{"id":239304,"date":"2011-06-26T15:41:30","date_gmt":"2011-06-26T15:41:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eugenesis.com\/dead-cities-victorian-hair-scrapbooks-automata-demonstrations-this-week-and-beyond-at-observatory\/"},"modified":"2011-06-26T15:41:30","modified_gmt":"2011-06-26T15:41:30","slug":"dead-cities-victorian-hair-scrapbooks-automata-demonstrations-this-week-and-beyond-at-observatory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/anatomy\/dead-cities-victorian-hair-scrapbooks-automata-demonstrations-this-week-and-beyond-at-observatory.php","title":{"rendered":"Dead Cities! Victorian Hair Scrapbooks! Automata Demonstrations! This Week and Beyond at Observatory!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am <\/span>very<\/span> excited to announce a whole slew of Morbid Anatomy Presents events taking place at Observatory, this week and beyond. Tonight, join Colin Dickey--author of <\/span> Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius<\/i><\/a><\/b>--as he attempts to \"conjoin a history of the necropolis with a history of ghost towns and abandoned urban landscapes.\" This Thursday, join <\/span>Collector David Freund<\/span> <\/span>for a demonstration and discussion of <\/span>Victorian scrapbooks holding everything \"from inventive collages<\/a> to seaweed compositions to artistically arranged feathers to advertising fragments to human hair to basically anything else that could be glued down.\" In July, make mummies at one of our popular mummy workshops, take in some “Theatrum Mundi,” investigate postmodern mermaidia, parse the politics of taxidermy, and\/or witness antique automatons go through their motions live and in person!<\/p>

Full list follows; hope very much to see you at one or more of these fantastic events!<\/span>
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Dead Cities \/ Cities of the Dead: An illustrated lecture by Colin Dickey<\/b>, author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius<\/i><\/a><\/b>
Date: TONIGHT: Monday, June 20th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
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Tonight, author Colin Dickey will conjoin a history of the necropolis with a history of ghost towns and abandoned urban landscapes. The necropolis has always been a vital feature of the city, from its earliest incarnations to today. The dead body has long been regarded as both sacred and polluting, so what does a community do with thousands of bodies? From medieval chapels literally bursting with the bones of the dead to the sanitized splendor of the modern funeral industry, how we treat the dead reveal much about how we view the living. How we treat dead cities--from California ghost towns to Ukraine's Pripyat, just outside of Chernobyl--begs a different question: what do we abandon, and why? What does all this urban ruin say about our future? Colin Dickey will intertwine these two forms of urban death to see what it all adds up to.<\/p>

Colin Dickey<\/b> is the author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius<\/i><\/a>, and the co-editor (with Nicole Antebi and Robby Herbst) of Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices<\/i>. 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<\/a>.<\/p>

Image: The Metropolitan Sepulcher, a plan for a London cemetery circa 1820<\/p>

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Home-Made Visual Albums: An Artifact-Based Lecture with Collector David Freund<\/span>
Date: THIS THURSDAY June 23<\/span>
Time: 8:00 PM<\/span>
Admission: $5<\/span>
Part of the Out of the Cabinet: Tales of Strange Objects and the People Who Love Them<\/a> Series, presented by Morbid Anatomy<\/a> and Morbid Anatomy Scholar in Residence Evan Michelson<\/a><\/b>

Home-Made Visual Albums were incredibly popular productions between the the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century; these scrap books contained artful arrangements of a wide range of materials, from inventive collages<\/a> to seaweed compositions to artistically arranged feathers to advertising fragments to human hair to basically anything else that could be glued down. More than simply collections or scrap books, these albums can also be seen as diaries, and project a sense of their absent makers through imaginative content, arresting design, obsession, and, above all, narrative.<\/p>

Collector and artist David Freund has been collecting--and classifying, into over 40 categories of his own invention-- these enigmatic and fascinating artifacts over the last 30 years. Tonight, join Mr. Freund as be discusses the history and taxonomy of these artifacts and presents a number of exquisite examples from his collection for your delight and perusal.<\/p>

David Freund <\/b>earned his MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop after a BA in Theater at UC Davis. Professor Emeritus of Photography at Ramapo College of New Jersey, he chaired its Visual Arts for twenty years. He also taught at Pratt and was a Dayton-Hudson Distinguished Visiting Artist at Carleton College. His NEA photographs showed gas station environments nationwide. Other grants included New York’s CAPS program and NYC’s Institute for Art and Urban Resources. During a Light Works residency Freund curated a regional photo post card exhibition, Penny Publishing. Exhibitions include Light Gallery and Eastman House. Among collections with his work are MOMA, the Corcoran, MFA Houston, and the Bibliotheque Nationale.<\/p>

Image: Detail from one of David Freund's collection of home-made visual albums from the 19th and early 20th Century<\/p>

And onward and upward in the weeks to come:<\/p><\/dt><\/dl>