Public Lecture: Realism and Psychosis, Simon Morgan Wortham

A lecture in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy's 20th Anniversary Public Lecture Series, in association with the London Graduate School.

Thursday 18th December 2014

Time: 6.00pm - 8.00pm
Venue: E003, Granary Building, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London
Price: free
Speaker: Simon Morgan Wortham (the London Graduate School - Kingston University)

In ‘Judiciousness in Dispute' Lyotard gives us an image of the seventy-four year old Kant beset by a near-permanent head cold. Here, while the mind, through a sheer effort of will, has the capacity to overcome a variety of ailments, thought nevertheless causes it severe pain, a pain to which it is not just opposed, but which indeed accompanies its very operation. To the extent that this ambivalent relationship to pain is insurmountable, the ageing philosopher's inflammation of the head is linked to what Kant himself describes as an involuntary spasmodic state in the brain, that is, a certain inability to maintain concepts, or to secure the unified consciousness of related representations, which Lyotard wants to suggest is fundamental or necessary, rather than merely contingent upon an ailment contracted late in life. To what extent is post-Kantian thought in pain? In what ways is such ‘pain' prolonged in philosophies that seek a radical departure from Kant? For instance, in seeking an exit from the subjective representation of objects (for Lyotard, the source of Kant's ‘pain')? Does speculative materialism risk a certain lapse into a psychotic state that—as both Lacan and Kristeva suggest—may be arrested only through the onset of phobia?

Followed by a reception to launch Simon Morgan Wortham, Modern Thought in Pain: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis (Edinburgh University Press).

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The Brain Makes Its Own Ghosts, by Julie Beck

In a new study, researchers were able to induce people to feel a presence behind them using a robot, which has implications for understanding schizophrenia and consciousness itself.

 When I was little, whenever I climbed a flight of stairs in the dark, the climbing quickly turned to running. About halfway up the steps, every time, I was overcome with an unshakeable certainty that there was a monster behind me, chasing me. I won’t say I never get that feeling anymore, but I force myself to walk up the stairs slowly and calmly when it happens now, swallowing my fear. That’s called being an adult.

The sense of someone near you when no one is actually there is called “feeling of presence” or FOP, apparently, according to a new study in Current Biology that identified the regions of the brain associated with this sensation and, wildly, recreated it in a lab setting.

“Although it is described by neurological and psychiatric patients and healthy individuals in different situations, it is not yet understood how the phenomenon is triggered by the brain,” the study reads.
First the researchers, who mostly hailed from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, studied the brains of 12 patients with neurological disorders (mainly epilepsy) who had experienced FOP, and found lesions in three regions of their brains: the insular cortex, frontoparietal cortex, and temporoparietal cortex. These areas deal with self-awareness, movement, and spatial positioning, suggesting that when sensorimotor signals get confused, people can feel presences that aren’t there.

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800,000 Pages of Patient Art and Mental Health Archives Are Going Online

A few weeks ago, the Wellcome Library announced a new initiative to digitize more than 800,000 pages of material from British psychiatric hospitals. Dating between the 18th and 20th centuries, the trove includes examples of patient artwork and writing, as well as patient-produced publications.

Some of these are shaky pencil drawings stuck amid further details on patient conditions — like this casebook on a patient at Ticehurst Hospital that includes a portrait of a doctor from 1891. Others are more elaborate oil paintings, like the above late-19th-century piece by George Sidebottom at the York Retreat, showing an eclectic scene of recreation. Together these visual details and the greater archives record a period of change in mental health management, when the mistreatment of patients began to be be addressed and institutionalization became more popular (and then gradually less so in the 20th century). The effort sees  the Wellcome Library partnering with the Borthwick Institute for Archives, London Metropolitan Archives, Dumfries and Galloway Council Archives, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde Archives, and the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

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Lunar Mountains and Divine Spheres: 1,000 Years of Illustrating Outer Space, by Allison Meier

Copernicus was convinced the planets revolved around the sun; Tycho Brahe had his own theory, that every planet except the Earth revolved around our star, then the sun orbited with all the planets around the Earth. Both offered heavily illustrated charts to accompany their visions of the universe, just two examples in a long history of human depictions of the world beyond our planet. In a new book called Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, published this month by Abrams, Michael Benson examines over a thousand years of mapping the great beyond.

 A photographer and filmmaker, Benson has published his own images of the night sky and the planets of our solar system. He’s also thoroughly researched the strange, beautiful, and prescient ways in which artists, scientists, and other enthusiasts have documented the seen and unseen in space over the centuries. Drawing on libraries and collections from around the world, Cosmigraphics chronicles how our understanding of the stars has changed with technology like telescopes and satellites, and even now continues to expand. Benson wrote in the New York Times: “The book’s overarching subject is our emergence as conscious beings within an unimaginably vast and cryptic universe, one that doesn’t necessarily guard its secrets willfully, but doesn’t hand out codebooks either.”

One major change over the years is a lessening of the emphasis on the divine now that the workings of astronomy are more evident. A 1573 illustration by Portuguese artist Francisco de Holanda feels strikingly contemporary with its fusion of abstract shapes and the Holy Trinity, shown as a human figure shooting lightning from his hands; the explosion of illumination and the words “Let There Be Light” in Latin evoke the dawn of our universe. Earlier works, like Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi’s Book of Fixed Stars from 964, give the first glimpses of galaxies neighboring our Milky Way, including Andromeda and the Large Magellanic Cloud. Étienne Trouvelot’s late-19th-century pastels based on his view from the Harvard College Observatory vividly illustrated phenomena like sunspots; his depictions went unrivaled for a century after.

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Brendan Chilcutt: The Museum Of Endangered Sounds

"I launched the site in January of 2012 as a way to preserve the sounds made famous by my favorite old technologies and electronics equipment. For instance, the textured rattle and hum of a VHS tape being sucked into the womb of a 1983 JVC HR-7100 VCR. As you probably know, it's a wonderfully complex sound, subtle yet unfiltered. But, as streaming playback becomes more common in the US, and as people in developing nations like Canada and the UK get brought up to DVD players, it's likely that the world will have seen and heard the last of older machines like the HR-7100. And as new products come to market, we stand to lose much more than VCRs.

Imagine a world where we never again hear the symphonic startup of a Windows 95 machine. Imagine generations of children unacquainted with the chattering of angels lodged deep within the recesses of an old cathode ray tube TV. And when the entire world has adopted devices with sleek, silent touch interfaces, where will we turn for the sound of fingers striking QWERTY keypads? Tell me that. And tell me: Who will play my GameBoy when I'm gone?

These questions and more led me to the undertaking that is The Museum Of Endangered Sounds."

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No Ghost Appears: Luciano Chessa’s Reconstructions of the Futurist Intonarumori, by Benjamin Lord

I. A Photograph Comes to Life

In every history of sound-art lurks a photograph of the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) and his assistant in Russolo’s painting studio with the intonarumori. Literally noise-intoners, these were musical instruments with delicious names: gorgoliatore (the gurgler), ululatore (the howler), stroppicciatore (the rubber), and so on. Played with levers and cranks, and housed in simple plywood boxes, the intonarumori channeled their gurgles and howls through large, speaker-like cones. Much in the photograph is obscure: the bulky boxes hide the internal mechanisms from view, and both the photographer and the precise date of exposure are unknown.

In spite of or perhaps partly because of its obscurity, the image has become famous, entrancing generations of artists and experimental musicians. Part of its allure is formal: the patterned spread of hexagonal tile on the floor creates a strong, almost diagrammatic perspective in the foreground, which then terminates in a jumble of boxes against the back wall. The effect is deeply classical, not unlike some paintings by the 15th century master of perspective Paolo Uccello. In the photograph, the two men appear dwarfed by the giant instruments. Together, they seem composed but slightly ill at ease, late-19th century men adrift in a 20th century world of inflationary geometries. The whole scene is suffused with the decline of the Belle Epoque.

Luciano Chessa, a musician and musicologist, has studied this photograph intensively for several years. He is probably the world expert on this picture and on its close cousin, an alternate exposure of the same scene with a slightly different arrangement. Ever since he began looking at the photos while writing his dissertation on Russolo (published in 2004), he hasn’t been able to leave them alone, mining them for their every minute detail as a documentary record of the instruments. When RoseLee Goldberg, impresario of the Performa festival in New York, invited him to recreate the instruments for concert performance in 2009, he began an extended project of reconstruction. At once scholarly and creative, Chessa’s project recreates a technique of the historic avant-garde, bringing it into the present in a necessarily altered form. Given its massive scope, it also raises historically complex aesthetic, political, and musicological concerns that have so far escaped serious critical review. This essay attempts to situate and evaluate Chessa’s remobilization of the intonarumori within each of these realms.

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Trends in the Anthropology of the Supernatural, by Jack Hunter

Definitions, Origins, Functions and Experiences: Trends in the Anthropology of the Supernatural from Tylor to Turner

The branch of anthropology that most frequently encounters the supernatural is the anthropology of religion. Religion has been a key concern for anthropologists since the very dawn of the discipline in the mid-Nineteenth Century. In light of the apparent diversity of forms that religion takes throughout the world—from the monotheism characteristic of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam to the polytheism of Hinduism and Buddhism and all the many variations and varieties in between—one of the first tasks facing the early anthropologists was to try to develop a standard definition of religion. At first glance this might seem like an easy task, but a generally accepted definition has, even today, yet to be devised. The problem lies in the complexity of the various phenomena usually classified as religious in nature, and in understanding how all of these disparate parts relate to one another. For example, religion may be defined in terms of the beliefs of a certain people or in terms of their practices—that is, their rituals, rites and performances. Religion might also be interpreted politically and economically, or described using the language of psychology and philosophy. This complexity, combined with huge cultural variation, makes the development of an all–encompassing definition and theory of religion a particularly difficult task (Boyer 2001, 2–3).

Defining Religion:

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology, realized that any definition of religion would have to be inclusive of the broad spectrum of religious ideas present throughout the human world. Tylor was shocked to read in the reports of pioneering explorers and missionaries that many newly discovered societies were described as possessing no religion at all, despite their apparent preoccupation with spirits, demons, and ancestors. This, he thought, arose from too narrow a definition of what religion entails. He argued that if our definition of religion is built around belief in a supreme deity, judgment after death, or the adoration of idols (which are hallmarks of both classical and contemporary European religions), the beliefs of a great many non-European people would immediately be excluded from the category of religion. To Tylor this simply did not make sense. The problem with this sort of definition was that it was based upon a particular development of religion, namely a Judeo-Christian development, and not upon religion itself. In order to counter this apparent bias, Tylor defined religion, in its simplest terms, as the belief in spiritual beings, a common trait of which he found ample evidence in the vast majority of ethnographic documents he read. Tylor’s definition of religion, therefore, highlighted the significance of belief, as well as the supernatural objects of these beliefs (Tylor 1930). Another definition of religion was offered by Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), a contemporary of Tylor’s, who argued that belief in spiritual beings, although common to many religions, could not be considered a minimum definition of religion because there are religious traditions that do not hold such beings as centrally important. To illustrate this point Durkheim gives the example of Buddhism, which does not consider gods and spirits to be central to its beliefs (though it does not exclude them), but rather emphasizes the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths (dukkha, “suffering”; samudaya, “craving”; nirodha, “the end of suffering”; and the Eightfold Path to end suffering) as its main creed. Durkheim suggested, therefore, that religion could best be defined as a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things (rather than supernatural beings specifically) and as beliefs and practices that unite its adherents in a single moral community. To Durkheim, religion was to do with the sacred, which he defined as things set apart and surrounded by prohibitions. For Durkheim, then, the sacred did not have to include supernatural concepts; his definition of religion could, for example, equally be applied to other social phenomena, as long as they were treated with a special kind of respect and separated from normal everyday life by certain prohibitions. Above all of this, Durkheim thought of religion as a social and communal phenomenon (Durkheim 2008); we will discuss the influence of Durkheim’s sociological view of religion shortly.

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Book Download: An Individual Note, by Daphne Oram

Download from ubuweb here

Graham Wrench: The Story Of Daphne Oram’s Optical Synthesizer, by Steve Marshall

In the early '60s, pioneering British composer Daphne Oram set out to create a synthesizer unlike any other. The engineer who turned her ideas into reality was Graham Wrench.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in April 2008, I wrote about its history for Sound On Sound (you can read the article on‑line at /sos/apr08/articles/radiophonic.htm). I've always felt that Daphne Oram's importance has been underestimated, both as a co‑founder of the Workshop and as an electronic composer, so I tried to redress this by including as much as I could about her graphically controlled Oramic synthesiser. This was not easy, as Daphne died in 2003 and I was unable to find anyone who'd even seen the Oramic System, let alone knew how it worked. I did my best, but shortly after the magazine went on sale, an email was forwarded to me by Sound On Sound. 

"I enjoyed the article very much,” said the writer. "With reference to the bizarre design concept of the original Oramics machine, you might be interested in some background as to why and how it took shape! I was the engineer who originally turned Daphne's concept into a reality, with an extremely tight budget and a lot of inverted, lateral thinking.” It was signed: "Yours respectfully, Graham Wrench.”

I had to meet this man! So off I went to rural Suffolk, where Graham lives in a little house crammed with engineering wonders. There are musical instruments, home‑made telescopes, model railways, vintage photographic gear… There's even a steam railway museum just down the road! Despite these temptations, I managed to spend a whole afternoon listening to Graham's account of how Oramics really worked, and how he came to design and build the prototype.

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The ANS Synthesizer: Composing on a Photoelectronic Instrument, by Stanislav Kreichi

THE ANS SYNTHESIZER

For the past 30 years, I have been working with the ANS synthesizer. This photoelectronic instrument takes its name from the initials of Russian composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, whose creative work and ideas about synthesizing the different arts inspired the young inventor Eugeny Murzin [2,3].

In 1938 Murzin invented a design for composers based on synthesizing complex musical sounds from a limited number of pure tones; this proposed system was to perform music without musicians or musical instruments. The technological basis of his invention was the method of photo-optic sound recording used in cinematography, which made it possible to obtain a visible image of a sound wave, as well as to realize the opposite goal - synthesizing a sound from an artificially drawn sound wave.

Despite the apparent simplicity of his idea of reconstructing a sound from its visible image, the technical realization of the ANS as a musical instrument did not occur until 20 years later. Murzin was an engineer who worked in areas unrelated to music, and the development of the ANS synthesizer was a hobby and he had many problems realizing on a practical level. It was not until 1958 that Murzin was able to establish a laboratory and gather a group of engineers and musicians in order to design the ANS. I joined his laboratory in 1961 as asound engineer and composer.

One of the main features of the ANS is its photo-optic generator, which Murzin designed in the form of a rotating glass disk with 144 optic phonograms of pure tones, or sound tracks. The narrow tracks that proceed from the wide track at the edge to the center of the disk correspond to the 144 pure tones. The track nearest to the center has the lowest frequency; the track nearest to the edge has the highest. A unit of five similar disks with different rotating speeds produces 720 pure tones, covering the whole range of audible frequencies. To select the needed tones, a coding field (the "score") was designed in the form of a glass plate covered with an opaque, nondrying black mastic. The score moves past a reading device made up of a narrow aperture with a number of photoelectric cells and amplifiers.

Scraping off a part of the mastic at a specific point on the plate makes it possible for the light from the corresponding optic phonogram to penetrate into the reading device and be transformed into a sound. The narrow aperture reads the length of the scraped-off part of the mastic during its run and transforms it into a sound duration. The nondrying mastic allows for immediate correction of the resulting sounds: portions of the plate that generate superfluous sounds can be smeared over, and missing sounds can be added. The speed of the score can also be smoothly regulated, all the way to a full stop. All this makes it possible for the composer to work direcdy and materially with the production of sound.

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The Sound of Soviet Science Fiction, by Robert Barry

Eduard Artemiev first met Andrei Tarkovsky at a house party thrown by the painter, Mikhail Romadin, in the spring of 1970. The conversation somehow turned to the subject of electronic music and, to Artemiev's surprise, the director soon invited himself to the electronic music studio in Moscow where the composer worked, keen to see the working methods behind the ANS synthesizer that was housed there.

Artemiev had been one of the first composers to work with the ANS, after its inventor, Yevgeny Murzin, posted a note up at the Moscow Conservatoire where Artemiev was a student, looking for composers interested in electronic music. This machine, the first Russian synthesizer, operated using a unique system of drawn sound synthesis. The composer would paint on a sheet of glass which was scanned by the synthesizer, becoming a kind of graphic score, allowing the composer to work like a painter, tinting and shading, forming textures and tone colours directly. Due to the similarities such a method conjured up with the colouristic music of Murzin's idol, the Russian composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, the device was named after his initials.

Tarkovsky was evidently impressed with what he saw at Artemiev's studio for he soon asked him to compose all the music for a new science fiction film he was working on with Romadin, Solaris, having recently fallen out with regular musical collaborator, Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov. Tarkovsky gave Artemiev a completely free hand on Solaris, insisting on just one stipulation: that the film must include JS Bach's Choral Prelude in F-minor, ‘Ich ruf zu Dir, Herr Jesus Christ’.

Though the soundtrack to Solaris uses both orchestral and electronic textures (from the ANS), Artemiev has said in interviews that in terms of its treatment, the orchestra "functioned like one giant synthesizer." From the composer's notes written before he started work on the film, we can see that he delineated five general areas: landscapes; personal sound perceptions; various transformations and distortions of the Bach theme; recollections of the Earth; and the sounds of the living ocean, Solaris, itself. Of this final category, Artemiev remarked, "It is, obviously, composed of the sounds of terrestrial life as if processed by the Ocean. . . The characters of the film hear (or are trying to hear) sounds either similar to terrestrial ones, or sounds which are kind of little cells or islands remaining from the Earth which they manage to identity out of the mass of strange and yet incomprehensible noises."

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Book: The Remarkable Life of John Murray Spear: Agitator for the Spirit Land

John Murray Spear was one of nineteenth-century America's most interesting characters. A leading social agitator against slavery and capital punishment, Spear also became the nation's most flamboyant spiritualist, inventor of “spirit machines,” and advocate of free love. In his captivating biography, John Buescher brings to life Spear's superlatively odd story. While no photograph or engraving of Spear exists, and his letters and personal papers are scarce, Buescher recreates in this book a sympathetic, even heroic, figure who spent the most energetic decades of his career absent, in a sense, from his own life, displaced by other spirits.

Born in 1804, John Murray Spear started his career as a Universalist minister. Later he was a close colleague of William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Parker in the abolitionist movement, an operator on the underground railroad in Boston, an influential leader in the effort to end the death penalty and to reform prison conditions, and a public advocate of the causes of pacifism, women's rights, labor reform, and socialism. Buescher chronicles Spear's work as an activist among the New England reformers and Transcendentalists such as Bronson Alcott, Lydia Maria Child, and Dorothea Dix.

In midlife Spear turned to the new revelation of spiritualism and came under the thrall of what he believed were spirit messages. Spear's spirits dictated that he and a small group of associates embark on plans for a perpetual motion machine, an electric ship propelled by psychic batteries, a vehicle that would levitate in the air, and a sewing machine that would work with no hands. As Buescher documents, Spear's spirit-guided efforts to harness technology to human liberation—sexual and otherwise—were far stranger than anyone outside his closest associates imagined, and were aimed at the eventual manufacturing of human beings and the improvement of the race. Buescher also examines the way in which Spear's story was minimized by his embarrassed fellow radicals. In the last years of his life, retired by the spirits and regarded by fellow Gilded Age progressives as a visitor from another age, if not another planet, Spear helped organize support for anarchist, socialist, peace, and labor causes. Spear's life, an odd mixture of comic absurdity and serious foreshadowing of the future, provides us with a unique perspective on nineteenth-century American religious and social life.

Spiritualism and Electromagnetism

The classical theory of electromagnetism, which formed the basis of wireless communication technology, was developed in the latter half of the 19th century, coinciding quite closely with the rise of spiritualism, i.e., the belief in the possibility of communicating with departed souls. Interestingly, there seems to have been some connection between these two fields of thought. Although aspects of what later came to be called spiritualism can be found throughout the 19th century (and indeed throughout history), the modern spiritualist movement is usually considered to have begun in 1848, when the young Fox sisters of upstate New York began to hold séances, during which they mediated messages from deceased persons. The idea spread rapidly, and by 1854 there were thousands of “mediums” throughout the United States and Europe – especially England – all claiming the ability to communicate with the dead. How seriously these claims were taken by the average person is debatable, but it’s remarkable that many well-educated and intelligent people became genuinely convinced by the basic tenet of spiritualism, which is that individual human souls survive death and continue in some mode of existence capable of interacting with the living. One notion was that the souls of the departed are imprinted in an “ethereal medium” that surrounds and permeates all ordinary matter.

The success of Isaac Newton’s inverse-square law of gravitation formulated in 1687 led to a concept of physical forces as some kind of direct “action at a distance”, and this conception was carried over to the study of magnetic and electric forces by scientists such as Ampere and Coulomb. However, beginning in the early 1850’s, James Clerk Maxwell began to conceive of electric and magnetic effects in a completely different way. Building on the earlier suggestions of Faraday, Maxwell conceived of an all-embracing ether as the mechanism and embodiment for the forces of electromagnetism. Moreover, he showed that this ethereal medium was capable of conveying energy in the form of electromagnetic waves propagating at the speed of light. Indeed he surmised that light itself is an electromagnetic wave. Maxwell’s final synthesis was published in 1873, and in the 1880s the reality of electromagnetic waves was shown by Hertz, who succeeded in producing and detecting them directly by means of oscillating electrical circuits.

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The X-Ray Audio Project

We are telling a story of forbidden music, cold war culture and bootleg technology  with a documentary, book, live events and travelling exhibition.

Many older people in Russia remember seeing and hearing strange vinyl type discs when they were young. The discs had partial images of skeletons on them and were called 'Bones' or 'Ribs'.

In an era when the recording industry was ruthlessly controlled by the State, an alternative source of raw materials was found to make illegal recordings - used X Ray plates obtained from local hospitals.

"The Age of the Bones" was a period lasting about fifteen years during which the sound of forbidden Russian and Western music was associated with images of the human skeleton. It was a period of what might be called "roentgenizdat" - the audio equivalent of  "samidzat" private publication of banned written works.  

In the Soviet states during the cold-war era, most modern Western bands and music was banned for all sorts of reasons including 'neo-fascism', 'mysticism' and even 'obscurantism'. Much Russian music was also forbidden for a variety of other reasons. Even certain rhythms were regarded unfavourably. But a vibrant, secret and risky trade grew up in what became known as 'Bones' or 'Ribs'.

These Bones were medical X-Ray fluorography sheets unofficially obtained from hospitals, cut into discs and embossed with the grooves of bootlegged gramophone records - a kind of medical version of a DJ dub plate. The quality was poor and the discs wore out quickly but the cost was low, just a couple of roubles compared with the fabulous cost of an actual Western LP.

To listen to Bones records go here.

There are many stories to be told about the people who made these recordings and how or why they did it. Some of them not only bootlegged the discs themselves but also copied the machines that made them in order that the process spread and persisted. They were often people who were fired up with a passion to share music, who risked and sometimes lost their liberty at a time when listening to certain songs was an offence and the private copying of music could result in a gaol sentence.

Despite the inevitable imprisonments and clamp downs, the culture of the Bones persisted right up to the early sixties when reel-to-reel tape recorders became common enough for this laborious real-time process involved to no longer be necessary.

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Archaeologies of Media and Film, University of Bradford and National Media Museum

September 3, 2014 – September 5, 2014

Keynote Speakers: Jussi Parikka, Thomas Elsaesser, Peter Buse

An international conference on media archaeology organised and hosted by the University of Bradford and the National Media Museum in association with the Royal Television Society and Bradford City of Film.

The aim of this conference is to bring together researchers, archivists, curators and artists working in the field that has become known as "media archaeology": an approach that examines or reconsiders historical media in order to illuminate, disrupt and challenge our understanding of the present and future.

The conference is organised and supported by the University of Bradford, the National Media Museum and Bradford City of Film.

More info here

The program for this conference is available via the following link.

Final Programme

Controlling Sound: Musical Torture from the Shoah to Guantánamo, by Melissa Kagen

“Purely physical torture is losing importance,” observed the psychologist Gustav Keller in 1981. “Psychological and psychiatric findings and methods are taking its place, planned and sometimes administered by white-collar torturers.” This statement, though prescient, is debatable: plenty of purely physical torture has been reported by former prisoners of Guantánamo and Bagram. The implication, however, is one of progress: that torture has been civilized, professionalized, in some way stripped of its teeth.

After the news broke that American soldiers were torturing detainees in secret prisons like Guantánamo, the idea spread that so-called “no touch” torture is more humane than more conventional methods involving violence to the body. No-touch torture utilizes methods like sleep deprivation, temperature regulation, violation of cultural and religious taboos, the playing of loud music, and psychological manipulation while interrogating prisoners. These methods, though often brutal, frequently don’t leave physical marks, thus nebulizing the concept of torture and leaving the act more open to interpretation.

Music torture at Guantánamo is a prime example of this mindset. Endless news cycles discussed whether waterboarding, hooding, and playing loud music could even be considered torture. Musicians, when asked for comment about “music torture”, sometimes responded dismissively: Metallica’s James Hetfield replied to the news with the comment, “We’ve been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music for ever. Why should the Iraqis be any different?” Bob Singleton, who composed the often-used Barney the Purple Dinosaur theme song, wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Would it annoy them? Perhaps … But could it ‘break’ the mental state of an adult? If so, that would say more about their mental state than about the music.”

The implication that these torture methods are somehow softer or easier to withstand than traditional methods is an interesting but dangerous fallacy. In no-touch torture, the torture weapon is the prisoner’s own body, which aches in stress positions, shivers, sweats, and demands sleep. The body itself becomes the enemy, psychologically destroying the prisoner from the inside out.

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Supernatural Sound: Science and Shamanism in the Arctic, by Tim Fulford

Toolemak’s voice

Scanning the horizon off the coast of Greenland in 1822, William Scoresby witnessed the impossible: floating in the sky was an upside down ship. “It was,” the whaling captain wrote, “so well defined, that I could distinguish by a telescope every sail, the general rig of the ship, and its particular character; insomuch that I confidently pronounced it to be my father’s ship, the Fame.” And this despite the fact that no ship was visible upon the water itself.

“I was so struck with the peculiarity of the circumstance,” Scoresby noted, “that I mentioned it to the officer of the watch, stating my full conviction that the Fame was then cruising in the neighbouring inlet.” Scoresby was correct: the airy phantoms not only resembled his father’s ship but, like the supernatural images seen by those with second sight, were premonitions of it. Scoresby senior’s ship subsequently appeared over the horizon, floating the right way up on the sea.

In the same year, the captain of a Northwest Passage expedition found his ears playing even stranger tricks than had Scoresby’s eyes. Meeting “a few male wizards,” among the Igloolik, George Lyon invited their “principal,” named Toolemak, to demonstrate his magical skills:

[He] began turning himself rapidly round, and in a loud powerful voice vociferated for Tornga with great impatience, at the same time blowing and snorting like a walrus. […] Suddenly the voice seemed smothered, and was so managed as to sound as if retreating beneath the deck, each moment becoming more distant, and ultimately giving the idea of being many feet below the cabin, when it ceased entirely. His wife now, in answer to my queries, informed me very seriously, that he had lived, and that he would send up Tornga. Accordingly, in about half a minute, a distant blowing was heard very slowly approaching, and a voice, which differed from that at first heard, was at times mingled with the blowing, until at length both sounds became distinct, and the old woman informed me that Tornga was come to answer my questions. I accordingly asked several questions of the sagacious spirit, to each of which inquiries I received an answer by two loud claps on the deck, which I was given to understand were favourable.

At length, the “voice gradually sank from our hearing,” Lyon related, only to be replaced by an “indistinct hissing” that reminded him of the tone produced by the wind on the bass chord of an Aeolian harp. This was soon changed to a rapid hiss like that of a rocket, and Toolemak with a yell announced his return. I had held my breath at the first distant hissing, and twice exhausted myself; yet our conjurer did not once respire, and even his returning and powerful yell was uttered without a previous stop or inspiration of air.

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Witches and Wicked Bodies at The British Museum

This exhibition will examine the portrayal of witches and witchcraft in art from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century. It will feature prints and drawings by artists including Dürer, Goya, Delacroix, Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, alongside classical Greek vessels and Renaissance maiolica.

Efforts to understand and interpret seemingly malevolent deeds – as well apportion blame for them and elicit confessions through hideous acts of torture – have had a place in society since classical antiquity and Biblical times. Men, women and children have all been accused of sorcery. The magus, or wise practitioner of ‘natural magic’ or occult ‘sciences’, has traditionally been male, but the majority of those accused and punished for witchcraft, especially since the Reformation, have been women. They are shown as monstrous hags with devil-worshipping followers. They represent an inversion of a well-ordered society and the natural world.

The focus of the exhibition is on prints and drawings from the British Museum’s collection, alongside a few loans from the V&A, the Ashmolean, Tate Britain and the British Library. Witches fly on broomsticks or backwards on dragons or beasts, as in Albrecht Dürer’s Witch Riding backwards on a Goat of 1501, or Hans Baldung’s Witches’ Sabbath from 1510. They are often depicted within cave-like kitchens surrounded by demons, performing evil spells, or raising the dead within magic circles, as in the powerful work of Salvator Rosa, Jacques de Gheyn and Jan van der Velde.

Francisco de Goya turned the subject of witches into an art form all of its own, whereby grotesque women conducting hideous activities on animals and children were represented in strikingly beautiful aquatint etchings. Goya used them as a way of satirising divisive social, political and religious issues of his day. Witches were also shown as bewitching seductresses intent on ensnaring their male victims, seen in the wonderful etching by Giovanni Battista Castiglione of Circe, who turned Odysseus’ companions into beasts.

During the Romantic period, Henry Fuseli’s Weird Sisters from Macbeth influenced generations of theatre-goers, and illustrations of Goethe’s Faust were popularised by Eugène Delacroix. By the end of the 19th century, hideous old hags with distended breasts and snakes for hair were mostly replaced by sexualised and mysteriously exotic sirens of feminine evil, seen in the exhibition in the work of Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Odilon Redon.

The exhibition will also include several classical Greek vessels and examples of Renaissance maiolica to emphasise the importance of the subject in the decorative arts.

25 September 2014 – 11 January 2015

Free 

Room 90

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Sound Mirrors Echo Obsolete Military Technology as Art Installation

Before the invention of radar, the British military experimented with acoustic mirrors as a means of detecting approaching enemy aircrafts. Rather than displaying blips on a screen, these strategically placed parabolic monoliths simply reflected ambient noise from their concave surfaces, making it easier to discern far-off sounds, like the drone of an airplane’s engine.

After learning about the existence of these curiously primitive and imposing pieces of outdated surveillance equipment, which are still standing along stretches of England’s coast, artist Tim Bruniges recreated these interactive objects in a gallery setting. Earlier this year, in an exhibition called MIRRORS at Brooklyn’s Signal gallery, Bruniges installed a pair of 9 by 9 foot sound mirrors that he constructed from wood and concrete with microphones embedded in their center. The sculptures faced each other to create an interactive sound experience for visitors to the cavernous gallery space.

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Mediumship & Folk Models of Mind and Matter

The following is excerpted from Talking with the Spirits: Ethnographies from between the Worlds, edited by Jack Hunter and David Luke, published by Daily Grail Publishing.

Introduction

This chapter explores the role of experiences with trance and physical mediumship in the development of folk models of mind and matter, at a non-denominational spiritualist home-circle called the Bristol Spirit Lodge. Mediums and sitters often claim that mediumship has led them to understand the world differently, and to appreciate that the standard materialistic view of science is inadequate as an all encompassing model of reality. Certain key themes and concepts have emerged from my informants’ experiences with mediumship that hint at alternative models of understanding the relationship between mind and matter, including the idea that bodies are permeable, that matter is essentially non-physical, that consciousness is far more expansive than our normal waking state would lead us to believe, and that persons are multiple, can survive death, and may be influenced by external spiritual entities.

 To begin, we will briefly examine the anthropological debate over spirit possession,  taking a quick tour through the various theoretical models developed to account for the existence of this human phenomenon. This will be followed by an introduction to the history of Spiritualism, and in particular to physical mediumship, in order to give an idea of the kind of spirit mediumship that forms the basis for discussion in this chapter. The chapter will conclude with an analysis of extracts from ethnographic interviews with members of the Bristol Spirit Lodge.

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Psychic Science, by Sir Oliver Lodge (1922)

In the long evolution of humanity, we trace, first, the gradual emergence of the organic from the inorganic, the utilisation of highly complex chemical compounds for the formation and purposes of life, and then the gradual rise of living things in the scale of existence, until at a certain stage the rudiments of mind and consciousness begin to make their appearance. At some unknown time after this, must have arisen the power of choice and knowledge of good and evil, which may be regarded as the most definitely human characteristic. Then humanity, too, went on rising in the scale, until it blossomed and bore fruit in the creations of Art, the discoveries of Science, and in works of genius.

Nor is development likely to stop there. Hitherto we have known life and mind as utilising the properties of matter, but some of us are beginning to suspect that these psychical entities are able to utilise the properties of the Ether too - that intangible and elusive medium which fills all space; and if that turn out to be so, we know that this vehicle or medium is much more perfect, less obstructive, and more likely to be permanent, than any form of ordinary matter can be. For in such a medium as ether, there is no wearing out, no decay, no waste or dissipation of energy, such as are inevitable when work is done by ponderable and molecularly constituted matter - that matter about which chemists and natural philosophers have ascertained so many and such fascinating qualities. Physicists, chemists, and biologists have arrived at a point in the analysis of matter that opens up a vista of apparently illimitable scope. Our existing scientific knowledge places no ban on supernormal phenomena; rather it suggests the probability of discoveries in quite novel directions. Any possible utilisation of the ether, however, by discarnate intelligences must be left as a problem for the future. What appears to be certain is that life and mind require for their manifestation and terrestrial development some form of "material" in the broadest sense, and that there is certainly an interaction between mind and earthly matter.

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Spiritual Materiality: Contemporary Sculpture and the Responsibility of Forms, by Klaus Ottman

There is a history of forms, structures, writings, which has its own particular time—or rather, times:it’s precisely this plurality which seems threatening to some people.” —Roland Barthes

With the introduction of the notion of artistic will or urge, the Kunstwollen, which he believed to be an expression of the spiritual conditions of the time, the 19th-century Austrian art historian Alois Riegl opened the prevailing mechanical-materialistic formalism, the Kunstmaterialismus of Gottfried Semper and his followers, to concept and ideology. American critic Clement Greenberg, whose essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” has dominated American formalism since its publication in 1939, can be considered a modern descendant of Semper’s materialism. Just as Semper defined art exclusively by the parameters of material and technique, so Greenberg speaks of the “pure preoccupation” of the modern avant-garde “with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc., to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in those factors."

While Greenberg’s formalism denies form meaning, a European version, independently proposed by Russian film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein and French structuralist Roland Barthes, following Riegl’s model, recognizes form as ideology and engages in an intimate investigation into the materiality of an object and its “functioning.”

In a conversation with Guy Scarpetta, Barthes hinted at a possible alternative to Greenberg’s formalism: “We should not be too quick to jettison the word ‘formalism’…attacks against formalism are always made in the name of content…The formalism I have in mind does not consist in ‘forgetting’…content…content is precisely what interests formalism, because its endless task is each time to push content back…It is not matter that is materialistic, but the refraction, the lifting of the safety catches; what is formalistic is not ‘form’ but the relative, dilatory time of contents, the precariousness of references.”

Instead of a mechanical-materialistic formalism, Barthes suggests a scrupulous examination of an object’s materiality as theoretical act. It is this structuralist activity that defines the object. Materiality becomes structure, an “interested simulacrum.” It “makes something appear which remained invisible, or if one prefers, unintelligible, in the natural object.”

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Gérard Courant - Michel Nedjar's portrait (1978 - silent)

quote

"I am inclined to believe that our personality hereafter will be able to affect matter.  If this reasoning be correct, then if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected, or moved, or manipulated...by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something."

Thomas Edison, "Edison's Views on Life After Death", Scientific American (1920)

The Museum of Jurassic Technology

The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, California is an educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic.

Like a coat of two colors, the Museum serves dual functions. On the one hand the Museum provides the academic community with a specialized repository of relics and artifacts from the Lower Jurassic, with an emphasis on those that demonstrate unusual or curious technological qualities. On the other hand the Museum serves the general public by providing the visitor a hands-on experience of "life in the Jurassic"

The public museum as understood today, is a collection of specimens and other objects of interest to the scholar, the man of science as well as the more casual visitor, arranged and displayed in accordance with the scientific method. In its original sense, the term "museum" meant a spot dedicated to the muses - "a place where man's mind could attain a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs." By far the most important museum of antiquity was the great institution at Alexandria founded by Ptolemy Philadelphus in the third century before Christ, (an endeavor supported by a grant from the treasury). And no treatment of the museum would be complete without mention of Noah's Ark in which we find the most complete Museum of Natural History the world has ever seen.

The museum fell into dark oblivion, as did all institutions of learning, with the coming of the Middle Ages. However, during these dark times, the churches and monasteries, through collections of curiosities, allowed the spirit of the museum to burn through the ages as the famed Hetruscan sepulchral lamps burned through the ages without benefit of air or fuel in the dark of the tomb.

Relics and curiosities could be found in nearly every parish church no matter how small. In the ninth century, a hair from the beard of Noah was shown at the Abbey of Corbie. In the choir of the church of Ensisheim in upper Alsace, there is a portion of a meteorite which fell to earth in 1492; and there were antediluvian bones in the church of St Kilian at Heilbronn, in Wurtenberg. "In some churches, two eggs of ostriches and other things of the like kind, which cause admiration and which are rarely seen, are accustomed to be suspended, that by their means the people may be drawn and have their minds the more affected."

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The Acoustics of War, by Daria Vaisman

By the early 1990s, the United States was reassessing its self-image. The major conflicts of the last century—the two World Wars and Vietnam—had, for the most part, already been consigned to history (for a younger generation, they were only more media kitsch). But a protracted Cold War had kept the United States in a defensive posture for decades; now that the USSR had dissolved, the US no longer worried about the threat of a nucle­ar attack. The military wanted weapons that reflected the US’s new international role. What to do? In 1991, the Pentagon issued a directive to test an emerging class of arms: Called "non-lethals," these weapons were meant to disable their targets "in such a way that death or severe permanent disability was unlikely."

Most international policy was, at that point, riot control. The US had become a peripatetic interventionist, dabbling in United Nations sanctions and adjudicating regional skirmishes as if they were protests at a college rally. For an optimistic military administration, non-lethals were the humanitarian antidote to atom bombs. By 1996, the US had invested nearly $37 million in research for non-lethal weapons.

The ideology behind "non-lethal" weapons was not new. Police had used chemical sprays and rubber bullets, to name just two, to quell domestic riots in the US throughout the 1960s. A second-wave of non-lethals were introduced in the Gulf War and then, later, in Somalia in 1994: sticky foams to adhere a person to an object or another person; caustics to dissolve tires and roadways; lasers to disorient and temporarily blind; acoustic weapons that used high-decibel noise to cause pain, or infrasound to cause unbearable nausea. The US had already discovered, while dropping bombs over Vietnam, that sudden, high-decibel noise would deafen people, though this was not what non-lethal researchers had intended. (The 1907 Hague Convention clearly prohibits the use of "arms, projectiles, or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering.") But it presented an interesting question: Was it possible to project sound at a precise decibel level that caused pain without permanent ear damage? Furthermore, there was anecdotal evidence suggesting that at the right frequency, infrasound would "liquefy [people's] bowels and reduce them to quivering diarrheic masses."

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The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland

The Kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland was founded by Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Leif Elggren. A Kingdom which extends across the entire world, the only global nation. We have annexed and taken over all borders on Earth, all no-man’s-lands, the space that exists between all states, and declared this our physical territory. We did this in 1992, and since then we have established diplomatic relations with many different countries around the world by opening embassies and consulates. We have a constitution, we have a currency, we have stamps and we have passports for our citizens. We are a new and expansive country. We have applied for membership in the UN. We see two different routes to a new world order: one involves the gradual expansion of our physical territory through the breakdown of existing states into ever smaller units (possibly all the way down to the individual person). This would give us more and more land area as new borders are added. The other route involves states merging and abolishing their borders and thereby eventually eliminating us. Here again we would be moving down towards the level of the individual person. Both routes lead, in their own ways, to the same point…

The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland has its own life now, continuing by itself. People are taking their own initiatives, doing what they want and need to do. And that is good, of course. We only started the whole thing. It must develop and change and go further on its own.

I believe that the borders around nations, especially the wealthier ones, are getting tighter and more important these days. So much to lose, so much to protect. A lot of bullshit is spoken about the global village and togetherness and all that, but the past couple of months clearly indicate where we are going and have been going for a long time now. We do not need to cross a certain border, because we are the border. The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland is the border. I am the border. We have suggested to the UN that they can collaborate with Elgaland-Vargaland for to send personnel and intervene in conflicts between nations wherever they appear.

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Official site here 

Cabinet Magazine article here 

Sacred Bones, by Mark C. Taylor

Throughout much of human history, bones have been associated not with death but with life. In many cultures, people actually believe bones are the seat of the vital principle or even the soul. As the locus of life, bones have mystic powers ranging from cure and divination to birth and rebirth. In the Hebrew Bible, Eve is born from Adam’s rib: "bone from my bones" (Genesis 2:21—22). In other biblical texts, bones appear to be conscious and even able to speak. The Psalmist declares:

My very bones cry out,
‘Lord, who is like thee?—
thou savior of the poor from those too strong for them,
the poor and wretched from those who prey on them.’
(Psalm 35:10—11)

The most important and widely held belief is that bones can be reanimated and therefore are essential to rebirth. This conviction is especially common among people in northern Eurasia as well in parts of Asia and can also be found in the myths of Germany, the Caucasus, Africa, South America, Oceania, and Australia. Ancient civilizations in Iran, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Ugarit also believed in the reanimation of bones.¹ One of the most remarkable accounts of the resurrection of bones appears in the book of Ezekiel.

The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he carried me out by his spirit and put me down in a plain full of bones. He made me go to and fro across them until I had been round them all; they covered the plain, countless numbers of them, and they were very dry. He said to me, ‘Man, can these bones live again?’ I answered, ‘Only thou knowest that, Lord God.’ He said to me, ‘Prophesy over these bones and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. This is the word of the Lord God to these bones: I will put breath into you, and you shall live. I will fasten sinews on you, bring flesh upon you, overlay you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.’ I began to prophesy as he had bidden me, and as I prophesied, there was a rustling sound and the bones fitted themselves together. As I looked, sinews appeared upon them, flesh covered them, and they were overlaid with skin, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to the wind, prophesy, man, and say to it, These are the words of the Lord God: Come, O wind, come from every quarter and breathe into these slain that they may come to life.’ I began to prophesy as he had bidden me: breath came into them; they came to life and rose to their feet. (Ezekiel 37:1-10)

Where there is belief in reanimation, bones are often preserved after the flesh has decayed and are treated with special care. In some cases, they are given a separate burial or are preserved as objects of worship.

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Book: Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult, by Luciano Chessa

Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) - painter, composer, builder of musical instruments, and first-hour member of the Italian Futurist movement - was a crucial figure in the evolution of twentieth-century aesthetics. As creator of the first systematic poetics of noise and inventor of what has been considered the first mechanical sound synthesizer, Russolo looms large in the development of twentieth-century music. In the first English language study of Russolo, Luciano Chessa emphasizes the futurist's interest in the occult, showing it to be a leitmotif for his life and a foundation for his art of noises. Chessa shows that Russolo's aesthetics of noise, and the machines he called the intonarumori, were intended to boost practitioners into higher states of spiritual consciousness. His analysis reveals a multifaceted man in whom the drive to keep up with the latest scientific trends coexisted with an embrace of the irrational, and a critique of materialism and positivism.

Media Archaeology Lab: Opening the Archive, Disrupting the Museum, by Lori Emerson

Founded in 2009 and currently part of the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Department of English, the Media Archaeology Lab (MAL) gives students, scholars, and members of the general public access to obsolete, functional media from the early twentieth century to the twenty-first century for hands-on research, teaching, and research creation. In this regard, the MAL is unique. Perhaps most importantly and broadly, the MAL turns the concepts of “archive” and “museum” inside out in the interests of disrupting two interrelated, cultural tendencies: a) the tendency to create neat teleological arcs of technological progress that extend from the past to the present and b) the tendency to represent such arcs through static exhibits that display the outside and surfaces of these artifacts rather than their unique, material, operational insides.

In my own research, I have used the MAL to describe a non-linear and non-teleological series of media phenomena – or ruptures – as a way to avoid reinstating a model of media history that tends toward narratives of progress and generally ignores neglected, failed, or dead media. However, I have come to recognize this sort of research is only one of the practices the MAL affords its interlocutors. I have come to understand it as a sort of “variontological” space in its own right, a place where, depending on your approach, you will find opportunities for research and teaching in myriad configurations as well as a host of other, less clearly defined activities made possible by a collection that is both object and tool. The MAL is an archive for original works of digital art/literature along with their original platforms. It is an archive for media objects. It a site for artistic interventions, experiments, and projects via MALpractices (residencies for artists and writers to first work and experiment directly with our materials and second, exhibit or perform their work either in the MAL or at a Colorado-based museum or gallery), MALware (our on-demand publication that documents events, MALpractices, and interdisciplinary thought taking place in and through the lab), and MALfunctions (monthly events for entrepreneurs, hackers, activists, academics, artists and designers that act equally as a hackerspace, makerspace, or straightforward venue space as a way to express the MAL’s extraordinary configurability). From the perspective of the university, it is a flexible, fluid space for practice-based research from a range of disciplines including literature, art, media studies, history of technology, computer science, library science, and archives and it is an apparatus through which we come to understand a complex history and the consequences of that history. From the perspective of the private sector and local tech/startup companies, the MAL offers a range of past solutions for present problems and it also offers these companies a compelling argument against planned obsolescence as many of the machines in the lab (such as the Altair 8800b) are over thirty five years old and not only function perfectly, but also make possible certain modes of interaction and creation that are not possible with contemporary digital computers.

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Inside the Paris Home of a Founding Father of Electronic Music, by Joseph Nechvatal

PARIS — Pierre Henry, aged father of electronic music, lives in a small house that also serves as his studio, in the twelfth arrondissement of Paris. I recently went there with a small group of people to hear one of his magnificent musique concrète

concerts that he performs live from his studio mixing board. It was an incredible and rare experience, similar in audio effect to his Intérieur/extérieur CD that contains the concert series Pierre Henry chez lui (“Pierre Henry at his place”) organized by the Festival d’Automne in Paris in 1996.

Speakers had been intricately placed throughout the different floors of the small house, and we took up seated positions among them so as to better get immersive satisfaction from this master’s mind-blowing art music. Comfortably seated, my eyes could not but help but wander over the walls, many of which were covered in Henry’s artworks, rather complex assemblages of existing objects and images. The art on the walls matched the structural conditions of his music perfectly, as it too is an art that is assembled from recorded sounds and noises, woven together into a (somewhat) coherent flowing whole. This is an art of sound montage and mixing. A lot of mixing: take for example Henry’s “La dixième symphonie de Beethoven” (1979–1988), where he mixes together some extracts from nine symphonies of the German composer.

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Jean Perdrizet - Deus ex machina

Historians of twentieth-century science have not recorded the name of Jean Perdrizet (1907-1975) for posterity. Perdrizet was originally a deputy civil engineer with the Bridges and Highways department before mental health issues forced him out of his career. He proved a fascinating figure for the many speculative thinkers and scientists he met, describing himself as an inventor and tirelessly striving to awaken human consciousness. Like all great thinkers, he did so by exploring beyond the limits laid down by fields of research.

Perdrizet worked with subtle shifts of reality, transgressing primary utilitarian functionality and living in a mental realm devoted to his mother and the unmarried machines he tasked with enchanting the world. In many ways, his work is reminiscent of Camille Flammarion for the way it reaches beyond the earthly realm, Raymond Roussel, for embracing the poetry of machinery, and Marcel Duchamp for exploring the aesthetics of movement. He submitted his designs to leading scientific institutions such as NASA, the French National Centre for Scientific Research, and the Nobel Prize committee, each invention an invitation to rethink the limits of physics by providing the code to another world. Inventions such as the Selenite Adam robots — humanity’s ambassadors to the cosmos —_and his machines for communicating with ghosts and sidereal esperanto, designed to facilitate communication with extra-terrestrials, all proclaimed the abolition of death. Perdrizet died in 1975, three days after his mother.

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French site here

Johann Konrad Dippel, 1673–1734, by E. E. Aynsley and W. A. Campbell

DURING the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there flourished a school of medical chemistry known as Iatrochemistry, the main object of which was to search for new medicines rather than to seek to turn base metals into gold.

Throughout this period numerous accounts were written about the wonderful curative properties of various chemical substances, usually metals and their derivatives, and gold, mercury, and antimony were each claimed to be the long sought after panacea.

At about the end of the Iatrochemical period there appeared a drug having a foetid smell and an unpleasant taste called Dippel's Animal Oil, for which its discoverer, Johann Konrad Dippel, claimed the properties of a universal medicine. This drug was included in the pharmacopoeias right up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the purpose of the present study is to show what manner of man Dippel was, and in what circumstances his assertion was made.

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wikipedia page here

also:

Investigating the ‘Real Frankenstein Potential’ of Johann Conrad Dippel, Pt. 1
By Mike A. Zuber here

Soap on a bone, by strangeremains

From 1786-1787 the graves in Paris’ Cemetery of Innocents (Cimetière des Saints-Innocents) were dug up to move the bones to the abandoned mines beneath the City of Lights, what would become the famous Paris Catacombs.  Fourcroy and Thouret, French scientists who supervised the exhumation and studied the decomposing bodies, found a waxy gray substance covering some of the children’s remains.  They called it adipocere, from the Latin adeps (fat) and cere (wax).

Adipocere, also known as corpse wax or the fat of graveyards, is a product of decomposition that turns body fat into a soap-like substance.  Corpse wax forms through a process called saponification and tends to develop when body fat is exposed to anaerobic bacteria in a warm, damp, alkaline environment, either in soil or water.  Grave wax has a soft, greasy gray appearance when it starts to form, and as it ages the wax hardens and turns brittle.  Saponification will stop the decay process in its tracks by encasing the body in this waxy material, turning it into a “soap mummy.”

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