Event: Two Knocks For Yes

In October we’re working with Curtis James to curate a series of events that explore the link between photography and film and the paranormal. Join us as Miniclick contacts The Spirit Side…

Shrouded in secrecy, Two Knocks For Yes will incorporate talks, music, theatre and photography.

“In every story of things that go bump in the night, there are two possibilities. One, that it’s a hoax. Two, that there is something going on beyond the grasp of the human mind”.

And so begins Black Channels’ radiophonic exploration in to the poltergeist phenomenon that forms part of this evenings immersive entertainment, alongside a talk on the folklore of death and water by James Burt, ghost stories and archive video footage and photographs, all hosted by paranormal enthusiast, Curtis James.

Real life reports of paranormal activity, otherworldly vibrations and oscillations, chilling accounts of nocturnal visitations and strange activity in the most mundane of suburban surroundings will echo around the 19th Century stone walls of Saint Andrews Church, Brighton. There are tales of hauntings in the venue itself (no longer used for worship), and it is certainly true that the burial vaults beneath the pews have yet to be removed.

Doors open at 7:30pm. Performance starts at 8. There will be no admittance after 8.

Tickets are £6 and available here...

http://www.eventbrite.com/e/two-knocks-for-yes-tickets-18501509513#

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Friday 23rd October. Doors at 7:30pm, kicks off at 8pm.

Saint Andrews Church, Waterloo Street, Hove, BN3 1AQ

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(all money from ticket sales go to the performers and creators of this piece)

https://www.facebook.com/events/1476101159360253/

Infiltrating London: subterranean exploration in the british capital, by Darmon Richter

London is a complicated place. It is a melting pot of cultures and races, a nexus for trade and travel, which archaeologists believe to have been occupied for more than 6,000 years. With every passing age, with each new society that has laid a claim to this settlement on the Thames Estuary, London’s roots have grown deeper and deeper into the soil of England.

The result today is a multifaceted and wholly organic entity, one in which Roman ruins rub shoulders with Victorian ice wells, between historic catacombs and contemporary rail tracks. London's layers spread out deep, far, and wide beneath the limited surface space. Beneath the paved streets is a tangled labyrinth of storm drains and sewers, subterranean rivers, the booming network of underground train tunnels, a warren of wartime bunkers, and deep level shelter facilities. Then, beneath that, there are areas of new bore. Even now London’s roots are searching deeper still, pushing further into the Earth’s crust to make room for high-speed rail connections and advanced data delivery conduits.

It should be no surprise then that London is something of a mecca for urban explorers. However, London is not Eastern Europe, where regime changes have left many underground facilities obsolete, their bulkhead doors hanging open and inviting to those who would dare to peek beneath the surface. This is not Australia, where explorers are discouraged from entering the extensive storm drain networks largely for their own benefit, on account of the many deadly creatures which thrive in these dank and disconnected places.

In a city of 8.3 million people, there is limited room for abandonment. London moves quickly, and there is little time to forget. Almost every inch of London’s subterranean realm still serves a purpose — from cable runs to data storage vaults — and those that don’t are simply waiting to be allotted new roles in the substructure of the capital.

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Derelict London

This website has now been around for 11 years. In that time my random wanderings around London have often been described as psychogeography and that little known penchant for walking around derelict buildings with a camera has been branded urban exploration (aka urbex).  This site  doesn't fit into any category or belong to any forum. There are no rules. 

This is not a compilation of familiar tourist sights, as another of those is hardly needed, but a depiction of an (often un-picturesque) view of everyday life in London

The site is obviously not taken to illustrate London at its most beautiful or most successful, the name derelict London is a memorable name for a website though not everything within this site is of derelict areas and everyone has their own definition of derelict......99% of these pictures were taken by myself during many miles of walkabouts around the great capital. After years of travelling via car or public transport I realised just how little I had seen of London. (ie just stepping back and looking at buildings and people). I've enjoyed putting this site together and will continue to add more pics. Try not to be too critical because I'm no professional photographer. Neither is this some trendy art student project..............Any places you think should be on this site? Let me know! Also info (however trivial) or stories/personal memories on any of the buildings would be appreciated.

Apart from the odd tip off most of the locations on this site are on here because I randomly stumbled upon them when walking down the street.

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Nevada Ghosts: LIFE at an A-Bomb Test, 1955

 In the spring of 1955, as the Cold War intensified and the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union escalated at a shocking pace, America — as it had many times before — detonated an atomic weapon in the Nevada desert. The test was not especially noteworthy. The weapon’s “yield” was not dramatically larger or smaller than that of previous A-bombs; the brighter-than-the-sun flash of light, the mushroom cloud and the staggering power unleashed by the weapon were all byproducts familiar to anyone who had either witnessed or paid attention to coverage of earlier tests.

And yet today, six decades later, at a time when the prospect of nuclear tests by “rogue states” like North Korea and Iran is once again making headlines and driving international negotiations and debate, the very banality of one long-forgotten atomic test in 1955 feels somehow more chilling than other more memorable or era-defining episodes from the Cold War. After all, whether conducted in the name of deterrence, defense or pure scientific research, the May 1955 blast (the results of which are pictured in this gallery) was in a very real sense routine.

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Francis Giacobetti: Portraits of Francis Bacon

2003-06-10 - 2003-07-05

This exhibition is the fruit of a unique adventure, The History of Art written in the present, springing from the remarkable meeting between two crazy men - one a painter, the other a photographer. It is the result of a never before seen telescoping of two worlds, two lives, two techniques and two generations, which at first glance appear to be poles apart.
This exhibition is the eye of Bacon through the eye of Giacobetti, a truly loving meeting of minds.

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Mike Kelley & David Askevold - The Poltergeist (1978)

The Ectoplasm series is linked to a project made in association with artist David Askevold in 1978, titled “The Poltergeist.”  David and I shared an interest in the aesthetics of the occult which led us to make a series of photographic works that addressed that history.  We did not work collaboratively, though we had numerous discussions about the project as it was developed.  Each artist’s works were produced independently, but with the intention that they should be seen simultaneously to inflect the reading of the other.  My portion of the project includes faux spiritualist photographs of a “medium” (myself) exuding the mysterious ethereal substance ectoplasm.  The photos mimic the look of period spiritualist photography from the early part of the 20^th century; they are grouped with texts and drawings (also presented photographically) that relate to this theme.  David assisted me in the photo shoot and one of the photos (of a sock monkey wrapped in gauze) ended up being used in his half of the project.  Only four of the ectoplasm images were included in “The Poltergeist;” the photos selected for this exhibition include never-before-printed images.

From  http://mikekelley.com/

Donald Weber - Post Atomic, 5. Fukushima Exclusion Zone

Life After Zero Hour Inside the Exclusion Zone, Fukushima, Japan

Just a few weeks ago, close to 50,000 people lived on a coastal plain, in the Fukushima Prefecture of Japan. Today, you’d be lucky to see a few dozen people, still clinging to the idea of normality in a radioactive “zone of exclusion.”

That first morning in March, as the Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Plant was nearing a nuclear meltdown, the authorities evacuated the towns and villages surrounding the facility and created a 40-kilometer Exclusion Zone around it. The 50,000 residents had fifteen minutes to leave, and never returned.

The dozen villages and towns in this death zone were chillingly deserted, as if time had ceased to pass since the moment the earthquake struck. It was like an episode of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone crossed with The Day After—an apocalyptic vision of life in the nuclear age.

I was the first journalist to wander into these “zones of exclusion” just days after the disaster at Fukushima was unfolding. The people I met, those who chose to stay, all expressed the same sentiment, that I would come back, not to forget them. Their government had abandoned them, will I?

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Donald Weber - Post Atomic, 2. Stalker

The people most affected by the explosion of Reactor Number Four on the morning of April 26,1986, soon learned that the event known as Chernobyl was predicted by a feature film made seven years earlier. Stalker, by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, explored the limits of our technical explanatory power against the backdrop of a mysterious force that can only be approached on foot, by forest “stalkers” who have learned to accept its risky gifts.

The portentous coincidence that links these two isolated small towns – one, the infamous home of a nuclear disaster, the other, a fictional source for metaphysical speculation – is the subject of this photographic project, ” Stalker.” Today, real stalkers live inside the official 30-kilometre Exclusion Zone in Chernobyl and secretly strip the dead city of its valuables, while avoiding the security forces – and the ghosts of the ruptured past. 

This story documents their twilight existence as scavengers of our newest Lost Civilization. 

As stalkers, these homeless men and women who wander the Zone, take over abandoned apartments and village homes, looting and stripping them of the remaining valuables, we see a terrible future revealed. The most precious commodity is bulk metal, stripped of its function ­ copper, aluminum and chrome, which they collect and sell to distributors in Kiev and beyond. Our grand technical vision, the city as pure laboratory, quickly recedes into the hunting and gathering primitivism of a future stone age. 

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Bawdy Technologies and the Birth of Ectoplasm by L. Anne Delagdo

Absurd though it appeared, ectoplasm seemed to redefine the boundaries of the next great scientific frontier. Dr. Gustave Geley, a French physician and psychical researcher, viewed this paranormal production as evidence of an evolutionary development of human organic capacities and believed that this development heralded a revolution in scientific thought. The physical attributes of ectoplasm seemed to vary as much as those who produced it. According to psychical researcher G. C. Barnard, Geley described ectoplasm as being “very variable in appearance, being sometimes vaporous, sometimes a plastic paste, sometimes a bundle of fine threads, or a membrane with swellings or fringes, or a fine fabric-like tissue”. It was sometimes incandescent and sometimes opaque. The color of the material varied but was usually white. Geley believed that the material was “capable of both evolution and involution, and is thus a living substance” but noted that it was unlikely that it ever separated from the medium’s body...  

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Jule Eisenbud collection on Ted Serios and thoughtographic photography

Originating mainly from the 1960s during the years of Dr. Jule Eisenbud's experimentation on psychic photographer Ted Serios, the digital collection provides an introduction to the psychic phenomenon 'thoughtography'. Serios possessed an apparent ability to place images on film with his mind using psychic energy that continues to baffle researchers and critics to this day. Ample numbers of these psychic photographs, or 'thoughtographs,' produced through extensive experimentation with Eisenbud, illustrate Serios's paranormal ability.

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