Date: Thursday, April 19th
Time: 7:30 PM
Admission: $7 (0r $75 for admission to all Congress events; more on that here)
***Location: The Coney Island Museum, 1208 Surf Avenue
Part of The 2012 Congress of Curious Peoples
Presented by Morbid Anatomy and The Coney Island Museum

f you like Quack Medical devices from the turn of the century, if cool inventions titillate you, then this is the show for you. The Museum of Interesting Things scoured our collection for the most bizarre, weird, unusual or kooky stuff we could find and put together a show just for the Coney Island Congress of Curious People.

Full lineup and more information on The 2012 Congress of Curious Peoples can be found here.

Lecture and performance with Lord Whimsy and Les the Mentalist
Date: Wednesday, April 18th
Time: 7:30 PM
Admission: $7 (0r $75 for admission to all Congress events; more on that here)
***Location: The Coney Island Museum, 1208 Surf Avenue
Part of The 2012 Congress of Curious Peoples
Presented by Morbid Anatomy and The Coney Island Museum

Lord Whimsy and Les the Mentalist will dazzle our audiences in their virtuosic return to the Coney Island Museum. In this hour-long presentation, they will give a historical overview of the topics of Fate and Chance with a nod to Culture and Folklore, while amazing the crowd with Mentalist effects and a phenomenal display of arcane knowledge.

Lord Whimsy wrote, designed, and illustrated The Affected Provincial’s Companion, Volume One (Bloomsbury 2006), which has been optioned for film by Johnny Depp’s production company, Infinitum Nihil. A devoted enthusiast, lower-case adventurer, and explorer of what he calls “the local frontier,” Whimsy spends most of his time among the nooks and margins of the forgotten, the curious, and the speculative that is found beneath, around, and between the everyday.

Les the Mentalist first amazed the Coney Island audience during last year’s Grand Guignol Variety Show. His magic explores the mysteries of the human mind by exhibiting feats of uncanny cognition, parapsychology and clairvoyance.

Full lineup and more information on The 2012 Congress of Curious Peoples can be found here.

An Illustrated lecture with Philip Kadish
Date: Tuesday, April 17th
Time: 7:30 PM
Admission: $7 (0r $75 for admission to all Congress events; more on that here)
***Location: The Coney Island Museum, 1208 Surf Avenue
Part of The 2012 Congress of Curious Peoples
Presented by Morbid Anatomy and The Coney Island Museum

In 1860, showman P.T. Barnum began presenting a number of “pinhead” performers (persons with microcephaly, or unusually small heads) as members of newly discovered races or evolutionary missing links between apes and humans. These “pinhead race” acts were enormously popular as America stood on the brink of civil war over the issue of slavery, and as racial “science” was poised to become the foundational justification of Jim Crow segregation. Unsurprisingly, the most successful of all of these “pinhead race” acts was the “What Is It?”, an African-American microcephalic who became a public sensation, to the point of being used in political cartoons attacking President Abraham Lincoln.” This lecture is structured around a trove of amazing images including photographs, posters, advertisements, political cartoons, news illustrations, and stunningly-offensive scientific charts.

Philip Kadish is completing his PhD in American Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He earned an MFA in fiction writing, and has written about the world of nineteenth century freak shows in fiction as well as scholarship.

Full lineup and more information on The 2012 Congress of Curious Peoples can be found here.

An illustrated lecture with Amy Herzog, Queens College
Date: Monday, April 16th
Time: 7:30 PM
Admission: $7 (0r $75 for admission to all Congress events; more on that here)
***Location: The Coney Island Museum, 1208 Surf Avenue
Part of The 2012 Congress of Curious Peoples
Presented by Morbid Anatomy and The Coney Island Museum

Amy Herzog returns to the Coney Island USA stage to assess the use of architectural renderings in imagining and promoting new development in 21st century Brooklyn as well as the fabulous and fantastical work of Albert Grass in Coney Island in the 1940’s. Playing with the notion of Brooklyn as a virtual playground she will explore the relationship between immersive experience and architectural fantasy. Those lucky enough to have seen Amy’s lectures in previous Congressional gatherings will know that her performances are not to be missed.

Amy Herzog is a professor of Media Studies at Queens College and the Author of “Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film”.

Full lineup and more information on The 2012 Congress of Curious Peoples can be found here.

Featuring classic Grand Guignol performances, film, puppet and toy theatre, song, dance, film and more, followed by a DJed after-party with complementary cocktails courtesy of Hendrick’s Gin
Date: Saturday, December 10th
Time: 8:00
Admission: $25 (tickets available here)
Location (Offsite): The Coney Island Museum, 1208 Surf Avenue, Brooklyn
Presented by Morbid Anatomy, Atlas Obscura and The Coney Island Museum and curated by Joanna Ebenstein & John Del Gaudio

From its beginnings in turn-of-the-century Paris and through its decline in the 1960s, the Theatre of the Grand Guignol gleefully celebrated horror, sex, and fear. Its infamous productions featured innocent victims, mangled beauty, insanity, mutilation, humour, sex, and monstrous depravity in a heady mix that attracted throngs of thrill-seekers from all echelons of society. By dissecting primal taboos in an unprecedentedly graphic manner, the Grand Guignol became the progenitor of all the blood-spilling, eye-gouging, and limb-hacking “splatter” movies of today.

Join us on December 10th at the Coney Island Museum for a one-night-only ode to The Grand Guignol and its legacy. Our evening of variety theatre was developed in conversation with Mel Gordon, author of Grand Guiginol: Theatre of Fear and Terror; Participants will include Jonny Clockworks, Angela Di Carlo, Doll Parts, Meg Moseley, Robert Munn, GF Newland, Melissa Roth, Sarah Schoemann, Shannon Taggart, Alison Termine, Ronni Thomas, and Kathleen Kennedy Tobin with a newly commissioned set by NYU’s Chris Muller and the role of Master or Ceremonies filled by Lord Whimsy. Projects include stagings of classic Grand Guignol plays, a toy theater version of Bryusov’s “The Sisters,” a harmonious and creepy rendition of “Dry Bones,” WWI 3D glass plate projection with theremin accompaniment, an installation of classic Grand Guignol posters, and more, all followed by an after-party with music and Hendrick’s Gin cocktails courtesy of Friese Undine.

Tickets available here.

Date: Thursday, September 22
Time: 7:30 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy and The Coney Island Museum
***Location: Off-site at The Coney Island Museum (1208 Surf Avenue, Brooklyn)

On an average day in Coney Island around 1900, a visitor might be able to experience: A midget village modeled on 16th century Nuremberg and featuring its own parliament, hotel, stables with midget ponies, vaudeville house, and midget fire department rushing off to put out imaginary fires; A recreation of the destruction of Pompeii by volcano, San Francisco by earthquake, Galveston by flood, and/or Titanic by iceberg; A recreation village of the head-hunting Bontac Tribe of the Philippines with real tribes-people on display; An immersive spectacular which staged tenement fires every half hour and featured a cast of 2,000; A Boer War reenactment featuring real Boer War veterans; A trip to the moon, under the sea, or to heaven and hell by way of being buried alive in a glass coffin; and, as they say, much, much more.

In the exhibition The Great Coney Island Spectacularium, Observatory’s Joanna Ebenstein and artist Aaron Beebe seek–via installation, artifacts, and newly commissioned artworks–to explore, celebrate, and evoke turn of the 20th Century Coney Island as the pinnacle of pre-cinematic immersive and spectacular amusement. The centerpiece of the exhibition is The Cosmorama of the Great Dreamland Fire, an immersive 360 degree spectacle based on the great panoramas and cosmoramas that populated Coney Island in the 19th century. It tells the story–in an immersive blend of image, sound, and light–of the most spectacular disaster in Coney Island history: the complete and dramatic destruction of Dreamland, one of the three great parks that made up turn of the century Coney Island, by fire 100 years ago in 1911. Dreamland was never rebuilt, but had it been, Ebenstein and Beebe are certain it would have given pride of place to a disaster spectacle that allowed visitors to experience the great fire that had once destroyed it. The Cosmorama of the Great Dreamland Fire is their attempt to create this attraction that should have been, and to allow contemporary audiences to experience a 19th century-style immersive spectacle of the sort celebrated in the exhibition.

This Thursday September 22, the crew behind the conception and construction–which include Observatory’s Joanna Ebenstein and Wythe Marschall as well as sound engineers, scenic painters, lighting designers, and artisans from the Metropolitan Opera and other institutions–will be on hand at The Coney Island Museum to discuss the making of the piece, answer your questions, and lead guided tours of the exhibition.

Launch party for new video series inspired by the events and personalities of Observatory, with filmmaker and collector Ronni Thomas
***Location: Off-site at The Coney Island Museum
Date: Friday, August 12th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $20 (at the door or by clicking here)
Presented by Morbid Anatomy and The Coney Island Museum
COMPLIMENTARY “MIDNIGHT MARTINI’S” AND SPECIALTY DRINKS FOR ALL!

Please join us for the launch of the new web series “The Midnight Archives: Tales From the Observatory.” The series is the work of many time Observatory presenter Ronni Thomas (Alias Ronni Raygun) of the IKA Collective and is centered around the esoteric and always exotic personalities that spring from the Brooklyn Observatory. It attempts to briefly document some of the truly unique people, talents and objects from around the world who gather there on a weekly basis. Mummies, Taxidermy, 18th century robotics, early French demonic 3d horror… its all here.

Series creator Ronni Thomas will give a brief lecture followed by the screening of episode 1 “Petrifying Pets: Modern Day Mummies” (6 minutes) and a short montage reel.

Tickets are first come first served.