By: Alexis Beckett\n\nSubmitted as partial requirement for the degree of\nMaster of Arts\nScience and Technology Studies\n\nYork University\n\nSeptember, 2014\n\n\n[[Bibliography]]\n<<back>>
Burno Latour ([[1966|Bibliography]], [[1990|Bibliography]], [[1999|Bibliography]]) writes about image-making in science as the creation of 'immutable mobiles'. Science relies heavily on the art of convincing. Should one intend to prove a hypothesis to others, one cannot hope to have all relevant audience members present and in the state of mind to understand what's going on at the time that proof presents itself. Latour writes,\n\n"If you wish to go out of your way and come back heavily equipped so as to force others to go out of their ways, the main problem to solve is that of mobilization. You have to go and to come back with the “things” if your moves are not to be wasted. But the“things” have to be able to withstand the return trip without withering away. Further requirements: the “things” you gathered and displaced have to be presentable all at once to those you want to convince and who did not go there. In sum, you have to invent objects which have the properties of being mobile but also immutable, presentable, readable and combinable with one another" ([[1966|Bibliography]]: 6)\n\nThe specimens, the animals that surrounded and overwhelmed me, are themselves immutable mobiles. They are evidence that such a thing really does exist. They have been treated so as to withstand time and distance, to remain intact in all essential ways for the purpose of demonstrating, in this case to museum visitors, what diversity of species exist in each climatic zone. Samuel Alberti calls them "chunks of landscape ripped asunder and transported to urban locales" ([[2011|Bibliography]]: 4). Furthermore, they have been combined (and likely recombined) with each other. In this configuration they do the work of telling the story not only of biodiversity and conservation, but of specific climatic zones. The animals are 'material knowledge in transit', carrying with them experience.\n\nThe experience these animals, or animal remains, provide is made evident in my attempt to photograph my confusion. I found a photo came nowhere near capturing the right-here-ness of being among this chaotic collection of immutable animal mobiles. The image so much distilled the experience that the turmoil of being there was lost.\n\nThese animals march along into our imagination and understanding, dropping bits of themselves along the way.\n\n[[I follow the bread crumbs|back again from entropy]]\n<<back>>\n
\n//For the world to become knowable, it must become a laboratory.//\nBruno Latour ([[1999|Bibliography]]: 43)\n\nHow do we pack the world in to museums? \n\n\tHow exactly do we get one building to hold all the world? We simplify it, of course. We find a way to reduce the whole world into a collection of several references which spark the imagination and, ideally, transport the visitor to a moment, an experience. This is the educational purpose behind museums, the crystallization of an experience, the proof of which is borne on the backs of specimens. Experience carries with it a claim to truth (Haraway, [[2004|Bibliography]]: 168). Without the proof of experience offered up by the museum’s specimens, the entire claim to scientific truth slips away like a last dying breath.\n\n\tThe specimen is the proof of a truth claim. It acts as a reference, a piece in a chain which traces back to a coordinate of time and space; the experience of being there. Someone was once there. Someone saw it. And though the specimen doesn’t pass so easily through time and space as a memory, it is borne along by incremental translations which allow its presence to vouch for the original experience. It is a reference.\n\n\tThe word reference, from the latin, means “to bring back”. Bruno Latour describes a scene where a plant specimen is collected from and Amazonian forest, to be brought back to a university on the other side of Brazil for study:\n\n“In the bouquet she has just picked we can recognize two features of reference: on the one hand economy, an induction, a shortcut, a funnel in which she picks one blade of grass as the sole representative of thousands of blades of grass; and on the other hand the preservation of a specimen that will later act as a guarantor when she is in doubt herself or when, for various reasons, colleagues may doubt her claims. […] The forest cannot directly give its credit to Edileusa’s text, but she can be credited indirectly through the extraction of a representative guarantor, neatly preserved and tagged, that can be transported along with her notes, to her collection at the university in Boa Vista.” ([[1999|Bibliography]]: 34)\n\nThe referent specimen is not only something we can refer to, but also something which gives its reference, a good reference, to the work of the scientist who has collected it. I was there, it says, and so was she.\n\n\tAnd so the world is broken apart. Tiny pieces go missing from their homes and are transported by collectors to speak on their behalf half a world away. But reference is not only a guarantee. Removing a piece so that it may be of use later also requires that it remain constant, that it be unchanged (Latour, [[1999|Bibliography]]: 58). The specimen is changed, though. It is plucked from it’s environment, for one thing. It may be dried or soaked into preservation. It may be reduced to a detailed set of notes. It must, however, remain essentially constant throughout its transformation. The essential parts, the parts of interest, are taken up. Left behind by Latour’s botanist is the rest of the forest: the heat, the insects, the mud.\n\n\tOnce the world has been simplified, it can be of great use. A specimen brought back and preserved may be examined in the cool comfort of the lab. It may be compared with other specimens; a comparison which bridges the void of time and space. Specimens of different types, of similar types, collected half a world apart, or even centuries apart (given the right preservation) can be brought together to great effect. The reduction gives the scientist this profound power over nature. “Yes, scientists master the world, but only if the world comes to them in the form of two-dimensional, superposable, combinable inscriptions” (Latour, [[1999|Bibliography]]: 29). And so, it should not be any great surprise that scientists can see patterns, connections, and answers that the rest of us cannot. In museums, these patterns and answers are re-presented for public consumption through similar, simplified, and useful ways. Samuel Alberti ([[2008|Bibliography]]) writes:\n\n“It transpires that museum nature, like art, is purified in its construction behind glass. […] When an animal’s skin is prepared for taxidermy, it is thoroughly cleaned and preserved. One part of nature (the hide) is kept, whereas the other parts (the blood, the fat, the fleas, the dirt) are discarded. Objects and environments, especially animals, are often deconstructed for transit […] then reassembled in the museum. Elements from life itself are pieced back together, ostensibly as authentic, uncontested, natural nature.” ([[2008|Bibliography]]: 83)\n\n\tMuseums capture nature in it’s most vulnerable moment: death (Haraway, [[2004|Bibliography]]: 152). Full of animal specimens, museums become “mausolea, storehouses of millions upon millions of dead things in drawers and jars, grim reminders of mortality” (Alberti, [[2011|Bibliography]]: 5). Alberti quotes Henry David Thoreau as having powerfully written: \n\n"I hate museums […] They are dead nature collected by dead men. […] What right have mortals to parade these things on their legs again, with their wires and, when heaven has decreed that they shall return to dust again, to return them to sawdust? Would you have a dried specimen of a world, or a pickled one?” (Alberti, [[2011|Bibliography]]: 5).\n\n\tThough much is gained through this simplification of the world, much is also lost. Even with those properties deemed essential still intact, the specimen has lost its spark, its life. It is dead nature. And yet, that is not all it is.\n\n\tIn her description of an art exhibit displaying a collection of photographs of taxidermy polar bears found across the United Kingdom in varying states of disrepair, storage, or display, Rachel Poliquin recounts the affective experience exuded by the photographed bears. She points to a sense of lingering and sadness, loneliness and longing in the “uneasy silence” of the gallery ([[2012|Bibliography]]: 2). These are obviously the emotions of a human viewer, and do not inhere in the animals themselves. But this affect is certainly a result of curatorial decisions. In a vivid description Poliquin evokes the image of these “quiet educators” being “//manhandled// into everlasting postures” [emphasis mine] which helps bring human culture back into the experience (3-4).\n\n\t“The museum display is one particular account of nature, one told with words and objects and images and, like other accounts, is told from particular moral and theoretical standpoints” (Alberti, [[2008|Bibliography]]: 83). The museum display does not simply represent nature as it is found. Though, as mentioned above, it claims truth based on its reference to experience, like Latour’s laboratories (Latour and Woolgar, [[1986|Bibliography]]) it is a truth which has been shaped by the culture of the museum. Museums actively construct nature in the same ways science does, through the choice and negotiations of a few humans and the culture in which they’re are embedded. Though the display case of the specimen acts not unlike a window through which one is transported in time and space (Asma, [[2001: xii|Bibliography]]; Poliquin, [[2012:|Bibliography]] 5), “if we learn the skill of reading between the lines at natural history museums, we begin to see deep ideological commitments quietly shaping and editing the sorts of things different cultures and difference historical epochs consider to be knowledge” (Asma, [[[2001|Bibliography]]: xii; Haraway, [[2004|Bibliography]]).\n\n\tThe museum practice engenders political and conceptual ideology in its re-presentation of nature. While the specimen moving from in situ to in-collection is processed through a number of physical transformations to make it stable, recorded in notes and database to give it oder, and stored or displayed in ways which make it intelligible, the efforts which go into this process are erased behind each movement. As it is made into museum specimens, a dual process does the job of unmaking it. “For, if objects are to act as data, they need to be impartial — their constructedness needs to be hidden by those whose credibility depends on them” and upon whom their credibility depends (Alberti, [[2008|Bibliography]]: 81).\n\n[[ On to Part II: Animal History and Animal Specimens|Part II: Animal History and Animal Specimens]]\n[[Part II: Animal History and Animal Specimens|First Encounters]]\n[[Part IV: Things Theory and Vibrant Matter]]\n[[Part V: Theatre of the Museum]]\n[[Part VI: How to Storify a Blue Whale|A spotlight performance]]\n[[Jump right to the chase: Conclusion|Conclusion]]\n<<back>>
Alberti, Samuel JMM, ed. (2011) The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie. University of Virginia Press.\n\nAlberti, Samuel JMM (2005) "Objects and the Museum.” in Isis 96(4): 559-571.\n\nAlberti, S. J. M. M., et al. (2009) “Should we display the dead?." Museum and Society 7(3) : 133-149.\n\nAlberti, Samuel J.M.M. (2008) “Constructing Nature Behind Glass” in Museum and Society, Jul. 2008. 6(2) 73-97.\n\nAsma, Stephen T. (2003) Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution & Natural History Museums. New York : Oxford: Oxford University Press.\n\nBennet, Jim (2005) “Museums and the History of Science: Practitioner’s Postscript” in Isis, 96, (4), pp. 602-608.\n\nBrantz, Dorothee, ed. (2010) Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History. University of Virginia Press.\n\nForgan, Sophie (2005) “Building the Museum: Knowledge, Conflict, and the Power of Place” in Isis, 96 (4), pp. 572-585.\n\nFudge, Erica., Ruth Gilbert, and S. J Wiseman (1999) At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies, and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period. New York: St. Martin's Press.\n\nFudge, Erica (2006) Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.\n\nHaraway, Donna Jeanne (2003) “Teddy Bear Patriarchy” in The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge.\n\nHaraway, Donna Jeanne (2003) “The Promises of Monsters” in The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge.\n\nKohlstedt, Sally Gregory (2005) ““Thoughts in Things” Modernity, History, and North American Museums” in Isis, 96(4), pp. 586-601.\n\nMachin, Rebecca (2008) “Gender representation in the natural history galleries at the Manchester Museum” in Museum and Society, Mar. 2008. 6(1) 54-67.\n\nMorgan, Lynn Marie (2009) Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos. Berkeley, Calif. ; London: University of California Press.\n\nPatchett, Merle M. (2010) Putting animals on display: geographies of taxidermy practice. PhD thesis.\n\nPoliquin, Rachel (2012) The Breathless Zoo. Penn State Press.\n\nPoliquin, Rachel (2008) “The matter and meaning of museum taxidermy” in Museum and Society, 6(2) 123-134.\n\nPorth, Emily F. (2012) “When Women Birthed Mooncalves and Moles: The Display of Fetal Remains and the Invisibility of Females in Museums” in Humanimalia, 4(1). [[Online source|http://www.depauw.edu/humanimalia/issue%2007/porth.html2]]\n\n<<back>>\n
In the introduction to Things, Bill Brown quotes a section of The Biographer’s Tale, by A. S. Byatt, in which a frustrated doctoral student cries out “I must have things. … Ideas give me a queazy feeling, nausea … objects in the external world, on the other hand, delight me” (Brown, [[2004|Bibliography]]: 2). Things are something different; things bring us back to reality. But how to find things? Brown reminds that “the body is a thing among things”, that we circulate in a world of bounded objects (4). And though we are surrounded by things, we fail to recognize them until they stop working. Until then, we look through things, like windows. We notice things when their relationship to us, to the human, is changed, and not in and of themselves. This project has attempted to examine the thingness of museum specimens for what they are and how they are individually and uniquely experienced upon every encounter.\n\n\tIn Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett attempts to reinvigorate the animate world we once lived in as children. While the imagination of children spins a wonderful world of animated and angential objects, as adults we neglect the effectivity and distributive agency of material things (Bennett, [[2010|Bibliography]]: ix). Bennet’s argument reawakens the material, and demonstrates how, even with little imagination, much that we consider inert, passive, and bounded as separate from ourselves, is in reality actively constructing the world we know. For Bennett, agency does not simply hinge on a question of intention. The agency of the museum specimen, then, is expressed on the visitor who engages with it. It is expressed in the work performed by the curator who prepares it. It is expressed in its near evasion of the collector who trapped it. The agency of the specimen is expressed through the visitor who remembers it, photographs it, changes his behaviour because of what it had to teach. \n\n\tAs mentioned previously, museum specimens are at once natural and cultural. The two become so intwined in the specimen that it is impossible to extricate them. The animal itself represents nature, and the natural, and while on display it is employed to stand in as nature and been seen as natural. It cannot be view, however, without acknowledging it’s cultural influence. While the two categories are consistently torn asunder by Western scientific ideals, Lorraine Daston calls the paradoxical objects which transgress these boundaries chimeras ([[2004|Bibliography]]: 15). These objects represent a blending of “art and nature, persons and things, objective and subjective”, things which are characterized as having blurred outlines (21). For the museum specimen, where do we find the outlines of the thing? Where are the boundaries of the specimen? Somewhere within the animal? At the edge of the glass case? The exhibit? The museum itself? When does one hit the limit of what is specimen? \n\n\tThese blurred outlines call for more careful consideration, argues Daston, and a reconsideration of where scientific objects fall on the spectrum between nature and culture, objective and subjective:\n\n“Because the objects in question have long been assumed to be as inexorable and universal as nature itself, the history of inquiry into these objects — that is, the history of science — has traditionally been narrated as just as inexorable and universal.” (Daston, [[2004|Bibliography]]: 15).\n\n\tDaston calls these objected with blurred outlines loquacious. These Things that Talk can be seen as implicitly trustworthy, as when we say that a thing speaks for itself. Talking things utter a pure truth, free of the corruption of human interests and intent (Daston, [[2004|Bibliography]]: 12-13). It’s the thing's ability to speak for itself which lends the aura of authenticity to the museum specimen. While we saw above that Latour argued a chain of reference accounted for the veracity and authenticity of the object, it’s truth to nature, Daston argues that the object speaks for itself.\n\n\tThe breath it draws to do so, I suggest, is found in that Latourian chain of reference. Once a specimen is happily situated in exhibit, the chain has dissolved into the background, it is invisible, and has been intentionally made so by its creators. Yet, the authenticity of the object is still felt by the museum visitor. How does the secret get out, if not through the object itself? The museum specimens are all whispering their secrets, if we’re listening closely enough.\n\n[[On to Part V: Theater of the Museum|Part V: Theatre of the Museum]]\n\n[[Back to Part I|Part I: Museums and STS]]\n[[Back to Part II|Part II: Animal History and Animal Specimens]]\n[[Back to Part III|First Encounters]]\n[[Part VI: How to Storify a Blue Whale|A spotlight performance]]\n[[Jump right to the chase: Conclusion|Conclusion]]\n<<back>>\n
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As I moved around the biodiversity gallery trying to capture not only the animals, but the chaos, I wanted to find a way to let the animals speak for themselves. John Law writes that when social science tries to describe things that are complex, “… it tends to make a mess of it. This is because simple clear descriptions don't work if what they are describing is not itself very coherent” (2004, 2). If real life is a mess, Law asks, then how can we know it. Should we even try to know it at all?\n\t\nIn order to know the world, there must be one, solid, agreed upon world to know. In the practice of social science, methodology is the fire by which the world is purified to its singular, essential, solid state. Methods produce this solid world (143), amid a "hinterland of realities" and "manifest absences" because "making anything present implies that other but related things are simultaneously being made absent, pushed from view, that presence is impossible without absence" (144). The absences and presences of Western methodology in social (and, Law reminds, natural) science, are designed, through method, to create a world which appears definite, stable, and universal.\n\t\nLaw's 'messy' wold challenges that notion and also challenges the moralist view that correctly executed methods lead to truth. In the challenge, Law calls for an unmaking of methodological habits, and abandonment of a notion of certainty. This may be precisely the approach I need in the the chaos of the biodiversity gallery which surrounds me. I tried a few different things with my photos. \n<html><img class="alignnone wp-image-28 size-large" style="border:10px solid #ffffff;" src="https://deadnatureblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/20140701_141859.jpg?w=640&h=853" alt="Where's home?" width="640" height="853"></html>\nLooking at this baboon atop a display pedestal amid other animals displayed at varying levels, he seemed to have no time for me. He was off looking for home, as the caption on his pedestal made clear. Frozen in time and space as he was, his attitude mirrored a down town Toronto pedestrian, speedily navigating sidewalks on a lunch break. This specimen had somewhere to be. All this came through in the bodily positioning of the specimen, and it's relative seclusion on on the pedestal. It's face was positioned away from viewers, at a slight angle, and no matter where I stood I couldn't get a straight shot of it's face. Places to go, people to meet... \n<html><img class="alignnone wp-image-29 size-large" style="border:10px solid #fefefe;" src="http://deadnatureblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/20140701_141755.jpg?w=640&h=480" alt="20140701_141755" width="640" height="480"></html>\t\nThis turtle seemed to have something similar going on. Alone on his display pedestal marked "Animals Without Borders" I found this little guys just as I was hitting the peek of my confusion over how these display cases were arranged. This is the same case which held the Baboon; behind the turtle you can see a Kiwi bird, it seemed like just a jumble of animals in a glass case with white background and white pedestals. Animals without borders is right! I though. These animals were defying geography in this case, they cared not for national borders, immigration or wildlife policy, they had transcended those earthly words of dirt and water and had begun some other journey. Again, like the baboon, the turtle seemed to be off somewhere, if slightly less determined as to where that place might be... Starting from a stark case some animals -- as I imagined them -- made their way out on long journeys; some stayed, and relaxed under the bright lights and cool air, others were trapped in jars, feeling left behind.\n<html><img class="alignnone wp-image-32 size-large" style="border:10px solid #ffffff;" src="https://deadnatureblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/20140701_141956.jpg?w=640&h=853" alt="20140701_141956" width="640" height="853"></html>\n\t\nIt was immediately obvious that I would be unable to capture an image of an animal without also capturing the glass of the case. At first this was frustrating. I wanted to make beautiful pictures of animals that would actually stand still, that I could get close to and move around. And then I thought of Law, and I wondered, what good would those photos do me? If what I was trying to capture was the chaos, then editing out so much of the context would simply ruin my project.\n\nI noticed others in the gallery, however, who were after that same purified image I was, and had found a way do get through the reflective surfaces, and jumble of specimens. \n<html><img class="alignnone wp-image-34 size-large" style="border:10px solid #ffffff;" src="https://deadnatureblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/20140701_143455.jpg?w=640&h=853" alt="20140701_143455" width="640" height="853"></html>\n\tThese Fine Arts students spent the whole day at the museum with me. There was a small clutch of them in the biodiversity gallery, practicing their animal sketches in rooms filled with models who could hold a pose forever. Was she drawing a specimen or drawing a snake? Can you use a specimen as a model for a living animal? If what you intend to produce is a drawing of a live snake, what is lost? Is the specimen brought back to life through the sketch?\n\nI preferred instead to play with the animals on their own terms, fully acknowledging their glass cages, and ill suited cell mates. Like this couple, who stuck me at first as in a rather awkward position, being posed for all time in a moment before one would kill the other. How uncomfortable for the seal, I thought. \n<html><img class="wp-image-35 size-large" style="border:10px solid #ffffff;" src="https://deadnatureblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/20140701_144017.jpg?w=640&h=853" alt="20140701_144017" width="640" height="853"></html>\nBut upon closer inspection, the illusion was lost.\n<html><img class="alignnone wp-image-36 size-medium" style="border:10px solid #fefefe;" src="http://deadnatureblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/20140701_144025.jpg?w=225&h=300" alt="20140701_144025" width="225" height="300"><img class="alignnone wp-image-37 size-medium" style="border:10px solid #ffffff;" src="http://deadnatureblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/20140701_143952.jpg?w=225&h=300" alt="20140701_143952" width="225" height="300"></html>\n\tThat bear has quite the pleasant and calming smile on his face, and he's gazing far off int he distance, maybe to another ice float, and seems not even to notice the seal. The seal, for her part, has the look of a curious puppy. She acknowledges absolutely no danger, but instead bobs comfortably inches below the predator's head. I was amazed at how my perspective could change as I tried to empathize with the animals I was being shown. Not the animals in the case, at this point, but the animals I was supposed to be seeing in frozen action, the predator and prey. With my closer look, the story changed completely.\n<html><img class="alignnone wp-image-39 size-large" style="border:10px solid #ffffff;" src="https://deadnatureblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/20140701_141533.jpg?w=640&h=480" alt="20140701_141533" width="640" height="480"></html>\n\tThis cheeky fellow gazed out of his case with pleasure. He'd been placed in a glass catwalk, protruding out into the gallery. A place of pride. He knew it, and it showed. I imagined him greeting visitors as they walked by in his own way, whatever dead animal speak is for "Well hello, welcome to our museum!" and "Please have as much fun as you'd like", and so I wanted to see the museum from his angle. I tried several shots over his shoulder which weren't quite capturing his view of the museum the way I wanted to, until finally I wedged myself into a nook at the back of the case to get a view straight out the front panel of his glass box.\n<html><img class="wp-image-40 size-large" style="border:10px solid #ffffff;" src="https://deadnatureblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/20140701_141605.jpg?w=640&h=853" alt="20140701_141605" width="640" height="853"></html>\n\tAs I crouched back there like a hunter in the brush surrounded by more animals than I could have hoped for, and waited for the perfect shot, one in which a museum visitor would stand right in front of my caribou friend and look excitedly into the animal's face, as if in communion, without noticing the tall graduate student awkwardly crammed behind the case. As the seconds wore on, I just felt more awkward. I snapped a few pictures to get the effect even without the wondrous visitor. Then I heard the laughing. Well...then I noticed the laughing, it had probably been going on a while. I looked around a realized that, to a pack of museum visiting kids, I looked like I was trying to take a picture of the caribou's butt. In my determination to get the perfect angle, I had blotted out any other visitors around me, none of whom were more interested in the animals than the strange lady climbing around the display cases trying to take pictures of a specimen's bum. At least I appeared thorough. \n\t\nThe place where the impulse to make perfect, beautiful photos was strongest, was standing in front of the butterfly case. \n<html><img class="alignnone wp-image-43 size-large" style="border:10px solid #ffffff;" src="https://deadnatureblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/20140701_142510.jpg?w=640&h=853" alt="20140701_142510" width="640" height="853"></html>\nButterflies are such whimsical representations of the beauty of nature, they seem so stark frozen still, brightly lit, in the middle of everything. It can't be denied, this was the chance to get a close up shot of a butterfly I wouldn't get in nature.\n<html><img class="alignnone wp-image-45 size-large" style="border:10px solid #ffffff;" src="http://deadnatureblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/20140701_142747.jpg?w=640&h=853" alt="20140701_142747" width="640" height="853"></html>\n\tThis is also where I should talk about the filters I put on these shots. Butterflies are as known for their brilliant colours as they are for their wings. So why photograph them in black and white and sepia? Several reasons. Museum visitors and curators alike claim that the specimen allows us to see an animal as it would be in nature. With excellent preservation, we can see the true colours of the fur, skin, or feather. With less preservation, a bit of paint helps a specimen achieve that authentic appearance. The in-authentic is more authentic, more true than truth. With this one perception taken away, what is our experience of the specimen? How is it changed? For one thing, it is simplified. More colours make for more confusion. These filtered images help reduce the noise of the photo. What is lost and what is taken up by methods? What world is created and what absences manifest?\n<html><img class="alignnone wp-image-46 size-large" style="border:10px solid #ffffff;" src="http://deadnatureblog.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/20140701_142706.jpg?w=640&h=853" alt="20140701_142706" width="640" height="853"></hmtl>\n\n\nReturning to the question of how to know the world Law writes:\n\n“Perhaps we will need to know them through the hungers, tastes, discomforts, or pains of our bodies. These would be forms of knowing as embodiment. Perhaps we will need to known them through ‘private’ emotions that open us to the worlds of sensibilities, as emotionality or apprehension. Perhaps we will need to rethink our ideas about clarity and rigour, and find ways of knowing the indistinct and the slippery without trying to grasp and hold them tight. Here knowing would become possible through techniques of deliberate imprecision. Perhaps we will need to rethink how far whatever it is that we know travels and whether it still makes sense in other locations, and if so how. This would be knowing as situated inquiry. Almost certainly we will need to think hard about our relations with whatever it is we know, and ask how far the process of knowing it also brings it into being.” (2004: 2)\n\n[[On to Part IV: Thing theory and Vibrant Matter|Part IV: Things Theory and Vibrant Matter]]\n\n[[Back to Part I|Part I: Museums and STS]]\n[[Back to Part II|Part II: Animal History and Animal Specimens]]\n[[Part V: Theatre of the Museum|Part V: Theatre of the Museum]]\n[[Part VI: How to Storify a Blue Whale|A spotlight performance]]\n[[Jump to the Conclusion|Conclusion]]\n<<back>>
I settled into the cold, darkened auditoriaum under the Royal Ontario Museum, and struggle to make an internet connection. Tonight I'm here for a lecture by curator Mark Engstrom, the mammal specialist who recently found himself knee deep in blue whale on the coast of Newfoundland. He's here to talk about that encounter with what will be a significant and impressive specimen for the museum, once preparations are completed.\n\nIn the spring of 2014, as the sea ice was melting, a pod of blue whales was trapped and crushed between the ice an the shore along the coast of Newfoundland. These nine whales, a significant number in a already dwindingly population, are presumed crushed to death and drowned. The bodies of two of these gigantic mammals washed up in seaside towns, and quickly expanded into a local problem.\n\nWhile the whales initially attracted tourist attention, and international news, the huge carcasses became dangerous, filling with gasses caused by decomposition, and threatening to explode. The ROM moved in to secure the whales as specimens and had to move quickly.\n\nA team was sent up to perform the arduous task of removing the tissues from the whale skeletons which would be collected by the museum. The project took days of strenuous work, but the bones were finally loaded onto crates for transport to Toronto, where they would be composted and dried with the hope of eventual display, a process which will take several years.\n\nWhile the loss of so many whales was tragic, this gigantic specimen collection, and the media surrounding it provided an interesting opportunity for me to participate, if minimally. At the lecture by Dr. Engstrom, I sat cross-legged in the theater-style chair, computer on lap, and live-tweeted the entire talk. While there wasn't any other audience traffic on Twitter - a rather missed opportunity for engagement - I produced a Storify.com post using my tweets capturing highlights of the talk, and ROM tweets with images from the actual specimen recovery.\n\nFor your viewing pleasure, I present: [[how to flense a whale|https://storify.com/whenshesaid/bluewhale]].\n\n[[Go on to the Conclusion|Conclusion]]\n\n[[Back to Part I|Part I: Museums and STS]]\n[[Back to Part II|Part II: Animal History and Animal Specimens]]\n[[Back to Part III|First Encounters]]\n[[Back to Part IV|Part IV: Things Theory and Vibrant Matter]]\n[[Back to Part V|Part V: Theatre of the Museum]]\n\n<<back>>
''[[Recalled to life.]]''\n\n\nThe afterlife performances of animal specimens in museums.\n\n\n\n//[[A major research paper.]]//
Stephen Asma points out that the Western intellectual history has an inherent distrust of images and emotion-evoking practices in education and science (Asma, [[2001|Bibliography]]: 41). This has created a hierarchy of knowledge, with knowledge which can be expressed in word more highly considered that that which requires images to express. Biology, he notes, has always relied on images for education and expression ([[2001|Bibliography]]: 244). The production of specimens, whether animal or plant, has been an important part of the development of the discipline, practices, education, and history. This has potentially left biology, and museums where biological specimens are held, in a precarious position on the hierarchy of knowledge production and dissemination.\n\t\nMuseums are inherently affective places, evoking emotion and moods in association with the knowledge they seek to impart on visitors. Moods, claims Asma, are linked to memory ([[2001|Bibliography]]: 241). Associating knowledge with moods allows for a better recollection of the knowledge which was acquired during an experience. It is the affective quality of the museum which makes it an excellent teaching environment. While specimens are representative of an experience, that had by the collector or hunter who found their animal counterparts in the wild, museums create an experience which the visitor will associate with the knowledge she is presented. Asma stresses that there is a fine line to walk with infotainment. While swinging too far toward the entertainment and shock value of presentation can leave the information and eduction under-represented, it is important to maintain the sensual, affective qualities of museums, and keep in mind that museums are theatrical by nature (Asma, [[2001|Bibliography]]: 40). \n\t\nRachel Poliquin describes three types of readings which apply to animal specimens in museums. The first is the biographical reading. The biographical reading, typified in Albteri’s The Afterlives of Animals, traces the paths of specimens as objects, as they pass through human hands, and leave behind them a trace in documents. These biographies are, therefore, inherently an enterprise in human histories. Poliquin points out, however, that these objects “accrue meaning as they move between and interact within various social contexts…”([[2008|Bibliography]]: 128). As noted previously, a lot of work goes into getting an animal into a museum. From the moment of death to the place where they’re found in display, an animal specimen is on the move, interacting with various specialists and viewers. This history is individual. It is unique to the specimen itself. This is in contrast to the descriptive reading which we will discuss next. This history brings the specimen to life as a pedagogical object on the move.\n\t\nIn a descriptive reading, the individuality of the animal is usually ignored in favour of the universals which can be offered by it’s display (Poliquin [[2008|Bibliography]]: 128). Asma describes this as follows:\n\n“In some sense, the educational value of any specimen (whether it’s a dissected organ or a stuffed animal) lies in its power to extend illumination beyond its own individuality. A true specimen is a species representative rather than an idiosyncratic particular. This explains why we freeze the otherwise fluctuation transient individuals of nature into static universals, but also suggests that displays of oddities … do not fit into the framework.” (Asma, [[2001|Bibliography]]: 36).\n\nPoliquin writes, “descriptive narratives therefore, fluctuate between reading a taxidermy mount as the material presence of an animal and as an abstract marker within a theoretical system” ([[2008|Bibliography]]: 129). Asma calls this oscillation, adding, “you must oscillate between knowing that it's a man-made construction and suspending your disbelief to enter into a play-along relationship with the display.” (Asma, [[2001|Bibliography]]: 38).\n\tBoth descriptive and biographical readings come into play in a cautionary reading. Poliquin describes the cautionary reading as the combination of the former two in the interest of highlighting “the loss and destruction of species and habitats” ([[2008|Bibliography]]: 128). Poliquin does, however, go on to point out that a cautionary reading often relies on a particular interpretation of nature as intrinsically valuable; a value which is lessened with human contact. An untouched natural environment or species is more conducive to a cautionary reading. This must be balanced, of course, in the case of specimens which are themselves evidence of human contact and tampering. Again, oscillation becomes important as the reader is asked to believe that the human interference which made the specimen possible was of a limited sort and an uncommon occurrence. \n\t\nThe experiential reading is a visceral experience. It is forged in the encounter between the specimen and the visitor. It involves an otherness and openness to the material world that borders on the mystical. Poliquin writes:\n\n“Experiential readings are the most difficult to theorize. Not only are they nebulous and emotional, but they suggest the need for a rigorous philosophical stance on perception and ontology, and yet they are also the most spontaneous. The excitement of children in natural history museums, and the casual comments that taxidermy is eerie, haunting, or ‘the eyes follow me’, all evince taxidermy’s provocative visceral presence.” (Poliquin, [[2008|Bibliography]]: 130).\n\nThis visceral experience can be enhanced by the size, age, or rarity of a specimen. The greater each of these qualities is, the greater the experiential impact a visitor will have while engaging with a specimen. Poliquin adds, in the case of the experience of museum specimens, “the viewers presence completes the work” (130).\n\n\tAll four of these readings can be found in the next section in which I have attempted to recreate a lecture presented at the ROM through the curation of twitter messages. This lecture describes the deaths, beachings, and recovery of two blue whales found off the coast of Newfoundland in the spring of 2014. The lecture itself, tracing the politics and practice of specimen recovery, allows insight into the individual biographical history of the specimens. Many details were shared regarding blue whales in general, highlighting the specimens’ descriptive reading. Since blue whale populations are limited in the wild, the loss of nine whales which were killed at the same time by natural forces is highlighted to support the cautionary reading of the specimens, as well as augmenting their experiential value. Their experiential value is also heightened, of course, by the size of the blue whales, and the detailed experience of curatorial team which dismembered the whale for transport as a specimen.\n\n[[Go on to Part VI: How to Storify a Blue Whale|A spotlight performance]]\n\n[[Back to Part I|Part I: Museums and STS]]\n[[Back to Part II|Part II: Animal History and Animal Specimens]]\n[[Back to Part III|First Encounters]]\n[[Back to Part IV|Part IV: Things Theory and Vibrant Matter]]\n[[Jump right to the chase: Conclusion|Conclusion]]\n<<back>>
Passing Bull, I moved into the Biodiversity Gallery. Though the gallery was relatively quiet on this Tuesday afternoon, with a few visitors milling about, I was overwhelmed by the animals staring out at me from behind glass. While a few were secluded - locked away in their own private crystalline display cases, peering out at me and seeming so lonely - the majority were mixed together in large case displays I couldn't make sense of at first. Fish rubbed fins with mammals and birds. Nothing seem arranged in a terribly "natural" way. This was not the animal display I was expecting.\n\nThere was a terrible amount of information in front of me presented in a way I could make no sense of, and so confusion set in. I would later realize the animals were arranged by climate, not species or family. This explained the diversity of each case itself. But that realization would come later.\n\nIn the face of so much information, I decided to try to make my own sense of the sensory overload by taking pictures. Pulling my phone out of my pocket, a custom storage compartment for delicate scholarly apparatus, I started trying to snap away the disorder, soon realizing the chaos was impossible to capture. You can't get an emotion into digital data storage.\n\nAs I took photos, however, I noticed that other visitors were doing the same. I felt as though they'd followed my lead, though I'm sure I wasn't the first. I began to think about what museum photos, taken on a cellular phone, would be used for. Would these visitors be sitting at coffee with a friend later, scrolling through the images and telling stories about the animals? Would they be posted to social media, Facebook or Twitter, to be swallowed up with the rest of the day's amusing ephemera? And if my pictures weren't making any sense to me, what were these other pictures saying?\n\nThese thrice-captured animals, killed, skinned, and photographed, really knew how to move.\n\n[[Dead nature on the move.]]\n<<back>>
I was later than I'd wanted to be, walking fast up the side of the late nineteenth-century building in the middle of down town Toronto. Rounding the corner to find the entrance to the Royal Ontario Museum for the first time, I was caught off guard by the gigantic, overhanging, modern facade that welcomes one million visitors a year. Passing through this glass and aluminum Crystal, opened in 2007, I had the feeling I was passing into a cave of wonders, ready to explore.\n\nI flashed my university student card, an admission token on Tuesdays, and felt myself shrink in the face of the expansive reception atrium. Certainly the largest museum I had ever been in, I was feeling a bit intimidated, but I set out, map in hand, to find the biodiversity gallery; my surest bet of finding animals specimens.\n\nI could have seen the dinosaurs, or the mammals, but I chose to start in biodiversity since the word itself promised a diverse animal collecting experience. As I rounded the stone stairway guided upward by an gigantic wooden totemic pole, I couldn't miss my target. The white rhino, [[Bull|https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_Qgz4a2Tas]] , looks out of the gallery, challenging visitors to cross into his territory. Bull was a wild-caught, South African rhino brought to the Toronto Zoo in 1974 where he lived until 2008 when he was euthanized and offered to the ROM as a specimen. It took roughly fifteen months to transform Bull from a 4,500 pound white rhino into a museum specimen. His outer skin is the same he wore in life, while his insides consist of styrofoam, paper mache, and modeling clay which (re)shapes his musculature. At the ROM, Bull "lives on" as a conservation "success story", since his species has made a come-back in the wild.\n\n[[I accepted Bull's challenge.]]\n<<back>>
In the history of science, museums have not gone unnoticed. It is unfortunate, however, that much of the work done illuminating their dimmed corridors through history has focused on the biographies of collectors, or the experiences of visitors, the human history, and not on the history of the objects themselves. This may seem natural since, being objects, they aren’t saying much. For the most part, however, museum objects are a particular case in that they do leave documents, in varying states of completeness. Curators work hard to establish provenance of some objects — usually those with some particularly attractive qualities — and so it was a paper by David Pantalony, curator at the Canada Science and Technology Museum, entitled “Biography of an Artifact” ([[2011|Bibliography]]) which shone a new light on these objects of display, and focused my interest on the life histories of museum artifacts.\n\n I spent a summer during my under graduate program volunteering at the Okanagan Heritage Museum in Kelowna, British Columbia, as well as several winter weekends. Sorting through storage rooms filled with shelves and shelves of objects I wondered, how were some of these items lucky enough to have escaped the ravages of time. I also wondered what could inspired anyone to save some pieces, and still others I couldn’t even identify. In the mess of dioramas, regatta trophies, and other artifacts that hadn’t yet made the move to the climate controlled collections storage, there were always a few dusty taxidermy animals scattered among the dark shelves, waiting to catch a curious museum volunteer by surprise. These animal specimens had always represented, for me, an odd hobby; a slightly grotesque, slightly droll caricature of a wild thing. Out of display this way, they never struck me as scientific objects. Despite all that, Samuel Alberti’s The Afterlives of Animals (2011) makes clear these animals live an afterlife as educational objects. The notion of these animal specimens as having been part of scientific history and as having once been an actual living animal, struck me and made me wonder how many examples I’d passed by, never having imagined their life stories of how they got to be in a dusty basement in the Central Okanagan Valley.\n\n In a [[2005|Bibliography]] essay, Alberti describes the travels of Zafara, the first giraffe ever seen in France, as it walked from Marseille to Paris in 1827 (562). The image of a giraffe making its, walking, graceful, long neck swaying rhythmically, through the nineteenth-century French countryside, was at once comical and miraculous. What it would have been like for the people of provincial France to see this oddly-shaped creature striding down a dirt road, next to carriages and horses. All legs and neck, a dusty yellow coat. The sight must have defined amazement. His description of Maharaja the elephant, who was displayed in death at the Manchester Museum and had lived out his life at the Belle Vue Zoo and in a traveling menagerie, exemplifies the transition animals made from a life of display to an afterlife of more of the same. A beloved crowd favourite, whether living or dead.\n\n With a new appreciation for the lives and afterlives of animals in the museum I wonder, how does an animal become a specimen? It clearly passes over not only the threshold between life and death, but between the categories of subject and object. When it makes both these transitions, what comes with and what is left behind? Face to face with life made still in the sucking silence of the museum, are we truly still dealing with an animal at all? Besides questioning displaying the dead, the most obvious question is why display animal specimens at all? The obvious answer, of course, is eduction. However, my next step on this line of reasoning is to ask what is particularly educational about the partial remains of a dead animal? Here I must confess that I am not particularly inclined toward a moral objection against animal specimens, and wish to clarify that my questions are not seated in an active (or passive) wish to remove animal specimens from display in museums. It simply strikes me, upon acknowledging the practice, that it is exceedingly odd that we should have ever decided that bits of animal preserved to varying degrees and displayed in cold, quiet rooms would make for an especially educational experience. I can’t mean to compare this form of eduction to others, but I am curious what it is that has perpetuated this from for several centuries. Should a museum choose to include provenance information about the specimen? Should we consider a life-history of the subject before it was made an object a necessary part of the story? Should we include in the story the process of transition and the labor — for, Alberti reminds us, taxidermy involves a lot of work ([[2011|Bibliography]]: 6) — that goes into forcing a dead thing into frozen perpetuum? If we did any of these things, what would be the effect for the museum visitor? Does seeing backward beyond that threshold, the one we all know somewhere has been crossed, revoke a permission that has been granted to look at a dead thing? Given our societal relationship with death, does the life history of specimens transgress an unwritten rule, a safety barricade, which protects us from the darkness of our own mortality? Does it provide and opportunity to connect, another chance at education, and empathy or compassion for other species or individuals?\nIn this essay I would like to look at animal specimens, specifically within the context of the museum, and what their afterlife jobs entail. What is the affective, pedagogical work they do — in parallel, what is the work we expect them to do, what is it we ask of them after they’ve died? How is it that we engage with them? How do we learn from them, and what can we learn from them? It’s a lot to ask of one who has already lived out their life, to continue on, to entertain and educate, to excited imagination and inspire the lives of those with whom they enter into some kind of emotional, educational experience. What are museum specimens up to?\n\tI have chosen multiple media through which to engage these questions. This essay has been produced as a text-based template for what has turned into web-based, non-linear story found at XXXX.XXXX.com. The non-linear element of the project is an exploration and an attempt to allow the reader (user, consumer) to engage with the material in an individual and explorative way, without prescribed outcomes or stages. There has been a blog element incorporated in this essay which acts as a personal narrative and diary of my trip to the Royal Ontario Museum and the biodiversity gallery. This element uses a linear and personal media, the blog, to immerse the reader in the personal element of the experience of engaging with museum specimens. It also allows incorporation of other multimedia elements through linking to outside sources such as a video posted on Youtube, and commenting by anyone one who reads it (the blog is publicly accessible). Storify was another digital platform incorporated into the essay and used to share a particular experience through the curation of messages sent using the online platform Twitter.\n\tThe essay has been broken into six parts which have I chose to arrange in order to be read from one to six, however, I am just as pleased if a reader or user decides to navigate through the essay in a different order. Every attempt has been made to facilitate free navigation through the website. Part one will deal with the history of Museums within Science and Technology Studies scholarship. Part two deals with the history of animals and animal specimens. Part three is the blog section which can be viewed as several posts online at www.deadnatureblog.wordpress.com, but is not broken up in the text-based essay or when viewed directly on the website. Part four deals briefly with theories of things and vibrant matter, and part five with the performances of specimens. Part six closes with the story curated on Storify, which has been represented in the text version with images.\n\n[[On to Part I: Museums and STS|Part I: Museums and STS]]\n[[Part II: Animal History and Animal Specimens]]\n[[Part III: Dead Nature dot Wordpress dot com|First Encounters]]\n[[Part IV: Things Theory and Vibrant Matter]]\n[[Part V: Theatre of the Museum]]\n[[Part VI: How to Storify a Blue Whale|A spotlight performance]]\n[[Jump right to the chase: Conclusion|Conclusion]]\n\n
Dorothee Brantz is critical of the place of animals within written history. She writes that “while it is certainly true that animals have not consciously contributed to the formation of the past, one must wonder if that also necessarily implies that they are not part of history” ([[2010|Bibliography]]: 2). However, the absence of animals in historical scholarship gives the impression that animals have had no part at all, which we known instinctually cannot be true. Animals have been sewn into the human experience since the beginning. Just what that experience has been, however, has shifted over time, even beyond the seeming impenetrable barrier of death.\n\n\tAs human history was deliberately set apart from natural history, Brantz asserts that “incorporating animals into historical narrative thus necessitates a radical rethinking of the project of history”([[2010|Bibliography]]: 3). Descartes separated humans from animals based on the soul (Fudge, Gilbert, and Wiseman, [[1999|Bibliography]]: 3). The soul signified both rationality and immortality, and therefore humanity. Genetically, some animals are closer to humans than to other animals; culturally, many domesticated animals have closer ties to humans than to anything wild. This begs the question of where animal specimens fit into an epistemology divided between the human world and the natural world. Specimens have certainly been used to reinforce this division, however, what becomes of it when we turn instead to the history of the specimen itself? There can be no avoiding the existence of specimens as part of human cultural history, but what part do they constitute? Specimens embody a many-layered relationship between humans and animals.\n\n//How much nature could possibly remain in a dust piece of victorian taxidermy?//\nRachel Poliquin, [[2008|Bibliography]]: 124\n\n\tA specimen, as defined by Alberti (2008) is, “an individual animal or plant, a piece of mineral etc., taken for scientific study or display (from specere, to look) and a single thing or part taken as an example of a class or representative of the whole […]” (74). Specimen’s have historically been defined in contrast to artifacts, as an artifact is, by its nature, a product of human workmanship. The specimen however, as we have seen above, is itself a product of human workmanship. So where does it lie on the scale between nature and culture? It is here helpful, perhaps, to review the process by which an animal, specifically, becomes a specimen. The obvious first step, death, needing no review, Stephen Asma’s //Stuffed Animals, Pickled Heads// ([[2001|Bibliography]]) provides an excellent description of the process of specimen-making.\n\n\tThe process begins when the animal enters the museum, or another preparatory environment (Asma, [[2001|Bibliography]]: 28). Precise measurements are taken of the body with photos and drawings to capture coloration and markings. A death mask may be made and used for reference during the mounting. The animal is skinned and the body deboned, each part examined, each detail suitably recorded. The body’s internals are left as scrap, the skin is tanned, and the bones are sent to the beetles for cleaning. The tiny beetles make quick work of an average-sized animal skeleton, leaving the bones ready for drying and perhaps display separately from the skin. Asma points out the similarity of this process to the degeneration that would take place in nature; made visible and perhaps sped up.\n\n\tThe skeleton may be reused in preparing the frame for the skin or it may be prepared and displayed separately. An oil-based clay is used to sculpt muscles over the frame, with a considerable amount of skill going into producing a life-like appearance (Asma, [[2008|Bibliography]]: 30). The level of accuracy taken in building a museum specimen may be what sets it apart from the work of a hobbyist, and what sets taxidermy apart as a form of art. Of the clay, a plaster mould is made. From the plaster mould a light-weight cast is made and fitted with any bony parts of the animal, such as horns or a beak, before the skin is stretched over and gently sewn up with close, careful stitching to conceal the evidence. Glass eyes complete the illusion of quasi-life.\n\n\t The basic principles of preparing skins has been with us, as humans, for as long as we have been using them for clothing or shelter. The wet preparation of specimens, on the other hand, has been a more recent development and shares its story with that of both embalming and anatomy. The embalming side draws our attention to our own discomfort with death; the entire funerary procedure being, as Asma points out, an elaborate and theatrical ritual where the evidence of death is banished by the artistic hand of the undertaker ([[2001|Bibliography]]: 50). The preservation techniques of the funeral industry, however, will not do for more than a few days, the mixture of fluids being weaken to maintain a life-like colouring. \n\nThe technique of alcohol preservation was perfected by John Hunter, remembered for his odd collection of jarred specimens assembled and displayed today in the Hunterian museum. Working as a surgeon, Hunter collected multiple accolades, as well as hundreds of wet-preserved specimens. Asma notes that Hunter was important figure in the transition of surgery from barbershop to science. His collection of anatomical specimens, both animal and human, was used in medical research through the eighteenth- and twentieth-centuries. \n\n\tThough the preservative qualities of alcohol were first discovered by Robert Boyle in the 1660s, it was Hunter who perfected the technique of preserving specimens submerged in it. Asma describes the collection thus:\n\n“All of hunter’s preserving jars were sealed first with a cap of pig’s bladder, then with a cap of tin, and over that a seal of lead, and lastly another pig’s bladder stretched over the top. The nearly imperceptible support filaments that suspended the specimens were linen threads soaked in molten beeswax.” ([[2001|Bibliography]]: 73).\n\nAsma further notes that without well-preserved anatomical specimens, museums of the eighteenth-century “could not effectively realize their education function” (2001: 51). However, the animal’s story doesn’t end with acquisition. Alberti writes, “Many [specimens] continue to move in and out of collections (especially plants and insects), others are subject to conceptual re-invention, affording new meaning and statuses, and all accumulate histories” ([[2008|Bibliography]]: 83).\n\n\tAnimal specimens present animals to us in a powerful new way. Haraway wrote, “Taxidermy was made into the servant of the ‘real.’ Artifactual children, better than life, were birthed from dead matter,”([[2004|Bibliography]]:166) going on to add, “No visitor to a merely physical Africa [in the case of Africa Hall] could see these animals” (157). It is the immobile quality of specimens, writes Asma, that makes them “inherently creepy” ([[2001|Bibliography]]: 46). Life is typified by, among other things, movement. It is simply unfortunate that much of life either moves too fast, or too slow to be properly appreciated, examined, or recorded by humans. The animal specimen corrects this deficiency. Animal specimens allow us the opportunity to deeply study life, stripped down to those essential qualities we find interesting at the time, and re-presented as an educational tool to be shared with the public. “The biological death of a living beast is the birth of the specimen,”writes Alberti.\n\n[[Take a walk through the Royal Ontario Museum?|First Encounters]]\n\n[[Back to Part I|Part I: Museums and STS]]\n[[On to Part III: Dead Nature dot Wordpress dot com|First Encounters]]\n[[Part IV: Things Theory and Vibrant Matter]]\n[[Part V: Theatre of the Museum]]\n[[Part VI: How to Storify a Blue Whale|A spotlight performance]]\n[[Jump right to the chase: Conclusion|Conclusion]]\n<<back>>
I began this project with a two-fold goal: to better understand the what makes animal museum specimens educational, and to find ways to share the experience of researching and writing about that question. In pursuit of the first goal, I traced the scholarship on museums, animals, and things. While museums construct nature and reinforce boundaries between nature and culture, the animals that they contain work at breaking those boundaries down. Animal specimens are a particularly acute example of objects which obliterate that boundary all together. While the animal is part of nature, the specimen, as artifact, is clearly part of the human world, though it is asked to perform its role as nature and we are asked, as visitors to the museum, to suspend our disbelief.\n\n\tAs things, specimens act out their agency in speaking for nature. They tell a story to visitors which authenticates their status as knowledge. They embrace their affective and theatrical nature to set a mood under which the visitor engages with them, as pieces of landscape on the move. The mood they set makes them more useful as pedagogical objects, helping to fulfill their afterlife purposes. Their biographical histories can be read; they can be read through descriptive narratives to represent entire species, instead of individuals; they can represent a cautionary tale of endangerment and entreat action for conservation of species and habitats; they can provoke a a visceral experience which is fluid, and unique to each visitor’s encounter with each specimen. These things are hard at work.\n\n\tIn pursuit of my second goal, I attempted to bring the reader along with me as I explored the biodiversity gallery at the ROM. I shared my thoughts, my feelings, my senses with my audience in my own hope of creating an experience. I re-created a lecture, sharing the expert knowledge of Mark Engstrom with those not present in either time or space. I reshuffled that expertise, remixing it with other information to augment the whole experience when I created a Storify story. And, I created a website through which my entire project could be experienced, building in as much flexibility as I could think of.\n\t\nAll of this I did in an attempt to challenge the morality of method. In offsetting my methods just a bit, I hope to have created something which provides different vantage point, and perhaps challenges the silences which would inevitably have crept into a more traditional and formally executed project. It is certain that my project has also created silences, for, where something has been made present, something else has been made silent. I hope, however, that the unconventional presences I have attempted to create have made unconventional silences which may draw more critical observation than conventional ones.\n\n[[Start again?|Recalled to life.]]\n\n[[Part I: Museums and STS]]\n[[Part II: Animal History and Animal Specimens]]\n[[Part III: Dead Nature dot Wordpress dot com|First Encounters]]\n[[Part IV: Things Theory and Vibrant Matter]]\n[[Part V: Theatre of the Museum]]\n[[Part VI: How to Storify a Whale|A spotlight performance]]\n