From the official call:

We suggest “2012-2017: Host Architectures and Expressive Ecologies” as the working title of this particular plateau, a project in which the complete English-language text of A Thousand Plateaus is converted to a wiki-based application. In this latest “death of the author” incarnation, community members would then have a five-year window in which to freely edit, change, remix, translate, illustrate, update, recompose, define, hyperlink, or otherwise reconstruct the text.

Decay, excise, churn, flourish, proliferate. You can imagine where things might lead from here.

Though by no means an exhaustive list, some of the questions this project might address include: What will this movement between communication modes resemble at the end of the experiment? How will the elements of smooth and striated interplay both within the technological form itself and the content generated within? Which elements are included or not included for instantiating the editing process: images? endnotes? index? publication history?

I particularly dig the idea of a ecologies that are themselves expressive, desirous. This feels already like an update of the machinic desire: Now we are writing of worlds as machines, and machine as worlds; of course the writing itself could take on either or both of these forms…

What about generating theoretical texts via wiki or blog? I know this process had some impact on the evolution of Cyclonopedia. Recently, our own art has turned more theoretical, and our theoretical efforts more machinic. We begin art on Google Docs and work as a group, using agreed-upon constraint (certain archives, certain questions). This has only been fruitful. Channeling our own thought, assembling a new ecology each time (or at least, that is the goal).

Perhaps enduring ecologies migrate from world to world, via technics, escaping the deaths that ecosystems must face. The logos finally escapes the world and vice versa, per Baudrillard. Per D&G, the world reterritorializes onto any discussion of it. We must be more wiki (quick) than the process of rigidification…

Also, c) perhaps I could weave these figures together into a single fictive arc, or a single thread of thought about home/foreign land, or even movement/stillness… Or make a deck of adventuresome trading cards to sell on BoingBoing and Etsy…

That’s for the future. For now, cheers to the obscure-in-the-service-of-inward-enlightenment!

Timeline of a Few Obscure Adventuresome Societies and Adventurers of Note:

THE BRONZE AGE

• The Pythagoreans, ~500-400 BCE, they hated beans!
• Hadrian, CE 76-138, the wandering emperor

THE MIDDLE AGES

• Xuanzang, 603-664, epic walker from China to India
• Ibn Fadman and other Arab explorers of the North, 900s
• Leif Ericson reached the North American mainland around the year 1000 and called it Vinland
• Robert Guiscard, AKA Robert the Fox AKA Robert the Resourceful AKA Robert the Wily, 1015-1085, sailor-slayer-prince-adventurer, founder of the Crusading dynasty of Bohemond and Tancred, Norman Italy and Sicily
• Ibn Rushd, AKA Averroes, 1126-1198, ultragenius, doctor, Cordoba
• Marco Polo, 1254-1324, who had the get-up-n-go about him, Italy and Asia
• John Mandeville, mid-14th century,
• Erasmus, 1466-1536, scholar-human, the HRE

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Obscure Knowledge

• Abu’l Fath Jalaaluddin Muhammad Akbar, 1542-1605, Mughal emperor and patron of thinking
• Francis Bacon, 1561-1626, Viscount St.-Alban, gentleman-genius, (to some) the secret-Shakespeare
• Athanasius Kircher, 1602-1680, volcano-priest

Obscure Politics

• Ben Franklin, 1706-1790, O. G. nerd Hellfire Club patron — perhaps a spy – perhaps Jack Black? (See below)
• Francis Dashwood, 1708-1781, founder of the Hellfire Club, 15th Baron le Despencer, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Fais ce que tu voudras  (do what thou wilt)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834, poet-addict, his spying (also his failed commune based on Pantisocracy), did he really spy or was he simply pro-democracy?

MODERNITY

Obscure Religion

• Richard Francis Burton, 1821-1890, linguist-adventurer, translator of The Arabian Nights
• Isabelle Eberhardt, 1877-1904, desert explorer, convert to Islam, fighter against colonial injustice

Obscure Nature

• Alexander von Humboldt, 1769-1859, biogeodude
• Joseph Leidy, 1823-1891, paleontologist and the first forensic pathologist
• Teddy Roosevelt, 1858-1919, president-naturalist
• Carl Akeley, 1864-1926, taxidermist-superhero
• Percy Fawcett, 1867-1925, botanist with a gun

POSTMODERNITY

Obscure Depths

• Jacques Cousteau, 1910-1997

Obscure Cosmos

• Yuri Gagarin, 1934-1968, Wikipedia on astronaut terminology:  “In China, the terms “yǔhángyuán” (宇航员, “sailing personnel in universe”) or “hángtiānyuán” (航天员, “sailing personnel in sky”) have long been used for astronauts.”

The Obscure Self

• V. S. Ramachandran, 1951-, exploring the mind, looking in instead of out

Our Obscure Back Yard

• The Clampers, or more properly, members of E Clampus Vitus – a group who, like Atlas Obscura, have dedicated themselves to exploring the known and finding it not so known after all

Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and published by Open Humanities Press (OHP) (http://openhumanitiespress.org), Living Books About Life is a series of curated, open access books about life — with life understood both philosophically and biologically — which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Produced by a globally-distributed network of writers and editors, the books in the series repackage existing open access science research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life: e.g., air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.

By creating twenty one ‘living books about life’ in just seven months, the series represents an exciting new model for publishing, in a sustainable, low-cost manner, many more such books in the future. These books can be freely shared with other academic and non-academic institutions and individuals. Taken together, they constitute an engaging interdisciplinary resource for researching and teaching relevant science issues across the humanities, a resource that is capable of enhancing the intellectual and pedagogic experience of working with open access materials.

All the books in the series are themselves ‘living’, in the sense that they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers. As well as repackaging open access science research — along with interactive maps, visualisations, podcasts and audio-visual material — into a series of books, Living Books About Life is thus engaged in rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data and e-book readers such as Kindle and the iPad.

Perhaps this is the promised return of the medieval book, without author, with only author function. Living books about life, as opposed to dead books about death. I like it.

Weeks ago, I attended this talk on energy as a living thing, held at the New School. The conversation was enlightening, but no one addressed the possible applications of biotechnology—such as engineered algae. That aside, the event is worth watching, and I still invite readers to cross these various perspectives with the biotechnological one, that the problem of clean energy may be solvable via an engineered plant, algae, microbe, or other living organism.

Also, the pressing question of how we limit “life” is very interestingly explored here, in a way that reminds me instantly of Cyclonopedia: Is oil alive? When we say “alive,” we imply certain attributes; when we speak of “desire,” too, we imply needs/drives and means for fulfillment. But abstracting these concepts only slightly challenges traditional notions, and we see that, in a metaphorical but important way, the entire system of energy production and consumption on earth is alive.

This is nothing new; Bataille started with the sun (moving to algae, to plants, to us) nearly a century ago, writing eloquently of the problem of our overall calorie-base in The Accursed Share and other books.

What is new is the pressing nature of the dilemma. What is also new is our necessary embrace of ad hoc solutions (making a fracked-apart, mutant-dead planet).

Personally, I see engineered algae as part of another potentially viable ad hoc solution, and one that is quite literally living energy.

The Windup Girl quickly and movingly explores some of these questions, showing us a possible future in which the alive-ness of energy of visible to all—populated by bioengineered factory elephants, plant-punk bamboo coils, and superalgae.

Yes, it’s a Rube Goldberg-ian, purely fictive solution to a very real problem, but it’s convincing in part because it feels so alien, so new: We know we aren’t headed toward corn-based energy base, but we may very well be moving toward an at least partially algae-based one. I like thinking about that future and its peculiar challenges.

We are so into library science right now. Word up to all my librarians. Raise your horn-rimmed glasses proudly, ladies. And dudes (Andrew). You guys are seriously smart and in-tune with both the internet and the Common Reader. You have shown us, in our interviews and casual conversations and desperate phone calls about database software, that a library is so much more than a collection of books. It is a repository of humanity, that ineffable stuff we’re always on about in the humanities (see: the name of the discipline) and fine arts. And librarians are (with museum docents) the Jedi-esque gatekeepers of the social space of outside-of-school learning.

Seriously smart, likesay. As opposed to these clowns:

These gentlemen are NOT librarians, as you shall understand upon viewing our informative, simple guide to the future of the library. DO NOT FALL FOR THEIR TRICKS. These gentlemen offer no books. Or perhaps only really naughty, also very boring books, such as tomes of “raunchy” limericks from between the World Wars. Ignore them. Offer no succor, not even a single nickel. They will make even that nickel WHOOSH into a devastatingly cute baby rabbit, emergent from a oil-black tophat. They will pull nickels in abundance from the backsides of your ears. But they will lend you no books, help you with no dissertations, and generally offer nothing of substance…

The Longest Story Ever Told – Saturday, April 21, 2012/ongoing – Almost as soon as we arrived in the Greensboro of 2012, we helped the Elsewhereians here (together with the Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC Greensboro, a local Fresh Market grocery store, and several bewildered kids) to instigate the longest story ever told—a scroll of sentences from different Living Library books that constitute a single, ongoing fiction. The scroll is also pulled into the ethernets via a series of audio and video recordings of the various sentences.

Time will tell if this mega-story turns into a chronotextual vortex and sends some unsuspecting schoolchild into a new epoch. Or if it makes sense. We theorize the scroll will, at least, be both beautiful and unparalleled elsewhere.

Though, big note, this project is easy to repeat with any archive! Try to organize a coherent, evolving, epic narrative out of the parts you have. Try it and report back.

Field data from the Elsewhen experiment with Super-Long Story Tactics (SLST):

Future Tarot – Saturday, April 28, 2012 – On Obscura Day, as a lead in to Post-Space, we conducted a constrained writing class with a group of especially awesome George Mason students. Taking Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies as our model, Ethan developed a new set of “tarot” cards using images from books in the Living Library.

Stephen, Ethan, and Wythe then led the George Mason students to pair up. One partner told a story without words (using only the iconic—but, here, often technological—images on the cards) while the other partner wrote what she thought was going on. Then the partners switched, developing a new silent story and a new incorrect prose-reading of the visual story. This technique was fun, to say the least. The stories veered from dinosaur-inspired action to socialist revolution tale.

But perhaps the sharpest, funniest, most affective narrative moments were generated by us as a group, laying out the cards in a traditional tarot cross, flipping them over one by one, taking turns reading into them a new turn in the life of the story’s protagonist, a mustachioed young rogue pictured on the first random card. The rogue went on to give up crime for art, then art for connection with his fellows—leading him to create Facebook. Yes, Dear Reader, we told, as a group, the story of Mark Zuckerberg, pirate and painter!

We recommend the Future Tarot technique to everyone interested in constrained writing, especially constraint that merges image and text.

Post-Space 2012: Library/Museum/University – Saturday, April 28, 2012 – The highlight of our residency at Elsewhere was the inaugural Post-Space conference, to be held on Obscura Day as part of the Hollow Earth Society’s ongoing commitment to pataphysics and the para-academy: We want to interrogate the literal dimension of space as it changes, in our minds, due to tele-technologies, remote control, cyber-ing, databasing, etc., etc., etc.

For this first event, we started simple: What will become of nonprofit spaces such as libraries, museums, and schools? We asked this three-part question to several artists, scholars, including four who joined us live via Google Hangouts on Obscura Day for a final panel—Eileen Joy, Meg Backus, Thomas Gokey, and Aaron Beebe.

But before the live, one-hour panel discussion—which was energetic and so jam-packed it is still happening, via email—we showed video from our interviews in New York and also heard from Elsewhere co-founders George Scheer and Stephanie Sherman. George and Stephanie have recently embarked on a second post-space nonprofit place, Kulturpark, in East Berlin.

Huge thanks go out to all who helped make the first Post-Space conference possible, in all three ways (live, taped, live-on-the-internet). We look forward to another great Obscura Day in 2013!

The opening of the Living Library – Friday, May 4, 2012 – For the official opening of Elsewhere’s Living Library, we added signs calling out the various newly determined, not quite organized sections of the library; then we got back into labcoats and challenged the city of Greensboro to bring us books, copious books—which we would then melt together using the power of time-limited illustrated storytelling.

Using the “NARRATRON 9000“—a metaphor machine made of foam, colored lights, wire, paint, fabric, and a lot of derring-do—we generated dozens of illustrated short-shorts, all within 2 minutes (timed using one broken egg timer, two iPhones, and often one or two overly enthusiastic children counting loudly).

This was one of the most fun performances/art-making happenings we’ve been a part of. I recommend anyone a NARRATRON 9000 to interested in showing off a particular book collection.

More Elsewhen updates and images soon!

Announcing Genetically Modified Storytelling, an ongoing forum for discussing the intersection of biopunk fiction, theory and ethics of biotechnology, and emergent biotechnologies.

Based on the class writers Daniel Grushkin and HES co-founder Wythe Marschall led at Genspace recently, the site hopes to collect some of the conversations we’ve tapped into around biotechnologies in real and fictive labs… aaaaand give us somewhere to post pictures of Frankenstein’s creature GFP E. coli (seen above), etc.

Join the conversation on the GMStorytelling site, and if you’re in Brooklyn, check out Genspace.

(Yes, disclaimer, there’s a lot more to say than, “Wow, Frankenstein is still prescient, over two centuries after its writing.” But that’s a fine place to begin…)

Jason Martin’s ”Untitled Sound” >>

We have here an 8-minute 22-second window into Jason Martin’s mind, expressed as a collage of found sound coupled with segments of music the artist made himself. Often, pieces of mail art such as this one operate less as fully-realized works than as sketchbook pages offering peeks into an artist’s practice.

Like most of the other participants in Special Delivery, Jason isn’t strictly a mail artist, but he has filled this forum with the ghosts and spirits occupying his other performances and videos. For example, the comical mystique of Jason’s earlier works (i.e., his silent 16mm film on “light phenomena [suggesting] extraterrestrial origins,”) resurfaces when the poltergeist portal pops up about 4 minutes and 9 seconds into the recording:

…Now there’s something… [Blurry static slowly increases in volume] That is a well known channel… [More blur and fluctuating vibrations] This is one of the gateways to other dimensions… [A whirling sound, then the blur immediately fades—we’re supposed to interpret this as Jason putting the gateway aside]… Got to be careful with those.

This fascination with other-worldly beings has accompanied this artist/musician for a long time. It formed alongside a childhood growing up near the Andirondack Mountains. On the statement released with his album, Adirondack Power and Light, Jason writes of many hours spent imagining ghosts in the woods and by the waters of Sacandaga Valley. But his ghosts and beasts are never terrifying exactly. They are glittery and spirited.

This spiritual energy in Jason’s work can best be viewed in his Power Animal rituals, where he and costumed participants dress as wolf-humans in spandex and stretch out in sexual prayer-like poses. In a telephone conversation about this sound piece, Jason said that these phantoms and beasts form an outlet for art making. “Like a frequency I get tuned into,” this energy for visual works comes from an instinctual place. The ghosts, warlocks, and beasts always feel like fitting representatives of the site of creativity.

§

The Hollow Earth Society is a fan of Audrey Tran’s blog Artful Green Dot, on which she covers contemporary artists and other thinkers whose practices intersect the Green Movement and in some way add to our growing dialogue on ecology. We are indebted to her for lending us her pen, and we look forward to her developing series on hollowearthsociety.com.

Cultural critic Mark Dery’s new collection of essays, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts

The Ludovico Technique is a form of compulsory deprogramming featured in both the book and film A Clockwork Orange. It consists of forcing a patient to watch horribly graphic murders, rapes, and other severe brutality while under the influence of an addictive, nausea-causing drug. The therapy’s intent is to train the patient to reflexively respond to violent impulses, acts—even thoughts—by undergoing debilitating nausea, thereby discouraging antisocial behavior.

In the title sequence of the stop-action animated series Robot Chicken, a mad scientist straps a cyborg chicken to an electric-chair, pries both her real eye and her Borg-red eye open, and forces her to watch a wall of tiny TV screens: an onslaught of pixelated pop culture.

Essayist Mark Dery regularly volunteers for both treatments.

Unblinkingly, Dery examines America’s Bizarro-World facets, taking notes on what must an asbestos keyboard. His stickleback-funny collection of diatribes is an incredibly satisfying disemboweling of an array of topics which—although disturbing to most of us in a vague, “that’s just wrong” sort of way—warrant examination by just such an acidic—encyclopedic mind.

Here’s the book’s equivalent of a mission statement: [Dery has…] “…the unshakable conviction that, while some beliefs may be ethically indefensible, morally repugnant, or universally unpopular, no subject should be ruled out of bounds, no thought forbidden; intellectual freedom is unimaginable without the right to think the unthinkable.” Hear, hear.

It’s a very wild ride; the reader is often left breathless. Dery’s critiques remind me of a rogue scientist engaging in some para-ethical experimenting-for-experimentation’s sake. “Let’s see how the gerbil responds to extreme cold, a strobe light, smell of sulphur, being shown a picture of Nosferatu, listening to Churchill speak, being hit on the head with a sage sachet.” He shines an assortment of litmus-lights on an assortment of topics, and the result is something dense, ornamented, and wise—and often spit-take hysterical. Here’s a random handful of my fave quotations:

The New Age sentimentalization of the dolphin as a guardian angel with a blowhole.

Hitler’s demonic talent for graphic branding reminds us of Walt Disney, the mediocre cartoonist and self-described benign dictator of the Happiest Place on Earth…

…These are the people who brought you Saint Bartholomew, the flayed martyr with his skin flung jauntily over his shoulder, like Frank Sinatra on the cover of Songs for Young Lovers, and the beatified truck-stop waitresses Saint Lucy and Saint Agnes serving up their plucked-out eyeballs and severed breasts on platters, like blue-plate specials.

Where most hetero-guy porn sites obsess over double-D cups, the Fantasy Decapitation Channel rejoices in double decaps…

Pretty great stuff. There’s tons more.

As I’ve already egregiously flirted with mixed metaphors above, I’ll just give in to the impulse and say that reading I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts feels like:

• Agreeing to compete in a hot-pepper tasting contest
• Sitting in a room fully of flea-bit taxidermy
• Learning how to say “You have a fatal illness” in all the world’s dying languages
• Sprawling spread-eagle on the hood of your friend’s car—going 40 on a summer night—and enjoying the bug buckshot
• Wearing bubblewrap undergarments
• Trying to ignore that creepy portrait’s eyes following you across the room
• Giving in to a Harryhausen “emerging tentacle” fantasy at the gravesite of your best friend’s husband
• Reading your parents’ dirty loveletters
• Having a nun wake you at 3 AM by shining a flashlight in your face
• Realizing you have the opposite of Alzheimer’s
• Yelling “Eureka!” Then bursting into tears

I love lists—and Dery’s variegated, kaleidoscopic, clever new book.

When you procure your own copy, tape your eyes wide open and have a notebook handy. Or a razor blade—if you’d rather take permanent notes on your arm.

—April 2012, Ted Enik

Read our stories; share them; write your own! We will be posting titles periodically that still need narrative and aesthetic remixing. We see libraries as time machines (collecting eras, stories, histories; of ownership of books, of understanding of ideas), as theaters (of ideas, of performances of reading and re-reading), as museums (of books, of the slimming pool of people who value knowledge over data).

We see as one part of this overall museum-ificiation our ongoing Elsewhen project of re/narrativizing every single book (narrative or not, “good” or “special” or not) in the Living Library. This project seeks to make all books newly “special” and wholly new: pieces of new wholes, mutant-dead stories, para-stories, object stories as much as “story” stories (para-realism, Surrealism).

This project is the best mix of collaboration, constraint, and constant renewal. All around me are short stacks of books from the mid-nineteenth century to the early Clinton years. From Tarot-inspired games with book images to sonnets, from strange stories based only on titles to reflections of beloved classics (Tristram Shandy, Moby-Dick), we’re working every angle to deliver an omni-story, to create a narrative vortex…

The collapsing of the the virtual and the real into one “space”

I would argue that virtual space has never been less “real” than space-space, only different. The way we interacted with the virtual medium was in a non-motive, minimally physical way (though most people can tell you about the feeling of “curling up with a good book” or the wrist- and eye-ache of a long computer session), but what gets me all hot under the collar (and frankly this is old news) is the prospect of interacting with this information in motive, physical ways. We do it with our cell phones all the time, map, space, Yelp, map, real space—TACOS!

I would add: Atlas! This is a virtual space that you can use to find, learn about, experience, and talk about different non-virtual places (such as Elsewhere).

Thanks, D. Looking forward to showing more of our Post-Space documentary work, and of course to talking live/via Skype/via video with over a dozen space-y artists and scholars on Obscura Day 2012!

In the Treptower Park forest in East Berlin, along the Spreeriver, there is an abandoned amusement park. The park, originally called Kulturpark Plänterwald, was built in 1969 by the GDR and was a rare site for Soviet amusement and attraction. After the fall of the wall, the park became the family-owned Spreepark and suffered challenges of access, attendance, and economy. In 2001, the park closed from capital collapse. Ever since, visitors have regularly traversed the fence to explore this jungle of broken thrill machines.

Kulturpark will investigate these lands as a site for cultural imagination.

Kulturpark will connect communities to explore possibilities for shared stories, memories, and ideas.

Kulturpark will instigate physical, social, and collaborative movement.

Kulturpark will propose a future for the park as an evolving constellation of our shared past and presence.

Kulturpark will model responsible forms for creative life and ecology for the 21st Century…

Kulturpark artists are working across creative media including architecture, sculpture, photography, performance, music, food, new media and more. Kulturpark artists will spend three weeks working in the amusement park as an outdoor studio, creating site-specific works that respond to the park’s unique history, overgrown ecologies, and contemporary presence in personal and cultural memory. Many projects will be interactive investigations that use the public opening as an opportunity to create research into a new kultur for public space and creativity in the 21st century.

In addition to the creation and exhibition of new, site-specific artworks and performances, Kulturpark will include a two-day conference led by graduate students from Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctoral Programs on the topic of Occupations past and present. A urban development master plan developed in collaboration with the Urban Arts Institute at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design will present research and possibilities on the park’s future. Included in the Kultur exchange program is a group from Provisions Library in Washington, DC, who will source information from the project to apply to the development of The Dupont Underground, an abandoned train station in the center of Washington, DC’s Dupont Circle–resulting in a comparative exhibition at Goethe-Institut DC.

About the Park

Built along the Spree River in the Treptow Park forest, Kulturpark Plänterwald was an idyllic and unusual site for amusement and leisure built by the GDR in 1969. After the fall of the wall, the park was privatized as Spreepark, and ran until financial collapse in 2001. Now, the park is a popular destination for tourists and adventurers fascinated by these machines frozen in time. The surrounding Treptow District contains a complex history including the site of the 1896 Berlin Trade Exhibition, the Archenhold Observatory where Einstein first lectured on relativity, and the Soviet War Memorial with its Stalinist architectures and cold war ceremonies. The Plänterwald landscape inspires reflections on public memory, resistance, leisure, amusement, ceremony, commerce and technology.

Presented by Morbid Anatomy Library and Coney Island USA, the 2012 Congress of Curious Peoples is a 10-day series of lectures, performances, and a 2-day symposium devoted to curiosity and curiosities broadly considered.

The Congress will take place this April 13-22; the 2-day scholarly-yet-popular symposium—The Congress for Curious Peoples—will place over the weekend of April 21 and 22.

SYMPOSIUM: THE 2012 CONGRESS FOR CURIOUS PEOPLE

SATURDAY APRIL 21st

11:00 – 12:00: Keynote Addresses

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

12:00 – 1:00: Lunch

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

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

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

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

SUNDAY APRIL 22

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

• Paul Koudounaris, author of Empire of Death
• Shannon Taggart, Photographer
•  The Venerable Tsering Phunstok
• Colin Dickey, author of Cranioklepty

1:00 – 2:30: Lunch and Sideshow Visit

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

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

• Amy Herzog, Queens College
• An as-of-yet unnamed representative of Sleep No More
• Chris Muller, New York University
• Dick Zigun, Founder of Coney Island USA

Full 10-day Congress Schedule:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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