The Hollow Earth Society presents
SUSPICIOUS ANATOMY
Workbook No. 15: The Human Cranius
Lecture, Live Human Dissection and Book Launch
Date: Friday, July 16th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5

Not since Galen’s De Elementis has been set in ink a single compendium of medicological knowledge so extensive & practicably useful as SUSPICIOUS ANATOMY Workbook No. 15: The Human Cranius. Having intrinsic value to all persons—piratical, mysterious, upright, or otherwise—The Human Cranius is a PEERLESS GEM of uncanny truth. If you are a living human, you should make frequent, unabashed forays into this field guide to your hideous secondary body—the cranius, an organ-matrix & carnival of fangs which is trying to destroy you even as you read this sentence…

From the genre-chainsawing minds of the Hollow Earth Society (Ethan Gould and Wythe Marschall) comes “the definitive guide to the horrifying world inside you”—finally available in lush, illustrated paperback!

In the tradition of John Hodgman, David Cronenberg, and H. P. Lovecraft, The Human Cranius explores an alternative anatomy at once mesmerizing and deeply unsettling. Gould and Marschall ask: What do we know about our own bodies? The answer: Very little…

In many ways, the art and human studies of modernity have given us the keys to our unconscious minds, but have left entirely to dry science (fixing plumbing, testing drugs) the workings of our bodies. What does it feel like to have guts? To face disease, age, mutation—in short, a self that is not only not whole but not even on its own side?

The SUSPICIOUS ANATOMY series seeks to address these physio–psychomological imbalances by producing, for your benefit, the entire unconscious of the body, the shadow-self, in words and elaborate images.

The official Human Cranius book launch features a lecture, medicological film snippets, and a live human dissection. Join us!

About the Hollow Earth Society: For over one hundred years, the Hollow Earth Society has probed the world’s most bizarre and pertinent mysteries via an ever-mutating set of handbooks, rogue histories, and practical manuals. The Society is currently led by Colonels Ethan Gould and Wythe Marschall.

Ethan Gould is a Brooklyn-based artist working in drawing, puppetry, writing, and video to exploit the moments when the formerly robust process of perceptual categorization snaps like the fragilest of dry twigs. A graduate of the University of Rochester, he helped to create several development programs at the American Folk Art Museum. His work has appeared in such disparate places as the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, The Assembly Theater Company, The Brooklyn Review, Pomp & Circumstance, and ABC’s Wife Swap.

Wythe Marschall is writer. A graduate of Bennington College and the MFA fiction program at Brooklyn College, where he teaches undergraduate literature, Wythe has published stories and essays in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He is the senior editor of the Atlas Obscura and an editor of Pomp & Circumstance, as well as a frequent reader for Electric Literature. His thoughts on letters, postmodernity, and hip hop can be found on his website, chronolect.com.

An Image from the Diableries series--masterfully designed 3d stereo 'tissues' created in france in the 19th century

An illustrated lecture and artifact display by filmmaker and collector Ronni Thomas
Date: Friday, July 30th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

Tonight, join Observatory for a night of unique 3D stereo-views from the 1800s featuring HAUNTING double exposure ghost images, DISTURBING medical anomalies and the ever ELUSIVE french Diableries (or devil tissues)!

3D is very much in the news these days, and while hollywood has finally come close to perfecting this technology for the silver screen, people are largely unaware that the Victorians were also aficionados of 3D technologies, and that this interest often took a turn towards the macabre. Tonight, filmmaker and collector Ronni Thomas will lecture on the history of macabre 3D spectacles of the Victorian age, especially the infamous Diableries series–masterfully designed 3D stereo ’tissues’ created in france in the 19th century, backlit and featuring ornate scenes depicting the daily life of Satan in Hell (see image to left for example).Tongue in cheek and often controversial, these macabre spectacles give us a very interesting look at the 19th century’s lighthearted obsession with death and the macabre, serving as a wonderful demonstration of the Victorian fascination with themes such as the afterlife, heaven, hell and death.

In addtion to the lecture, Thomas will display original Diablaries and other artifacts from his own collection. Guests are encouraged to bring their own pieces and, better yet, a stereo-viewer.

Date: Thursday, July 1st
Time: 7:30 PM Musical Performance by Todd Michaelsen and Reena Shah of My Pet Dragon
8pm: Film screening/Q & A
Complimentary bags of popcorn will be served while supplies last
Admission: $5
Day Four of The Oxberry Pegs Series

Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by email. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as “the Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.”

This Thursday, July 1st, 8pm, the Animators are God? series at Observatory continues with a screening of the animated feature Sita Sings the Blues hosted by the film’s director, Nina Paley. Prior to the screening, there will be a live performance by Todd Michaelsen and Reena Shah of My Pet Dragon.

Nina Paley is a longtime veteran of syndicated comic strips, creating “Fluff” (Universal Press Syndicate), “The Hots” (King Features), and her own alternative weekly “Nina’s Adventures.” In 1998 she began making independent animated festival films, including the controversial yet popular environmental short, “The Stork.” In 2002 Nina followed her then-husband to Trivandrum, India, where she read her first Ramayana. This inspired her first feature, Sita Sings the Blues, which she animated and produced single-handedly over the course of 5 years on a home computer. Nina teaches at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan and is a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow.

Singer-composer Todd Michaelsen created the title music, “Agni Pariksha,” and most of the score and background music for Sita Sings the Blues.

Photo courtesy Bruce Hamilton

An Illustrated lecture with Amy Herzog, professor of media studies and film studies program coordinator at Queens College, CUNY
Date: Friday, August 6
Time: 8:00
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

Walter Benjamin, in his fragmentary Das Passagen-Werk, illuminated the resonances between urban architectural structures and the phenomena that define a cultural moment. “The Pornographic Arcades Project” is a work-in-progress, seeking to build on Benjamin’s insight to ask what a study of pornographic peep show arcades might reveal about the cultural imaginary of the late twentieth century.

Motion picture “peeping” machines have existed since the birth of cinema, and were often stocked with salacious titles. Public arcades devoted to pornographic peep booths only began to appear in the late 1960s, however, although once established, they proliferated wildly, becoming ubiquitous features in urban landscapes. Outfitted with recycled technologies, peep arcades were distinctly local enterprises that creatively exploited regional zoning and censorship laws. They became sites for diverse social traffic, and emerged as particularly significant venues for gay men, hustlers, prostitutes, and other marginalized groups. The film loops themselves often engage in a strange inversion of public and private, as “intimate interiors” are offered up to viewers, at the same time that the spectators are called out by the interface of the machines, and by the physical structures of the arcades.

Peep arcades set in motion a complex dynamic, one that sheds light on wider contemporary preoccupations: surveillance videography and social control; commodification, fetishization, and sexual politics; debates regarding vice and access to the public sphere. Less obvious are they ways in which the arcades subvert far older fascinations, such as technologies of anatomical display and the aesthetics of tableaux vivants.

Amy Herzog is associate professor of media studies and coordinator of the film studies program at Queens College, CUNY. She is the author of Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film (Minnesota, 2010). She recently curated an exhibition at The James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center on the dialogue between pornographic peep loops and contemporary art practices; you can find out more about that exhibition, entitled “Peeps”, by clicking here.

Plate from Vesalius' Fabrica

An illustrated lecture by Colin Dickey, author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius
Date: Saturday, July 24
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

In the wake of the photos of Abu Ghraib, images of torture have been pushed back into the forefront of American consciousness, but Western history has had a long and complicated relationship with images of torture. Colin Dickey discusses images of torture in the cult of Christian saints, particularly Saint Bartholomew (who was flayed alive), Saint Lucy (whose eyes were gouged out) and Saint Agatha (whose breasts were cut off). Inverting the traditional relationship of torturer and powerless victim, Christian imagery turned the act of torture into empowerment, where specific methods of torture became iconically associated with specific saints. As the cult of the saints waned, these images of torture began to filter into European consciousness in bizarre and fascinating ways, appearing in everything from Renaissance anatomy textbooks to the paintings of Paul Gauguin to the feminist art of the 1970’s.

Colin Dickey is the author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius, and the co-editor (with Nicole Antebi and Robby Herbst) of Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Cabinet, TriQuarterly, and The Santa Monica Review. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, he now lives in Los Angeles. This is a return visit for Colin, who lectured on Cranioklepty earlier this year at Observatory to great acclaim; more on that lecture can be found here.

An illustrated lecture by artist and former forensic photographer Luke Turner
Date: Tuesday, July 13
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

Forensic autopsy, crime, and death scene photographs hold a strong fascination in culture. These specific types of photographs present to the viewer a mediated confrontation with horror. In the context of a courtroom, there is a presupposition that the scientific or analytic use value assigned to the photograph will function to shift the viewer’s position from voyeur to detached collector of facts relevant to the legal system. Yet neither position is stable, and the psyche must contend with a complexity of vision that exceeds either classification.

In this slide show, artist and former forensic photographer Luke Tuner will present images from the history of forensic photography, slides from cases that he has photographed, and documentation of modern and contemporary art works that engage the viewer in the reconstruction process. Some relevant concepts explored by artists are crime scene reconstruction in Pierre Huyghe’s “Third Memory”, entropy in the work of Robert Smithson, accumulation in Barry LeVa’s pieces, the logic of sensation in the painting of Francis Bacon, something about that guy that had himself shot in a gallery, and many more. He will also discuss the curatorial work of Ralph Rugoff, and Luc Sante who have both made important connections between art and the forensic image.

Thoughts by philosophers of the abject/scientific, such as Julia Kristeva, Georges Bataille, Paul Feyerabend, Paul Virilio, and others, will be brought into play with the visual presentation. We will explore strategies of resistance to an “official” culture that attempts to legitimize a fixed methodology for the interpretation of evidence. As we emerge from art and philosophical tangents, the lecture will conclude with an argument for why the characters of Agent Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks and Laurent, the protagonist of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Erasers, personify two notions of the radical detective through their unconventional approaches to the interpretation of evidence.

Luke Turner is an artist / writer / gallery preparator, who previously worked for three years as a forensic photographer for various Medical Examiner and Coroner’s Offices. Luke has lectured at Glendale Community College in Los Angeles and at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He is the recent founder of the art blog Anti-EstablishmentIntellectualLOL!, (www.anti-establishmentintellectuallol.com).

Date: Thursday, June 24th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Day Three of The Oxberry Pegs Series

Characters morph toward Cute. Whether they originate in your father’s funny papers, animated shorts, or classic kidsbooks, a gradual juvenilization takes place: Betty Boop loses her dog-ears (you heard me) and becomes a flapper, Bugs crossdresses, and the Simpsons grow way less simian. In a brilliantly snarky article for Natural History Mag, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould traced the calculated cutifying of Mickey Mouse, how the thin-limbed wiseass Steamboat Willie became the adorable spokestoddler / CFO for Uncle Walt.

Fifty years of research tells us that we Humans have ginormous radar for picking up the most subtle infant-like characteristics in both animate and inanimate objects. Apparently it’s good Evolution. Back in the `40’s, animal behaviorist, Konrad Lorenz (the duckling Imprinting guy?), determined that a babyfaced helplessness triggers our fundamental nurturing instincts. And last year the Lab Coats pinned it down: part of our lizard-brains called the nucleus accumbens actually gets a chemical buzz off of babies – or a reasonable facsimile. The kicker is, it’s the same Reward Area of the brain stimulated by drugs, food, and sex. And what we crave we go into credit-card debt over. Free Marketeers have known this for decades. Kewpie-Doll Bombshells and Little-Rascal Fratboys sell us cute cars (the Mini Cooper and new the VW), cute clothes (haute Flipflops), cute gadgetry (Navi’s, App’s, Tweets), cute food (the Boutique Cupcake), and cute carnality (sweethearts speak Motherese to each other as Mr. Wiener docks with the bajingo).

In a pop-culture-kaleidoscope of a lecture, childrensbook author / illustrator, Ted Enik will trace how we slip-‘n -slid from The Good Ship Lollipop to Lolicon, from Disney to Henry Darger, from “Hello Sailor” to Hello Kitty, how we all have been willingly polluted by the CUTE. :(…

Ted Enik has kept a gingerbread roof over his head for years by working with ever-so-cute classic and contemporary kidsbook characters: talking pigs, chameleon schoolbusses, Hispanic dragons, and pinky-up waifs. Google-Image him and go “Awwww.” You can find out more about Ted and his work at www.tedenik.com.

A performative exploration of electricity, biomedicine, and spectacle
Date: June 29, 2010
Time: 8:00 P.M.
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy
Please note: This lecture is paired with an event taking place on Tuesday, June 15; More here.

Tonight, join Observatory as it hosts Torino:Margolis in a three-part performance investigating the rich history of biomedicine, electricity, and spectacle. First, the audience will have the opportunity to control the movement of the performer using neuromuscular stimulation, which sends outside electricity into the performer’s muscle, forcing their muscle to contract and the performer to move involuntarily.

In the second part of the performance, they will use electromyography (EMG) in a sound-based performance. EMG is a way of sensing the electricity produced naturally during muscle contraction when an individual moves voluntarily. However, when the performer is physically manipulated by another person there is no action potential generated, no signal sensed by the EMG, and no change in the sound is produced. In this way you can hear someone’s free will.

In the third portion they will add a vocal component to the EMG “rig” by manipulating sound coming from the vocal cords using neuromuscular stimulation.

Torino:Margolis will then explain the workings of the biomedical tools used in the performance and the audience will have the opportunity to ask questions.

Torino:Margolis is a performance art team that smashes through physical and psychological barriers separating one body from another using invasive electronics and biomedical tools. They explore the idea
that the self is transient, elusive and modular by playing with the notion of control and free will. Their extraction of physiological processes concretizes these concepts and presents them as questions to the
viewer — not to illustrate the mechanism, but to explore the experience. The team has performed nationally and internationally at New York venues such as Issue Project Room, POSTMASTERS Gallery and Exit Art, the HIVE Gallery in California, and the Bergen Kunsthall Museum in Norway. They have lectured for institutions such as SUNY Stony Brook and the School of Visual Arts. For more information please see www.torinomargolis.com.

An illustrated lecture by Torino:Margolis
Date: June 15, 2010
Time: 8:00 P.M.
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy
Please note: This lecture is paired with an event taking place on Tuesday, June 29; More here.

Beginning with the first known public performance by Stephen Gray in 1729 and continuing through the present, scientists and artists have been exploring electricity and the human body for hundreds of years. The innate electrical potential of the human body, electricity as a medium of destruction and using outside electricity to manipulate the body have been served as conceptual fodder throughout this rich history. Although the collaboration between the arts and sciences may seem recent, due to its popularization in the media and 20th century art movements such as Bioart, the connection between these two groups have existed for centuries. Benjamin Margolis, MD and Jenny Torino, MS, RD current tinkerers in both worlds, will take you through the history of public performances in this arena and discuss how it relates to their own work using invasive electronics and the body.

Torino:Margolis is a performance art team that smashes through physical and psychological barriers separating one body from another using invasive electronics and biomedical tools. They explore the idea
that the self is transient, elusive and modular by playing with the notion of control and free will. Their extraction of physiological processes concretizes these concepts and presents them as questions to the
viewer — not to illustrate the mechanism, but to explore the experience. The team has performed nationally and internationally at New York venues such as Issue Project Room, POSTMASTERS Gallery and Exit Art, the HIVE Gallery in California, and the Bergen Kunsthall Museum in Norway. They have lectured for institutions such as SUNY Stony Brook and the School of Visual Arts. For more information please see www.torinomargolis.com.

Date: Thursday, June 3rd,
Time: 8:00 PM
Day Two of the Oxberry Pegs Presents Series

The second night of the Oxberrry Pegs Presents “Animators are God?” series features a glimpse into the wacky world of Academy Award nominated director John R. Dilworth. Known affectionately as Silly Dilly, this New York-based animation director and designer has made his unique brand of cartoons for HBO, FOX, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, MTV, Canal +, and Arte, as well as the Museum of Modern Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. He has produced many award-winning independent and sponsored films, which have screened around the world, including “The Dirdy Birdy,” “The Chicken From Outer Space,” and “Life in Transition.” Dilworth is also the creator of the popular Cartoon Network series, “Courage the Cowardly Dog.”

Meet Dilly, live and in person at Observatory this Thursday night, June 3rd, at 8 o’clock in the p.m. For just 5 bucks you’ll get a guided tour of his selected works, a look at what he’s been up to lately, and you can ask him Courageous questions like these: What’s happening with Muriel and Eustace Bagge these days? How do you prepare space chicken eggs for the whole family without harmful side effects? Why should we fear snowmen and librarians? Are the gods really goosey?