Imagining the Brain, Engaging the Body: Designing Visitor Engagement in Science Exhibition Experiments with Art
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29311/mas.v20i2.3522Keywords:
exhibition experiment, science communication, public engagement, art-science, visitor engagementAbstract
Science museums have increasingly experimented with bringing art into their exhibitions to attract and engage visitors. While the prevalence and popularity of such experiments is growing, research on the rationales for collaboration and their outcomes, as well as the challenges involved, remains scarce. This paper analyzes and discusses how art is used as part of engaging visitors in two contrasting exhibitions about the brain and neuroscience: one using art as illustration of ready-made science, the other inviting artists as co-curators in evoking a feeling of science in the making. Drawing on models of public engagement and art-science collaboration, it discusses how notions of science communication and visitor engagement are imagined and enacted in the two exhibitions, and how they relate to different ‘logics’, or rationales, of interdisciplinary collaboration.
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- Fig. 1 Visitors in the walk-through installation Synaptic passage by artist Daniel Canogar. Courtesy of Studio Daniel Canogar.
- Fig. 4 View from the entrance to the section ‘Your Thinking Brain’. Photo by Roderick Mickens © American Museum of Natural History.
- Fig. 2 After the Mona Lisa 8 by artist Devorah Sperber. Photo by Denis Finnin © American Museum of Natural History.
- Fig. 3 Star tracing activity, to illustrate the shaping of procedural memory. Photo by Denis Finnin © American Museum of Natural History.
- Fig. 5 Faces in the ‘Mirror Room’. Photo © Lesley Leslie-Spinks.
- Fig. 6 Display of brains on jars in Mind Gap. Photo © Lesley Leslie-Spinks.
- Fig. 7 View from the entrance to the ‘Forest Room’. Photo © Lesley Leslie-Spinks.
- Fig. 8 Guided group of children walks along the light tubes in the ‘Lighting Room’. Photo © Lesley Leslie-Spinks.
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Copyright remains with the author(s) of the article. This article can be re-used according to the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence.