WANTED: Intern for Upcoming London-Based 10 Day Festival of Curiosity and Curiosities

WANTED!

Frighteningly organized interns for upcoming (30 August - 8 September) festival of curiosity and curiosities programmed by Morbid Anatomy, Strange Attractor, and The Coney Island Museum at a number of venues around London.

We are looking for is someone to help us research and contact venues, speakers, and performers; oversee scheduling and logistics; assist with publicity; and write professional emails to individuals and institutions.

The position is, I am sorry to report, unpaid. However, you will be generously rewarded with books, alcohol, food, and full access for yourself and two friends to the festival and other events. Work will be part time (3-6 hours a week) but focussed and occasionally (and inevitably) stressful.

We truly believe that, for the right person with the right interests, this will be a fantastic learning opportunity, and a chance to develop relationships with fascinating and brilliant people as well as remarkable and overlooked venues and institutions.

If interested, please email a short letter about yourself and your suitability for the role to congress[@]strangeattractor.co.uk by 28 May.

Please feel free to pass this on to any potentially interested parties.

Image: L0063532 Credit: Wellcome Library, London via Wellcome Images
Poster: For twelve nights only, commencing Monday, Feb. 23, 1874 : South London Palace, London Road / proprietors, Speedy and Poole. 1874

"History And Cultural Representations Of Human Remains," Symposia Series, London and Paris, 2013

I just learned of two wonderful looking symposiums taking place this year as part of a three-part series called "History And Cultural Representations Of Human Remains," organised by the CAS research centre (EA 801) in collaboration with the Toulouse Natural History Museum and in partnership with the Academy of Medicine (Paris), the Hunterian Museum (Museums and Archives, Royal College of Surgeons, London), the Center Alexandre Koyré and FRAMESPA (UMR 5136). The second one, entitled "Anatomical Models," will take place April 4 at the Academy of Medicine in Paris; the third one, entitled "Exhibiting Human Remains," will take place at London's Hunterian Museum on June 4th. They both look excellent! Sadly, we missed the first of the series, which took place in Toulouse on Feb. 4th and was called "Medical Museums and Anatomical Collections."

Full details on both remaining symposia follow; hope to see you at one or both!

Anatomical Models
Academy of Medicine - Paris
April 4, 2013

• 9.00-9.15 : Welcome speech
• 9.15-10.00 : Rafael Mandressi (CNRS, Centre Alexandre Koyré), Artificialisations du corps dans la première modernité européenne
• 10.00-10.30 : Jack Hartnell (Courtauld Institute of Art, London), Anatomical Image as Anatomical Model: Evoking Skin and Surgery in a Tactile Anatomical Scroll
• 10.30-11.00 : Marieke Hendriksen (University of Groningen), The Fabric of the Body: Textile in Anatomical Models and Preparations
• 11.00-11.30 : Coffee break
• 11.30-12.00 : Jean-Louis Fischer (CNRS), Les cires de foetus humains du Musée de la Specola : Une modélisation unique du dogme de la préexistence des germes
• 12.00-12.30 : Margaret Carlyle (MacGill University, Canada), Manikins, Midwives, Medical Men: Obstetrical Hardware in the Paris Medical Marketplace, c. 1750-c.1789
• 12.30-14.00 : Lunch Break 
• 14.00-14.30 : Victoria Diehl (Spanish National Research Council), The Iconographic Catholic Legacy of Clemente Susini’s Anatomical Venus
• 14.30-15.00 : Nike Fakiner (Spanish National Research Council), Impressions in wax: Alexander von Humboldt and Gustav Zeiller’s Anatomical Wax Models
• 15.00-15.30 : Mechthild Fend (University College London), Contagious Contacts: The Dermatological Moulage as Indexical Image
• 15.30-16.00 : Coffee break
• 16.00-16.30 : Anna Maerker (King’s College London), Models and Performance in Leicester Square and the Strand, 1831-32
• 16.30-17.00 : Birgit Nemec (University of Vienna, Department for the History of Medicine), Modelling the Human – Modelling Society. Anatomical Models in late 19th- and early 20th-Century Vienna and the Politics of Visual Cultures

Exhibiting Human Remains
Hunterian Museum - London
June 4, 2013

• 10.00-10.45 : Sam Alberti (Hunterian Museum), Collecting the Dead
• 10.45-11.15 : Nausica Zaballos (EHESS, Paris), Fear of death and body snatchers on the reservation: the corpse as a mediating figure between settlers and Navajo people
• 11.15-11.45 : Coffee break 
• 11.45- 12.15 : David Mazierski (University of Toronto), Vanitas Mundi: The Anatomical Legacy of Frederik Ruysch
• 12.15-12.45 : Adrian Young (Princeton University, USA), Man Ape or Ape Man? Raymond Dart, the Taung Child, and the Rhetorics of Display at the 1925 British Empire Exhibition 12.45-14.00 : Lunch break
• 14.00-14.30 : David Punter (University of Bristol), The Abhuman Remains of the Gothic
  14.30-15.00 : Laurence Talairach-Vielmas (University of Toulouse II-Le Mirail/Centre Alexandre Koyré), Bottled Specimens in Victorian Literature 
• 15.00-15.30 : Peter M. McIsaac (German and Museum Studies, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, USA), More than Shock Value: Gestures of Exposure in Gottfried Benn’s Morgue Cycle
• 15.30-16.00 : Coffee break
• 16.00-16.30 : Fiona Pettit (University of Exeter), Monstrous Specimens: The Conflation of Medical and Popular Exhibitions of Rare Anatomies
• 16.30-17.00 : Gemma Angel (University College London), Displaying the Self: The Tattoo from Living Body to Museum Collection

For registration and information: email talairac [at] univ-tlse2.fr and rafael.mandressi [at] damesme.cnrs.fr.

Special thanks to Mechthild Fend--who will participate in the April event--for letting me know about this!

Image: "Royal College of Surgeons, Court of Examiners," Henry Jamyn Brooks, 1894

Congress for Curious Peoples One-Day Symposium: London Edition, Last Tuesday Society, This Saturday, September 8

 This Saturday, September 8, you are cordially invited to join myself and a host of distinguished scholars, makers, and museum folk as we investigate, via a one day symposium termed "The Congress for Curious Peoples," some of the provocative intersections explored in the exhibition "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions of Death Made Beautiful in Italy," on view at the London-based Last Tuesday Society until the end of the month.

This first ever UK edition of The Congress for Curious Peoples will feature participants from The Wellcome Collection, The Wellcome Library, and The Gordon Museum of Pathology, as well as some of my very favorite artists, thinkers and scholars, and will take on such heady topics as enchantment and enlightenment, or the sublimation of the magical into the rational world; the secret life of objects, or the non-rational allure of objects and the psychology of collecting; and beautiful death and incorruptible bodies, or the shared drive to immortalize the human body and aestheticize death in both medicine and Catholicism, and will

Full info follows; hope very very much to see you there!

Congress for Curious Peoples: London Edition
Date: Saturday September 8
Time: 11am - 5:30 pm
Admission: £15.00 (Tickets here)
Location: The Last Tuesday Society
Address: 11 Mare Street, London, E8 4RP
Produced by Morbid Anatomy

11-12: Introduction by Morbid Anatomy's Joanna EbensteinKeynote panel: Enchantment and Enlightenment (20 minute presentations followed by moderated discussion)

• Moderated by Joanna Ebenstein
• David L. Martin, Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Modernity and the Sacred
• Simon Werrrett, Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History

12-1: Lunch

1-2:30 The Secret Life of Objects: The Allure of Objects and the Psychology of Collecting (20 minute presentations followed by moderated discussion)

• Moderated by Ross MacFarlane, Wellcome Library
• Petra Lange-Berndt, University College London
• Kate Forde, The Wellcome Collection

2:30-3:00 Break

3:00-5:30 Beautiful Death and Incorruptible Bodies: Eternal Life and Aestheticized Death in Medicine and Catholicism (15 minute presentations followed by moderated discussion)

• Moderated by John Troyer, Center for Death and Society, University of Bath 
• Eleanor Crook, Wax artist
• Gemma Angel, PhD Student ad UCL History of Art
• Anna Maerker, Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775–1815
• Simon Chaplin, Wellcome Library
• Sigrid Sarda, Wax artist
• William Edwards, The Gordon Museum

You can find out more by clicking here, and purchase tickets by clicking here.

2012 Congress of Curious Peoples This Week at Coney Island!!!

Hi All! Just a reminder that the 2012 Congress of Curious Peoples--a 10-day series of lectures and performances devoted to curiosity and curiosities broadly considered, and featuring sideshow acts, lectures, performances, and a 2-day scholarly-yet-popular symposium called The Congress for Curious Peoples--launches in earnest tomorrow night, with a lecture by the always amazing Amy Herzog.

This year's iteration of The Congress promises to be the best yet; it will include a 2-day symposium featuring panel discussions on topics such as pre-cinematic immersive amusements and religion as spectacle, with featured speakers that include Sara Velas of The Velaslavasay Panorama; Paul Koudounaris of Empire of Death; Colin Nightingale, Senior Producer of Punchdrunk, the company behind the mindbendingly amazing Sleep No More Sleep; and Colin Dickey, author of Cranioklepty. Also featured will be stand-alone lectures on the 17th century artist of fetal skeleton tableaux Frederik Ruysch and the phenomenon of ethnographic displays called "human zoos," a screening of an over-the-top early 1970s TV Evangelist Christmas spectacular, and introductory lectures by myself and Coney Island Museum director Aaron Beebe.

Full--and hopefully final!--lineup below; hope to see you at some--if not more--of the terrific events making up this year's Congress!

Monday April 16th
7:30 – (Lecture) Amy Herzog: Architectural Fictions: Economic Development, Immersive Renderings, and the Virtualization of Brooklyn (more here)
9:00 – (Performance) Shea Love and the Circus Emporium

Tuesday April 17th
7:30 – (Lecture) Philip Kadish: “Pinhead Races and the White Man’s Burden” (more here)
9:00 – (Performance) The Squidling Bros Sideshow

Wednesday April 18th
7:30 -(Lecture/Performance) ‘An Evening of Fate, Chance and Mystery’ with Lord Whimsy and Les the Mentalist (more here)
9:00 – (Performance) Jo Boobs

Thursday April 19th
7:30 – (Lecture/Demonstration) The Museum of Interesting Things, WHAT THE SAM HILL IS THAT! (more here)
9:00 – (Performance) The Curious Couple from Coney Island

Friday April 20th
7:30 – (Performance/Reading) A reading of VENUS by Suzan-Lori Parks. Directed by Donya K. Washington (more here)
9:00 – (Performance/Lecture) Sideshow Legend Jim Rose

Saturday April 21st
Super Freak Weekend at Sideshows by the Seashore (Continuous Admission, Tickets at the door); Colonnade of Curiosities in the Freak Bar
Congress For Curious People (Day 1 of a 2-day Symposium)

Sunday April 22nd
Super Freak Weekend at Sideshows by the Seashore (Continuous Admission, Tickets at the door); Colonnade of Curiosities in the Freak Bar
Congress For Curious People (Day 2 of a 2-day Symposium)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

FULL SYMPOSIUM DETAILS:
THE 2012 CONGRESS FOR CURIOUS PEOPLE
Saturday and Sunday, April 21st and 22nd

SATURDAY APRIL 21st

11:00 – 12:00: Keynote Addresses

• Joanna Ebenstein, Morbid Anatomy Library
• Aaron Beebe, Coney Island Museum

12:00 – 1:00: Lunch

1:00 – 3:30: Immersive Amusements: Cosmoramas, Cycloramas and Panoramic Illusions: Panel discussion moderated and introduced by Aaron Beebe, The Coney Island Museum

• Suzanne Wray
• Sara Velas, The Velaslavasay Panorama
• Jessica Routhier, The Saco Museum
• Russell Potter, Rhode Island College
• Denise Blake Oleksijczuk, Simon Fraser University

4:00 – 5:00: The Business of the Dead: Frederik Ruysch as an Entrepreneurial Anatomist, Lecture by Daniel Margocsy, Hunter College

5:00: Christmas in America: Miss Velma and the Evangelist Spectacle: Screening of “Christmas in America,” an early 1970s television special by Miss Velma, early TV evangelist, introduced by Daniel Paul

SUNDAY APRIL 22

11:00 – 1:00: Religion and Spectacle: A panel with discussion moderated and introduced by Joanna Ebenstein, Morbid Anatomy Library

• Paul Koudounaris, author of Empire of Death
• Shannon Taggart, Photographer
  
• The Venerable Tsering Phunstok
• Colin Dickey, author of Cranioklepty and Afterlives of the Saints
• Salvador Olguin, Borderline Projects

1:00 – 2:30: Lunch and Sideshow Visit

2:30 – 3:30: Traveling Ethnographic Shows and Human Zoos, a lecture by Elizabeth Bradley

3:30 – 5:30: Theater Rethunk: An Alternative History of the Theatrical: A panel with discussion moderated and introduced by Chris Muller

• Amy Herzog, Queens College
• Colin Nightingale, Senior Producer of Punchdrunk, Sleep No More
• Alex Harvey, Freelance Director/Adapter
  
• Chris Muller, New York University
• Dick Zigun, Founder of Coney Island USA

Tickets for the symposium are available here; for tickets to individual events and lectures, click here; 10-day Congressional Passes--which provide access to all events!--are available here. All events take place at 1208 Surf Avenue in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York; you can map it here. See you there!!!

Panoramas! Baroque TV Evangelism! Human Zoos! Frederik Ruysch! Religious Theatre! Announcing the 2012 Congress of Curious Peoples Lineup!

I am SO very excited to (finally!) announce the lineup for this years' Congress of and for Curious Peoples, taking place this April 13-22 at Coney Island USA!

For those of you new to the concept, The Congress of Curious Peoples is a 10-day series of lectures and performances devoted to curiosity and curiosities broadly considered. If features sideshow acts, lectures, performances, and a 2-day scholarly-yet-popular symposium called The Congress for Curious Peoples, which is produced by The Morbid Anatomy Library in tandem with The Coney Island Museum.

This year's Congress for Curious Peoples symposium will feature panel discussions on such topics as pre-cinematic immersive amusements and religion as spectacle, while some of the featured speakers will be Sara Velas of The Velaslavasay Panorama; Paul Koudounaris of Empire of Death; an as-of-yet unnamed representative of the amazing Sleep No More; and Colin Dickey, author of Cranioklepty. Also featured will be stand-alone lectures on the 17th century artist of fetal skeleton tableaux Frederik Ruysch and the phenomenon of ethnographic displays called "human zoos," a screening of an over-the-top early 1970s TV Evangelist Christmas spectacular, and introductory lectures by myself and Coney Island Museum director Aaron Beebe.

Full lineup below; hope to see you at some--if not more--of the terrific events making up this year's Congress!

SYMPOSIUM: THE 2012 CONGRESS FOR CURIOUS PEOPLE
Saturday and Sunday, April 21st and 22nd

SATURDAY APRIL 21st

11:00 – 12:00: Keynote Addresses

• Joanna Ebenstein, Morbid Anatomy Library
• Aaron Beebe, Coney Island Museum

12:00 – 1:00: Lunch

1:00 – 3:30: Immersive Amusements: Cosmoramas, Cycloramas and Panoramic Illusions: Panel discussion moderated and introduced by Aaron Beebe, The Coney Island Museum

• Suzanne Wray
• Sara Velas, The Velaslavasay Panorama
• Jessica Routhier, The Saco Museum
• Errki Huhtamo, UCLA
• Russell Potter, Rhode Island College
• Denise Blake Oleksijczuk, Simon Fraser University

4:00 – 5:00: The Business of the Dead: Frederik Ruysch as an Entrepreneurial Anatomist, Lecture by Daniel Margocsy, Hunter College

5:00: Christmas in America: Miss Velma and the Evangelist Spectacle: Screening of “Christmas in America,” an early 1970s television special by Miss Velma, early TV evangelist, introduced by Daniel Paul

SUNDAY APRIL 22

11:00 – 1:00: Religion and Spectacle: A panel with discussion moderated and introduced by Joanna Ebenstein, Morbid Anatomy Library

• Paul Koudounaris, author of Empire of Death
• Shannon Taggart, Photographer
  
• The Venerable Tsering Phunstok
• Colin Dickey, author of Cranioklepty and Afterlives of the Saints
• Salvador Olguin, Borderline Projects

1:00 – 2:30: Lunch and Sideshow Visit

2:30 – 3:30: Traveling Ethnographic Shows and Human Zoos, a lecture by Elizabeth Bradley

3:30 – 5:30: Theater Rethunk: An Alternative History of the Theatrical: A panel with discussion moderated and introduced by Chris Muller

• Amy Herzog, Queens College
• Colin Nightingale, Senior Producer of Punchdrunk, Sleep No More
• Alex Harvey
• Chris Muller, New York University
• Dick Zigun, Founder of Coney Island USA

And now, for the full 10-day Congress Schedule:

Friday, April 13
Opening Night Party featuring The Lizard Man and the annual inductions into the Sideshow Hall of Fame.

Saturday, April 14
Alumni Weekend at Sideshows by the Seashore (Continuous Admission, Tickets at the door); Colonnade of Curiosities in the Freak Bar.

Sunday, April 15
Alumni Weekend at Sideshows by the Seashore (Continuous Admission, Tickets at the door); Colonnade of Curiosities in the Freak Bar

Monday April 16th
7:30 – (Lecture) Amy Herzog: Architectural Fictions: Economic Development, Immersive Renderings, and the Virtualization of Brooklyn
9:00 – (Performance) Shea Love and the Circus Emporium

Tuesday April 17th
7:30 – (Lecture) Philip Kadish: “Pinhead Races and the White Man’s Burden”
9:00 – (Performance) The Squidling Bros Sideshow

Wednesday April 18th
7:30 -(Lecture/Performance) ‘An Evening of Fate, Chance and Mystery’ with Lord Whimsy and Les the Mentalist
9:00 – (Performance) Jo Boobs

Thursday April 19th
7:30 – (Lecture/Performance) Erkki Huhtamo: “Mareorama Revisited”
9:00 – (Performance) The Curious Couple from Coney Island

Friday April 20th
7:30 – (Performance/Reading) TBA
9:00 – (Performance/Lecture) Sideshow Legend Jim Rose

Saturday April 21st
Super Freak Weekend at Sideshows by the Seashore (Continuous Admission, Tickets at the door); Colonnade of Curiosities in the Freak Bar
Congress For Curious People (Day 1 of a 2-day Symposium)

Sunday April 22nd
Super Freak Weekend at Sideshows by the Seashore (Continuous Admission, Tickets at the door); Colonnade of Curiosities in the Freak Bar
Congress For Curious People (Day 2 of a 2-day Symposium)

Tickets for the symposium are available here; for tickets to individual events and lectures, click here; 10-day Congressional Passes--which provide access to all events!--are available here. All events take place at 1208 Surf Avenue in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York; you can map it here. See you there!!!

"Of Pictures & Specimens: Natural History in Post-Revolutionary and Restoration France," Interdisciplinary Symposium, American Philosophical Society

Another excellent looking symposium! Free and open to the public:

Of Pictures & Specimens: Natural History in Post-Revolutionary and Restoration France
Interdisciplinary Symposium
December 1 - 3, 2011
American Philosophical Society (APS) Museum, Philadelphia

Of Pictures & Specimens: Natural History in Post-Revolutionary and Restoration France is organized by the APS Museum in conjunction with its current exhibition, Of Elephants & Roses: Encounters with French Natural History, 1790 - 1830. The symposium includes French and American scholars, and addresses key ideas raised by the displays in the exhibition. Included are presentations exploring how Empress Josephine became shepherdess, botanist, and estate manager, how top scientists and artists pictured nature, and how natural science influenced everything from Balzac's novels to the 19th century's romanticized notions of long-lost worlds.

Of Elephants & Roses celebrates the life sciences during a time when Paris was the center of natural history in the Western world. On view are more than sixty objects from France never before seen in the U.S., including Josephine's black swan, gorgeous renderings of flowers on Sèvres porcelain, a mastodon fossil bone sent by Thomas Jefferson to Paris, an herbarium specimen of the flowering Franklinia tree, and everyday objects decorated with charming images of a giraffe who walked 550 miles across France to greet the king.

For information on speakers and program: apsmuseum.org/symposium
For online registration, required by Nov. 28, 2011: apsmuseum.org/registration

SYMPOSIUM IS FREE OF CHARGE
The symposium is made possible through generous funding by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation.

More on this symposium can be found here.

"Good Neighbours: Faeries, Folklore and the Art of Tessa Farmer," Symposium, London, TODAY

I have just been alerted to a pretty amazing sounding day of presentations, readings, films and discussions taking place at Viktor Wynd Fine Art today to launch an exhibition work by Tessa Farmer. Full details below; wish I could be there!

Good Neighbours: Faeries, Folklore and the Art of Tessa Farmer
A day of presentations, readings, films and discussion
Saturday 1 October 2011, 11am til 7pm
Viktor Wynd Fine Art, 11 Mare St, London E8

* 11am Introduction - Tessa Farmer, Viktor Wynd and Mark Pilkington

* 11.30 Jeremy Harte – Faeries and Otherness

* 12.30 Gwilym Games – “The Obscure and Horrible Race of the Hills”, Arthur Machen’s faeries

* 1.30pm lunch

* 2.30 Wynd reads a faery tale to aid digestion

* 2.45pm Petra Lange Berndt – Swarming: Insects in art

* 3.45pm Diane Perkiss – The Changing Face of Faery

4.45 pm Quick tea break

*5pm Screening of Tessa Farmer and Sean Daniels’ three short films

* 5.15pm Catriona Mcara in discussion with Tessa Farmer and Mark Pilkington

* 6pm Carol Mavor faery tale reading

* 6.30 pm Closing discussion and questions

7pm close

Tickets are £25, though early bird tickets, and those bought from the gallery are only £15. You can book tickets here.

You can find out more by clicking here.

The Congress for and of Curious Peoples 2011, The Coney Island Museum, April 8-17

The Morbid Anatomy Library is so very excited to announce the lineup for this year's Congress for Curious Peoples at The Coney Island Museum. For those of you who don't remember from last year, the Congress for Curious Peoples is a 2-day symposium about curiosity and curiosities broadly conceived; it is organized by The Morbid Anatomy Library and The Coney Island Museum and takes place over the weekend of April 16th and 17th at The Coney Island Museum, marking the final weekend of the 10-day Congress of Curious Peoples (more on that in a moment).

This year's Congress for Curious Peoples symposium was inspired by the themes of the The Great Coney Island Spectacularium, the installation I have been working on as Artist in Resident of The Coney Island Museum and within which the Congress will take place. Topics explored in the symposium will include Immersive Amusements, Human Anatomy on Display, and Science and Technology for Public Amusement and will feature many of my favorite scholars, artists, collectors and bon vivants, including (and this is just a brief sampling) Mark Dion, Norman Klein, Mark Dery, Mike Sappol, Lord Whimsy, Evan Michelson, Mike Zohn, and Laurel Braitman. There will also be a scheduled break to visit the Super Freak Weekend Freakshow that will be running continuously throughout the weekend downstairs in Coney Island USA.

Full schedule for the Congress for Curious Peoples follows. This event is sure to sell out, so I highly recommend getting your tickets as soon as possible!

The Congress for Curious Peoples
Saturday and Sunday, April 16th and 17th
The Coney Island Museum
1208 Surf Avenue, Brooklyn

Saturday April 16th
10:00 - 11:00 Keynote Speaker
Norman Klein, author of "The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects"

11:30 - 1:30 "The New Curiosity": Scholarship as Artistic Medium
Mark Dion, Artist
Joanna Ebenstein, The Morbid Anatomy Library
Wendy Walker, author of "The Secret Service"
Moderated and introduced by Aaron Beebe, The Coney Island Museum

1:30 - 3:30: Lunch and Sideshow Visit

3:30 - 5:30: Immersive Amusements/ Scripted Spaces

Elizabeth Bradley, author of "Knickerbocker: The Myth behind New York"
Mark Dery, author "The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink"
Amy Herzog, author of "Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film"
Moderated and Introduced by Alison Griffiths, author of "Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinemas, Museums, and the Immersive View"

Sunday April 17th
10:00 - 12:00: The Fairground and The Museum: Human Anatomy on Display
Lisa Farrington, author of "Creating Their Own image: the History of African-American Women Artists"
Anna Maerker, author of "Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775-1815"
Mike Sappol, author of "A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America"
Elizabeth Stephens, "Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present"
Moderated and introduced by John Troyer, author of "Technologies of the Human Corpse" (Forthcoming)

12:00 - 1:00: Lunch

1:00 - 3:00: The 19th Century Dime Museum in the Contemporary Imagination
Will Baker, author of "Multiple Meanings and Values in Johnny Fox's Freakatorium"
Aaron Beebe, The Coney Island Museum
D. B. Denholtz, editor of "Shocked and Amazed: On & Off the Midway"
Evan Michelson, Obscura Antiques and star of TV's "Oddities"
Mike Zohn, Obscura Antiques and star of TV's "Oddities"
Moderated and introduced by Andrea Dennett, author of "Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America"

3:30 - 5:30: Science and Technology for Public Amusement
Laurel Braitman, author of "Animal Madness" (forthcoming)
Fred Nadis, author of "Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion in America"
Simon Werrett, author of "Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History"
Moderated by Lord Whimsy/Allen Crawford, author of "The Affected Provincial's Companion, Volume One"

Tickets for the weekend are $25 and can be purchased by clicking here. You can also purchase a 10-day Congressional Passes which gets one into all of the events comprising both the Congress of Curious Peoples and the 10-day Congress for Curious Peoples, including those that are already sold out; click here to purchase one of those, $75 in advance, $100 at the door.

To give you a sense of what this "Congressional Pass" would entitle you to, following is the full schedule for the 10 day Congress of Curious Peoples, of which the Congress for is but a the final part. Confused? I know. Sorry! There's simply no getting around it; that's just the kind of beast this series of events is.

Congress of Curious Peoples Schedule
Coney Island USA
1208 Surf Avenue, Brooklyn

Friday, April 8

• Opening Night Party TICKETS/DETAILS

Saturday, April 9

• Super Freak Weekend at Sideshows by the Seashore (Tickets at the door)
• Colonnade of Curiosities in the Freak Bar (Curiosity vendors)
  
• Party for the 2011 Season Premiere of Oddities on the Science Channel TICKETS/DETAILS (Sold Out!)

Sunday, April 10

• Super Freak Weekend at Sideshows by the Seashore (Tickets at the door)
• Colonnade of Curiosities in the Freak Bar (Curiosity vendors)

Monday April 11th

• 7:30: Evan Michelson, "A Gathering of Bones" TICKETS/DETAILS
• 8:30: The Flambeaux Sheaux Birthday Roast TICKETS/DETAILS

Tuesday April 12th

• 7:30: Ronni Thomas, “The Diableiries and 19th Century Pre-cinematic Horror” TICKETS/DETAILS
• 8:30: Johnny Fox of the Freakatorium TICKETS/DETAILS

Wednesday April 13th

• 7:30: Judson Rosebush, "Burlesque: Exotic Dancers of the 1950's and 60's" TICKETS/DETAILS
• 8:30: Bambi and Bambi: Classic Burley-q meets the New Burlesque TICKETS/DETAILS

Thursday April 14th

• 7:30: Amy Herzog, “Primal Scenes: Sigmund Freud, Coney Island, and the Staging of Domestic Trauma” TICKETS/DETAILS
• 8:30: Rudy MacAggi, finalist on America’s Got Talent 2010 TICKETS/DETAILS

Friday April 15th

• 7:30: Acep Hale, "Legerdemain and Larceny" TICKETS/DETAILS
• 8:30: Sideshow Legends Ward Hall and Bobby Reynolds TICKETS/DETAILS

Saturday April 16th

• Super Freak Weekend at Sideshows by the Seashore (Tickets at the door)
• Colonnade of Curiosities in the Freak Bar (Curiosity vendors)
• Congress For Curious People Day 1
  

Sunday April 17th

• Super Freak Weekend at Sideshows by the Seashore (Tickets at the door)
• Colonnade of Curiosities in the Freak Bar (Curiosity vendors)
• Congress For Curious People Day 2

As you can see, this is going to be a seriously epic series of events! Very, very much hope to see you at one, many, or all of them!

To find out more about The Spectacularium and The Congress(es), click here.

Special thanks to the Andy Warhol Foundation, whose generosity helped to fund all of these fantastic events.

Also, the lovely poster was designed by Lord Whimsy; click on image to see larger more readable version.

"Imaging / Imagining the Skeleton," Symposium, Tomorrow, Friday, April 30, 1:00-4pm, CUNY Graduate Center

I just found out about a pretty intriguing looking event taking place in New York City tomorrow afternoon: "Imaging / Imagining the Skeleton," a free Symposium at CUNY Graduate Center. Participants include friend-of-Morbid-Anatomy and future Observatory lecturer (click here for details) Mark Dery.

Full details below; hope to see you there!

Imaging / Imagining the Skeleton
Friday, April 30, 1:00-4pm
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Ave. (at 34th St.), NYC
Rooms 9206 / 9207
No reservations. First come, first seated
Caroline Jones KEYNOTE, MIT, History, Theory, Art History
Vincent Stefan, Lehman College CUNY, Anthropology
Lisa E. Farrington, John Jay College CUNY, Art History and Race
Mark Dery, Independent Scholar
Tatiana Garmendia, Artist
Dr. Joseph Lane, Hospital for Special Surgery, Orthopedic Surgery
Co-Sponsored by the Ph.D. Program in Art History and Science & the Arts CUNY Graduate Center; Funded by the John Rewald Endowment of the Ph.D. Program in Art History

Imaging/Imagining the Skeleton is a symposium organized to explore how social conceptions of the human form have evolved alongside the increasing ability of science/medicine to represent the body. The speakers will present a constellation of inter-disciplinary discussions about the relationship between representing/exhibiting the body, evolving conceptualizations of the body and bones, and artistic and professional responses to new medical imaging technologies. The underlying proposition is that the ability to investigate and represent the body—at the levels of both anatomy and function—has exerted a profound impact on how the relationship between the physical body and human experience is conceived. Those changing conceptions, in turn, have had far-reaching consequences for the humanities, social sciences, public policy, and artistic practice.

Symposium attendees will receive a catalogue from the exhibition Visionary Anatomies, originally presented at the National Academy of Sciences.

Introductory remarks by Kevin Murphy, Professor of Art History. Panel discussion moderated by Adrienne Klein, co-Director, Science & the Arts.

Speaker Bios and Paper Topics
Professor Caroline Jones will speak on “Senses, mediation, and selves beyond the skin.” Jones explores selected art works that use the trope of the skeleton to indicate “penetrating” views of the self, but contrasts these with a recent sensory turn that suggests a broader critique of modern ocularity. Caroline Jones studies modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception. Previous to completing her art history degree, she worked in museum administration and exhibition curation, holding positions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1977-83) and the Harvard University Art Museums (1983-85), and completed two documentary films. In addition to these institutions, her exhibitions and/or films have been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Hara Museum Tokyo, and the Boston University Art Gallery, among other venues. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (among others), and has been honored by fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Max Planck Institüt (2001-02), the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton (1994-95), and the Stanford Humanities Center (1986-87). Her books include Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, (1996/98, winner of the Charles Eldredge Prize from the Smithsonian Institution); Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950-1965, (1990, awarded the silver medal from San Francisco's Commonwealth Club); and Modern Art at Harvard (1985).

Professor Vincent H. Stefan, Lehman College CUNY, will speak on “Human Skeletal Variations” as it relates to analysis of skeletal structures both prehistoric and contemporary. Dr. Stefan's field of general interest is physical anthropology with specialization in human skeletal biology. His fields of study include human osteology and skeletal biology; forensic anthropology; paleoanthropology; quantitative methods; Rapa Nui (Easter Island) skeletal biology; Polynesian skeletal biology. Current research interests include the documentation and analysis of contemporary and prehistoric human skeletal variation. Future research will focus on the use of these same procedures to assess metric cranial/skeletal variation for understanding the peopling of all of Polynesia and Oceania. Currently Professor Stefan regularly consults with the Nassau County Medical Examiner, East Meadow, NY, the Suffolk County Medical Examiner, Hauppauge, NY, and the Westchester County, Department of Laboratories & Research, Office of the Medical Examiner, Valhalla, NY in cases involving human skeletal remains. He is expert in the recovery of decomposed/ skeletonized human remains, and in the identification of victims from skeletal remains.

Professor Lisa E. Farrington will speak on “de Bouffon's 1805 published autopsy findings on the body of Sartjie Baartman” Professor Lisa E. Farrington is the founding Chair of John Jay’s Art & Music Department, as well as an accomplished curator, author, and art historian. In 2007-2008 she was awarded the prestigious William and Camille Cosby Endowed Scholars chair at Atlanta University’s historically black women’s college, Spelman. She has earned numerous academic degrees, including PhD and Master of Philosophy degrees from the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, an MA in art history from American University, a BFA (magna cum laude) from Howard University, and an Honors Degree in painting and illustration from New York's School of Art & Design. Dr. Farrington worked for many years at the Museum of Modern Art and, from 1994 to 2007, was senior art historian at Parsons School of Design (the fine arts division of The New School). She specializes in Western and Non-Western Art, Haitian Art and Vodou Culture, African-American Art, Women’s Art, and Race and Gender studies. She has also taught the on-site museum art history course at Parsons Atelier in Paris, France. Dr. Farrington is a Mellon, Magnet, U.S. State Department, and Ford Foundation Fellow, and was a consultant for The College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) Art History program. She has published ten books and a dozen scholarly essays in the past decade, including two monographs on artist Faith Ringgold, and a 2005 textbook for Oxford University Press entitled Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists, which recently won three major academic literary awards, including the American Library Association Award for Outstanding Contribution to Publishing, the American Association of Black Women Historians Annual Book Award, and the Richard Wright/Zora Neale Hurston Foundation nomination for non-fiction. She recently won the Andy Warhol Foundation / Creative Capital Arts Writers prize for 2010.

Mark Dery will speak on "The Anatomical Unconscious: X-Ray Specs, Visible Women, and the Eros of the Unseen," a cultural critique of the eroticizing of the scientific gaze. Mark Dery is a cultural critic. His byline has appeared in publications ranging from The New York Times Magazine to Rolling Stone to Salon to Cabinet, and his lectures have taken him to Australia to Austria, Belgium to Brazil, Macedonia to Mexico. He has been a professor in the Department of Journalism at New York University, a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine, and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome. Dery is best known for his writings on the politics of popular culture in books such as The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. He is widely associated with the concept of “culture jamming,” the guerrilla media criticism movement he popularized through his 1993 essay “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs,” and “Afrofuturism,” a term he coined and theorized in his 1994 essay “Black to the Future” (included in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, which he edited). More at www.markdery.com.

Tatiana Garmendia, MFA, will speak by remote uplink on her “X-ray Painting and Graphite Series”and explore some of the dichotomies between actual and conceptual representations of body and bones. Tatiana Garmendia is a figurative artist with a conceptual twist. Her work synthesizes formal concerns and a humanist engagement with history and culture. Born in Cuba, she was raised a devotee of Santeria - the syncretic mix of Yoruba mysticism and Spanish Catholicism. She also hails from a family of doctors and medical researchers. “I grew up in a household where the human body, in various guises of dejection and exaltation, was a primary theme in devotional and medical imagery. In my earliest recollections, the body is both flesh and mythological certainty." Repatriation from the Spanish government took the artist’s family first to Madrid, and later to the U.S.A. She studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and has degrees from Florida International University, and Pratt Institute of Art, Brooklyn.

Dr. Joseph Lane, MD, Professor Orthopedic Surgery and Assistant Dean, Weill Cornell Medical College and Chief Metabolic Bone Disease Hospital for Special Surgery, will speak on “Reconstructing the Skeleton.” He presents the skeleton including radiographs, bone scans, PET scans, CT scans and MRI, and will suggest some of the implications of changing methods for “reading” skeletons and bones. Joseph M. Lane, MD has published extensively on bone biology, tissue injury and repair, trauma, bone and soft tissue sarcomas (including osteogenic sarcoma and Ewing’s sarcoma), limb preservation, functional amputations, limb regeneration, and metabolic bone diseases (osteoporosis, Paget’s disease, rickets, osteomalacia, fibrous dysplasia). He has served on numerous committees for the AAOS, including the Board of Directors and Chairman of COMSS, the Chairman Oversight Panel on Women’s Health Issues. He was President of the Orthopaedic Research Society, Musculoskeletal Tumor Society, Chairman of NIH Orthopaedic Study Section, OREF grants review board, ABOS Question Writing Task Force. He is a member of the AAOS, AOA, ABJS, ASBMR, ORS, MSTS, and OTA. He has earned NIH career and R01 grants, OREF grants, and foundation awards. He has been a visiting professor at educational institutes and is on the editorial board of several peer journals.

Thanks so much to friend, artist, and book-club partner Laura Splan for tipping me off to this!

Image (click on image to see much larger version): from Mike Sappol and the National Library of Medicine's incomparable Dream Anatomy Exhibition; Caption reads: Elementi di anatomia fisiologica applicata alle belle arti figurative, Turin, 1837-39. Lithograph. National Library of Medicine; Francesco Bertinatti (fl. mid-1800s) [anatomist]; Mecco Leone [artist]. The anatomical studies for real, imaginary and prospective sculptures and paintings became a genre in its own right in the early and middle decades of the 19th century.

Halloween Wonder Cabinet at The New York Institute for the Humanities, Curated by Lawrence Weschler, Free!

I just recieved an email from the associate director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU asking if I would post information about their upcoming Halloween Wonder Cabinet event, curated by Lawrence Weschler. I do so with great pleasure, having already had plans to attend this wonderful (and free!) conference that will run from 11AM-9PM tomorrow (Halloween).

Lawrence Weschler, the curator of this day-long collection of illustrated talks, screenings, and multimedia presentations, is best known (at least to me!) as the author of the deeply influential Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder, which recounts the mysterious and fascinating story of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, and which went on to inspire countless numbers of pilgrims (myself included) to make the trek to experience the fabled museum in person. To my great excitement, I see that the "Mr. Wilson" behind the Museum of Jurassic Technology, David Wilson, will be featured in this lineup, where, the invitation tells us, he will evoke "the Russian mystical origins of the Soviet space program, subject of a trilogy of heartrendingly lovely short films." Having never heard the man speak before is reason enough for me to attend this event, but Weschler has provided plenty of other compelling reasons to spend your Halloween indoors, as you can see in the full line-up you will find below.

This looks to be a stellar event. Hope to see you there!

The New York Institute for the Humanities
& the Humanities Initiative at NYU
present an all-day

HALLOWEEN WONDER CABINET
curated by Lawrence Weschler

A day of illustrated talks, screenings, and multimedia presentations with Laurie Anderson, Michael Benson, Chandler Burr, Walter Murch, David Wilson and many others


Saturday October 31
11 am till 9:30 pm

NYU's Cantor Film Center
36 East 8th Street, NYC

Free and Open to the Public
{on a first-come, first-in basis}

Every once in a while, Lawrence Weschler, the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and author, among others, of the Pulitzer-nominated Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (a work of “magic-realist nonfiction” arising out of an investigation of the premodern roots of the postmodern Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles), gets it into his head to contrive a day of sublimely odd, wonderflecked and just plain cool presentations, braided one after the next in a thematic order intermittently evident to himself, if no one else. This year, he proposes to do so on Saturday October 31, which is to say Halloween.

As you will see from the program below, the first half of the day will focus generally on the stellar, the planetary, the cosmological and the astronomic. Later in the day, presentations will begin to morph into a consideration of the experience itself of drop-jawed amazement. Toward the end of the procession, attention will turn to things somewhat more infinitesimal: the molecular basis of smell, insect camouflage, and (to round out the day, Halloween after all) the downright hallucinogenic.


SESSION I

11:00 am
A celebratory fanfare by avant garde, downtown (and well nigh breathless) saxophone player COLIN STETSON

11:10 am
LAURIE ANDERSON, the celebrated performance artist and hipster sage, who will dilate on her days, a few seasons back, as visiting artist-in-residence with the good folks at NASA. (Note: She will be replacing the previously announced bead-artist Liza Lou in this slot.)

11:45 am
Filmmaker and photographic archivist MICHAEL BENSON will be evoking the entire universe as seen from the point of view of the Hubble and other deep space observatories, subject of his latest book, Far Out, which in turn follows on from his last, the critically celebrated, Beyond, which took the same sort of survey of the photographic legacy of interplanetary space probes.


SESSION II

1:45 pm
The eminent film and sound editor WALTER MURCH (Apocalypse Now, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The English Patient, The Conversation, etc.) will reveal a whole other side of his famously overbrimming curiosity, which is to say his excavation and systematic rehabilitation of a long discredited theory as to the placement of planets and moons in relation to the bodies around which they orbit, a formula which turns out to accurately predict 85% of such orbits, and which, when properly rejiggered, turns out to coincide with the formula for the Pythagorean octave (talk about the music of the spheres!).

3:00 pm
DAVID WILSON, the MacArthur winning Jurassic Technologist himself, will evoke the Russian mystical origins of the Soviet space program, subject of a trilogy of heartrendingly lovely short films, a full decade in the making, currently coming to closure at the fourteen-seat Borzoi Theater atop his LA museum.

4:00 pm
A rarely screened short, filmed during the last months of the Khrushchevite Thaw, in which the Soviet master PAVEL KOGAN trains a hidden camera on a succession of common Russians at the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad, as they gaze, positively awestruck, at Leonardo’s rendition of a Virgin and Child. That film will in turn be coupled with an uncanny set of recent shorts in which JOSH MELNICK trains a highspeed high-definition excruciatingly slow-motion digital camera upon wayfarers on the New York city subway, staring, positively dumbstruck, at nothing in particular.

5:00 pm
A similar pairing, as in the above, this time two vantages of life on earth; the first in which the renowned avant garde filmmaker PETER HUTTON, of Bard College, trains his attention on the play of light dappling an Icelandic fjord; and the second in which MATT COOLIDGE, of LA’s Center for Land Use Interpretation (sister institution to David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology) trains his camera out the side of a helicopter for a jaw-dropping twenty-minute single-take survey of Houston’s petrochemical channel, arguably the most ecstatically industrialized swath of real estate in the world.


SESSION III

6:30 pm
New York Times scent critic CHANDLER BURR (The Emperor of Scent and The Perfect Scent: A Year inside the Perfume Industry in Paris and New York), singing the Nose Fantastic, which is to say plumbing the still mind-boggling mysteries involved in how it is that we smell anything at all (complete with blotter-swatch demonstrations).

7:30 pm
Entomologist Extraordinaire MAY BERENBAUM of the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana (Ninety Nine Gnats, Nits and Nibblers; Bugs in the System; and The Earwig’s Tale: A Modern Bestiary of Multi-Legged Legends), who in honor of the evening’s festivities will consider Insects that Ape Shit (which is to say exceptionally novel, if creepy, insect disguises).

8:30 pm
HAMILTON MORRIS, the disconcertingly enterprising young pharmacopia correspondent of Vice Magazine, will round out the evening by reporting on all manner of oddities (penis mushrooms, Amazonian frog sweat, etc.) that he has ingested and that you might want to avoid.

Times above are approximate at best.

* SPECIAL NOTE *
{We hope as many of you as possible will be able to spend the day with us, feasting on the Wonder Cabinet in its entirety. However, should you be unable to stay for the whole program, we strongly recommend that you come for each session in full—you’ll understand why when you do.}

Nearest Subway Lines to Cantor Film Center,
located at 36 East 8th Street (btw University Pl. & Greene St.),
(with caveat to check MTA's weekend service advisories prior to heading over!)
A, C, E, B, D, F, V to West 4th Street (6th Ave.)
R, W to 8th St.--NYU (Broadway)
6 to Astor Place

For further information, visit www.nyih.as.nyu.edu or contact the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU at nyih.info@nyu.edu

You can find out more about the event by clicking here. You can find out more about Weschler's inestimable Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder by clicking here. To find out more about the Museum of Jurassic Technology, click here.

Image: A micromosaic by Henry Dalton shown at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, found here.