century. Yet, by focusing on the experiences of three types of user groups – children, factory and office workers, housewives – and by drawing on David Edgerton’s history of technology-in-use approach, this paper will highlight the ways in which the growing consumption of the tooth brush formed an integral part of rising demands for personal cleanliness from the late nineteenth century. This was a demand that dentists, medical officers of health and the health and beauty industry exploited. By analysing the reciprocal relationship between tooth brush supply and demand then, a clearer picture will emerge of how historians and museum professionals alike might study the history of use of this everyday technology.
Kimon Keramidas:
The Interface Experience: Staging Computers as Objects Of Use And Using Computers As Tools of Display
From April to July of 2015, an exhibition titled The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal Computing was on display at the Bard Graduate Center. This exhibition, which I was the curator of, considered the history of the design and materiality of computers and highlighted the ephemeral nature of interface as experienced through the cybernetic connection of hardware, software, and human intervention. Rather than inform a narrative of technological progress and corporate innovation, The Interface Experience aimed to provide its visitors with a better informed and more critical understanding of how we use computing devices and which features of computer design drive our personal consumptive practices. Using innovative and creative exhibition techniques, The Interface Experience was both a playful exercise in creating a vital display of computers as creative platforms for personal use and a purposeful intervention aimed at highlighting the problems inherent in traditional computer history exhibitions, which tend to place dead computers on pedestals for distant, non-tactile examination.
This paper will discuss how The Interface Experience presented this approach to the history of personal computing through four integrated features: five core active and interactable devices with newly developed applications through which visitors could experience the significance of each device; twenty-seven unpowered objects from the history of personal computing able to be touched; a web application that provided historical information on each device in the exhibit and made historical, cultural, and data-related connections; and a text that added historiographical, theoretical, and historical information and anchored the project in a broader discourse about computer history and interface theory. This paper will discuss how these four features were tied together in a purposeful design that utilized defamiliarizing techniques of staging as well as a critically conscious integration of various media to deliver a conceptual thesis across multiple non-linear user-driven environments. Along with describing the process of developing and executing the exhibition, this paper will highlight how the display of computers and their use raises new challenges for museum exhibitions, and that the lessons learned from creating exhibitions about computing devices can have a profound impact on how we think about the display of a wide range of technological and material culture.
Aleksander Kolkowski, Amy Blier-Carruthers:
The Art and Science of Acoustic Recording: Re-enacting Arthur Nikisch and the Berliner Philharmoniker’s 1913 Recording of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony
The Art and Science of Acoustic Recording was a collaborative project between the Royal College of Music and the Science Museum, London, that saw an historic orchestral recording from 1913 re-enacted by musicians, researchers and sound engineers at the Royal College of Music (RCM) in 2014. The original recording was an early attempt to capture the sound of a large orchestra without re-scoring or substituting instruments and represents a step towards phonographic realism. Using replicated recording technology, media and techniques of the period, the re-enactment recorded two movements of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony onto wax discs - the first orchestral acoustic recordings made on disc since 1925. The aims wer_rough tacit knowledge, and to derive insights into the musicians’ experience of recording acoustically. Furthermore, the project sought to discover what the acoustic recordings of the past do - and don't - communicate to listeners today. Archival sources, historic apparatus and early photographic evidence served as groundwork for the re-enactment and guided its methodology, while the construction of replicas, wax manufacture and sound engineering were carried out by an expert in the field of acoustic recording. The wax recordings were digitised and some processed to produce disc copies playable on gramophone, thus replicating the entire course of recording, processing, duplication and reproduction. It is proffered that this project has contributed to a deeper understanding of early recordings and has provided a basis for further reconstructions of historical recording sessions.
Jennifer Levasseur:
When Seconds Count: Astronaut Personal Timekeeping Devices
For anyone who wears a watch daily, there is a sense of security and comfort in wearing the device. They mark us with the infamous “watch tan,” we might feel naked without them, and our need to know the time means the watch gives us a constant means of access to information and awareness of time. Watches, or chronographs in the case of astronauts, become symbolic of our sense of the passage of time, marking our existence, and connecting our present with memories of specific moments in our personal experience. For astronauts, bound in their work to timing and schedules, these were necessary devices to perform their duties with the utmost precision and dedication.
The National Air and Space Museum’s collection of Omega Speedmaster chronographs used by Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and ASTP astronauts in part chronicles the varying degrees of personal connections to time and the devices provided by NASA for marking time within missions. By examining personal testimony, curatorial experiences, museum and government documentation, public discussion around auctions, and other mission-related documents, connections between users and object become clearest in instances where the user had an existing reliance on timekeeping devices. As a story of curatorial practice, often involving the users themselves, the acquisition and maintenance of these objects is fraught with complications, along with an avid collector community (and black market) observing these objects like circling vultures over potential prey. As the struggle over physical ownership issues continues between the Museum, NASA, astronauts, and the collector community, a number of case studies will be examined for these personal user linkages.
Pedro M. P. Raposo:
Hands on the heavens: celestial cartography and its users
The science, artistry and craftsmanship involved in the production of celestial atlases, charts and globes has been extensively studied, but much remains to be done regarding their uses and users. In this paper I will highlight some items from the Adler Planetarium collections to illustrate how evidence from the cartographic items themselves may be combined with other sources, in order to characterize their uses and users. I will conclude with a note on an ongoing citizen science project related to celestial cartography, which has raised interesting questions regarding the use of museum collections in web-based projects.
Jaume Sastre-Juan:
Film Screening of ‘Museums of the New Age’ with New Score by Jean-Philippe Calvin
Filming the ‘museums of the new age’: the appropriation of European industrial museums in New York City (1927)
"Museumsof the New Age": Science Museum premiere for new film score by Jean-Pilippe Calvin"
On Sunday 2nd October at 18:30, the Science Museum hosts the first public performance of a new musical score accompanying a remarkable film showing the major science museums of Europe as they were in the 1920s.
‘Museums of the New Age’ is a project that has researched and found inspiration in the 1920s fashion for American enthusiasts for new science museums in their native land to come to Europe to learn how the great museums of the old world achieved their aims. One such group, led by trustee of The Museum of Peaceful Arts Charles T Gwynne, took along the film director Arthur Edwin Krows and cameraman Walter P. Pritchard. The trip produced a book and three films, which were shown to potential supporters in New York. Copies were also donated to the four museums shown: the Science Museum in London, the Technical Museum Vienna, the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris, and the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
To bring the film to today’s audiences, we have commissioned a new score from the Science Museum’s first Composer in Residence, Jean-Philippe Calvin. The new music brings alive the film’s fascinating sequences that reveal the architecture, displays and individual facilities of the museums, from famous objects to interactive exhibits, and from workshop technicians to directors.
Performers:
Hannah Black (Flute); Alasdair Hill (Oboe); Adrian Somogyi (Clarinet); Julia Payne (Horn); Izabela Musial (Bassoon); Simon Callaghan (Piano); Louise Goodwin (Percussion)
Conducted by the composer.
Supported by a Leverhulme Trust Artist in Residence Grant
There will be the opportunity to experience the performance at the Manchester Science Festival on 28th October.
In November 29th 1927, a film called Museums of the New Age was screened at New York’s elitist Metropolitan Club, at a luncheon organized by the trustees of the Museum of the Peaceful Arts (renamed in 1930 as New York Museum of Science and Industry). The motion picture shown to the exclusive guests documented the four biggest European national industrial museums with the goal of raising money for importing this cultural institution into New York City.
What do we know about the film’s context of production and use? What can this film tell us about the process of appropriation of industrial museums in the United States? In this paper I will draw on my doctoral research on the politics of display at the New York Museum of Science and Industry in order to analyse the use of film in the Museum of the Peaceful Arts project and provide a context for decoding Museums of the New Age.
I will look into the process of appropriation of industrial museums in the United States by addressing such issues as: the study trips to Europe by American curators and trustees of the new museums of science and industry in the 1920s; the ideology and political agenda of the individuals behind the industrial museum movement, which had close links with the vocational education movement; the role played by the state and individual philanthropists, which led to a different process of institutionalisation; or the circulation and appropriation of display techniques such as visitor-operated exhibits.
Karin Tybjerg:
Exhibiting Epistemic Objects
Scientific objects are objects of knowledge to their users. Instruments for measuring or producing natural phenomena, collections of natural history or pathological specimens, slides, models, maps or graphs have all been part for the production of knowledge and their prime role is as epistemic objects.
To the users of the museums of science or medicine the exhibited objects are also epistemic objects as the museum itself may still be seen as a site for knowledge production – in the very broadest sense. Historically the museum has been a place of generating knowledge from objects particularly in ethnographic, natural historical or anatomical collections. The question is, however, how to create new ways of producing knowledge from objects that go beyond the collection-based sciences and function in today’s museums where the connections between collections and exhibitions are no longer as tight.
This paper considers how exhibitions can explore the epistemic potential of the objects. Not by shifting the laboratory into the museum and thus making the users into objects themselves, but by designing exhibitions that mirror the epistemic context of the research process.
Following ideas of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Karin Knorr-Cetina and their concepts of epistemic things and epistemic objects, I will thus consider ways of curating scientific objects that allow the epistemic functions of the exhibition and the exhibited objects to reinforce each other. In this way the exhibition will continue the process of materially defining the object. I will draw on examples from the development of the exhibition The Body Collected at Medical Museion in Copenhagen, which showed how doctors and medical researchers have collected human bodily material to generate medical knowledge.
Drawing on the epistemic history of the sciences may also begin to heal the rift between exhibitions communicating scientific content and exhibitions displaying the social and historical context of the objects.
F. Robert van der Linden, Margaret A. Weitekamp:
Teaching Visitors to Think Like Historians: The Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum
Considerations of use informed both the organization and the presentation of artifacts in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum’s new Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall, which opens 1 July 2016. Planning for the Hall began with formative evaluation considering how visitors use the space, which serves both as the entrance and exit for the Museum, its orientation space, and its thematic center. The result fundamentally reorganized the space, improving visitor experience and reframing the central artifacts.
Using both traditional exhibit techniques (artifact cases and label panels with images and text) and an integrated digital experience (a mobile app, a redesigned website, and an on-site touchable computer wall), the combined exhibitry prompts visitors to think like historians: asking questions about how these artifacts were used and what broader transformations they represent. The presenters, the two lead curators for the Hall, organized those stories into five themes (Science and Technology, Politics and Power, Business and Economics, People, and Culture) based on guidelines from the National Council of the Social Studies. For instance, the exhibit of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis illustrates both the pilot’s grueling 33-hour flight and the subsequent “Lindbergh boom” in airline stocks. Panels accompanying the 11-foot Star Trek starship Enterprise studio model highlight its broad cultural impact and explain how miniatures were filmed. The resulting interpretation draws upon decades of analytical scholarship in the history of science and technology, considering artifact’s use, immediate impact, and broader effect. For Spirit and the rest of the Milestones artifacts, the Hall considers how these artifacts tell multiple, complex, interconnected stories of use.
Margaret Vining, Barton C. Hacker:
Women Using Uniforms: Symbolizing Citizenship in the Great War
In this paper, we describe military-style uniforms as a form of social technology. The uniform, in addition to its utilitarian aspects, is a means used by organizations to identify and channel the efforts of their members. Social control apart, the uniform also provides greater status and agency to its wearer.
In the Great War, many armies recruited women in substantial numbers for uniformed service. But civilian relief and welfare organizations drew in even larger numbers of women who also wore uniforms. Having their members, female and male alike, in uniform served the organizational purpose, but women also used uniform-wearing to achieve their own goals. For them, wearing military-style uniforms brought enhanced status and self-esteem; it also allowed them to stake a symbolic claim to military service and thus the vote, based on the age-old linkage between military service and full citizenship. There was no precedent for the hundreds of thousands of women who served in uniform during the Great War. Of the many ways the Great War separated the past from the present, few were more important than the altered place of women in society. To a significant degree, that transformation can be attributed to women’s use of uniforms during the war.
We will discuss the manuals, orders, and other prescriptions for uniforms, as well as the testimony about what wearing the uniform meant from contemporary correspondence, memoirs, and the like. We will also discuss how this understanding of women’s uniforms informs our upcoming exhibit at the National Museum of American History, which draws on the museum’s unmatched collection of World War I women’s uniforms.
Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi:
Larry’s Wheelbarrow and Amelia’s Purse: Forging User Identities Through Disability Technologies
“Both the artifacts owned and used by people with disabilities and those that are used upon them or that are encountered in life create possibilities, impose limits, assert political and ideological positions, and shape identity.” -Katherine Ott, “Disability Things” (2014).
At first glance, it looks like another rusted object ravaged by the passages of time, discarded in a dusty corner. A closer look reveals different pieces of metal and wood welded together, fragments repurposed with intention, perhaps following a carefully formulated plan. This is a wheelbarrow made entirely from scraps by Larry, a Ward 2A psychiatric patient at the Ontario Hospital sometime between 1938 and 1940. We know nothing else about Larry, including the reasons for his admission or his motivations for building the wheelbarrow; only the object serves as evidence of his existence. Elsewhere, a silk drawstring purse, delicately woven and ornately beaded, suggests its owner Amelia Woods, a deaf woman residing at her sister’s farm in Hazeldean during the late 1880s, affixed it to her skirt for a single purpose: to carry around her cherished conversation tube.
These objects are examples of how people with disabilities engaged with technologies to forge their own identities as users, as opposed to having them constructed or configured for them by others. The materiality of these objects highlights the varied ways disability was (re-)defined and the everyday realities faced by their users. More than tools to “fix” or “normalize” a disabled body/part, these objects allow us to trace the different interpretive frameworks by which users addressed their physical/mental impairments, including how social, cultural, and medical factors shaped their identities. Using examples from museum collections across Ontario, this paper looks at how users modified or adjusted technologies to bring them into better alignment with their bodies and the identities they wished to represent: special crutches for a one-legged Inuit to navigate through snow; an iron claw prosthetic arm for a bicycle repairman; a crocheted blanket for a wheelchair user. In particular, this paper focuses on how users rejected prevailing conceptions of “normalcy,” drawing attention to their technologies rather than camouflaging them, in order to better contextualize the material lives of the disabled in Canadian history.
Sophie Waring:
Back from the Dead: A social history of penicillin consumption and a long-history of antibiotic resistance
The first clinical trials of penicillin took place in Oxford in 1941. In 2016-17, the Museum of the History of Science will celebrate the 75th anniversary of this major milestone with an innovative and thought provoking exhibition Back from the Dead. The exhibition will link the transformation of penicillin from a chance discovery to a pharmaceutical product to the long-history of antibiotic resistance and drug consumption. Back from the Dead will emphasise histories of penicillin consumption and use over its invention and production. By juxtaposing artefacts from the production of penicillin with narratives and objects that describe and depict the impact and significance of the consumption of penicillin, this exhibition will deal with the tension between production and consumption explicitly. By communicate the long history of antibiotic resistance from 1940 to todays ‘crisis’, a new interpretation of the objects remaining from the development of penicillin in Oxford will be provided. These objects will be removed from the association of scientific genius, discovery and ‘yellow magic’ and instead re-framed as research objects that simultaneously helped with the control of infectious disease while also highlighting the immediate limitations of the drug, particularly the route of administration into the body, and the problem of antibiotic resistance.
By thinking about the consumption of penicillin, emphasising the users of the drug, the appreciation and interpretation of the objects remaining from penicillin’s production and development are brought into new light. By emphasising narratives of antibiotic use from patients, medical staff, farmers and legislators, the exhibition will attempt to draw focus away from the moment of discovery and the development of penicillin and encourage exhibition visitors to think about the history of antibiotic use as well as their own antibiotic consumption.
Artemis Yagou ):
How did they play? Children and constructions sets (c. 1830-1940)
Construction sets (sets of building blocks) have been devised and developed by adults as educational tools for children; they have been designed to shape the future through specific play activities. The proposed paper analyses construction sets by emphasising the perspective of children users in the period from the middle of the 19th century until the Second World War. The research is underpinned by an interest in the user, commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules. The investigation is driven by the hypothesis that users of objects (technological or otherwise) develop practices transgressing the functional and disciplinary limits set by the contexts of consumption and use; users tend to generate novel meanings through alternative engagements with objects.
The difficulty of grasping the experience of children is acknowledged, as children do not often speak for themselves or leave records; so they have remained comparatively obscure and elusive to historians. The paper addresses the issue through original, object-based research on toys from three Munich collections (Deutsches Museum, Münchner Stadtmuseum, and Bayerisches Nationalmuseum), including accompanying material such as packaging and manuals. The project combines hands-on study of the objects in question (through play re-enactment and search for material traces of play) with the study of relevant bibliographic and iconographic sources. The paper aims to contribute to the understanding of childhood and technology-inspired play, especially with reference to museum collections and activities. This is a crucial subject for our societies and their future, as technology-based play is nowadays a predominant element of leisure, entertainment, and education.