Warning! The soundtrack of “Split and Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine”.

“Split and Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine”, the upcoming temporary exhibition at Medical Museion, will expose visitors to a sensory and phenomenological engagement with the materialities of recent biomedicine. In addition to foregrounding aesthetic and morphological aspects of the instruments and technologies that are involved in the everyday practices of biomedicine, the visitors will be able to touch and move objects, experience (rather than merely read about) the high and low temperatures used to manage biological processes, see through the ‘eyes’ of contemporary endoscopy, and listen to the sounds of laboratory equipment telling you to pay attention.
For that reason, I spent a couple of hours recording the audio alarms of different instruments in the collections of Medical Museion. These will, in an edited form, be part of the exhibition. But I figured that perhaps they could be useful for anyone feeling a bit sleepy in from of their computer and therefore in need of a gentle but insistent wake-up call.
Therefore, feel free to enjoy at any time the sound of a Forma water-jacketed incubator in need of more water, a Techne Progene PCR-machine reaching the end of its pre-programmed thermal cycle, or the somewhat less sophisticated call of a KONE incubator where the timer has run out.
“Split and Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine” opens on 11 June and can be experienced until mid-december this year. We will be back with more updates on how the installing of the exhibition progresses.