David is an independent researcher, writer and multimedia artist who focuses on the interstices of art, culture, and consciousness. David will explore FoolishPeople’s twenty year history through a series of articles and interviews with members of FP both past and present and audiences who have witnessed and experienced FoolishPeople’s ritual work.

David comments: “Having followed FoolishPeople’s work for a number of years it is a great pleasure to be able to explore their history, methodology, and most importantly the intimate connection that each member shares to the greater work of embracing the true magic of storytelling. Beyond theater, FoolishPeople offer a gateway, and I am honored to be given a guided tour into the rare and potent world they’ve discovered beyond the veil.”

John Harrigan founder of FoolishPeople says: “2013 is an important year for FoolishPeople, and it feels like the right moment to share our rich history by pulling back the curtain. David’s unique skills as a researcher and writer enables him to record and examine how our stories have manifested through the lives of the members of FP and our audiences. FP is privileged to have a writer and thinker of David’s caliber research the history and art of FoolishPeople and to share it in this way.”

The first part of ‘Entering the Theatre of Manifestation – Unveiling the FoolishPeople’ begins today with David’s first article…

-

FoolishPeople create Weaponised Art, Ritual Theatre and Film.

Over a number of years, FoolishPeople has developed a unique practice, Theatre of Manifestation. This is a form of ritual theatre that combines mythology, shamanism, drama therapy, strategic forecasting and open source collaboration. We create stories by merging film, performance, sound, art, light and the location to create a unique, dreamlike world that living characters inhabit.

Our audience must choose their own journey without guidance, a technique which challenges their habitual way of watching art and entertainment in a conventional manner. Static consumption is not possible, active engagement and participation is vital and absolutely necessary.

We have produced our work across sites including conventional theatres, galleries and site-specific venues spanning prestigious cultural venues such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Arcola Theatre and the Horse Hospital in London and historical buildings like the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham. We have toured internationally to the US and Amsterdam and worked for clients such as the BBC and Secret Cinema.

David Metcalfe is an independent researcher, writer and multimedia artist focusing on the interstices of art, culture, and consciousness. He is a contributing editor for Reality Sandwich, The Revealer, the online journal of NYU’s Center for Religion and Media, and The Daily Grail. He writes regularly for Evolutionary Landscapes, Alarm Magazine, Modern Mythology, Disinfo.com, The Teeming Brain and his own blog The Eyeless Owl. His writing has been featured in The Immanence of Myth (Weaponized 2011), Chromatic: The Crossroads of Color & Music (Alarm Press, 2011) and Exploring the Edge Realms of Consciousness (North Atlantic/Evolver Editions 2012). Metcalfe is an Associate with Phoenix Rising Digital Academy, and is currently co-hosting The Art of Transformations study group with support from the International Alchemy Guild.

5 pm A History of Parapsychology and Psychical Research

The scientific investigation of psychic phenomena will be discussed—from the rise of Spiritualism in 1848, to the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, to the laboratory research and the U.S. government’s psychic spying program of the 1970s and 1980s. Methods, findings, and applications of research will be discussed, including some examples from Hansen’s own research. The rise of organized attacks on paranormal research and belief will be covered.

6:30 pm  Break for Refreshment / Discussion

8 pm  The Decline of Parapsychology, or Whatever Happened to Parapsychology?

About 1990, U.S. research in parapsychology began a steep decline. Laboratories closed, attendance at professional conferences dropped, the average age of attendees trended strongly upward, and professional journals became thinner. This failure to flourish can be understood in terms of rationalization and disenchantment—concepts developed by sociologist Max Weber. Openness to, and engagement with, paranormal phenomena is rarely found in the large, hierarchical organizations of government, academe, business, or religion. The side effects of psi phenomena will be discussed.  Those effects are often overlooked, but they lead to the paranormal’s marginalization in our culture.  Although parapsychology is now nearly moribund in the U.S., growing paranormal interest is found in the academic fields of religious studies, anthropology, and studies of Western esotericism.

George Hansen was professionally employed in parapsychology laboratories for eight years—three at the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, and five at Psychophysical Research Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey.  His experiments included remote viewing, card guessing, ganzfeld, electronic random number generators, séance phenomena, and ghosts. His papers in scientific journals cover mathematical statistics, fraud and deception, the skeptics movement, conjurors in parapsychology, and exposés of hoaxes.  He has been active in a number of psychic, UFO, and New Age organizations, and he helped found a skeptics group. He is a member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians.

This event is event is produced as a joint collaboration between Liminal Analytics and photographer Shannon Taggart.

For more information on the event please head over to The Observatory Room event page.

This lecture will detail his life, especially the spectacular levitations, and show how they aroused fear, awe, wonder, envy, and suspicion – especially from the Inquisition.  The story of Joseph shows how fame for miraculous performance almost destroyed his life, and how he used his saintly talents to protect himself from the church and his insatiable fans.

Faith traditions in the Americas are as diverse and expressive as the many cultures they emerge from, but one particular set of traditions has captured the eye and ire of official orthodoxies in government, law enforcement and the Christian church, the passionate veneration of Most Holy Death.

SkeletonSaint.com is a collaborative venture between Dr. R. Andrew Chesnut, Bishop Walter Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, and author of Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint,  David Metcalfe, and Liminal Analytics, presenting a multi-faceted exploration of the sanctification of death in the popular faith traditions of the Americas.

Join us as we examine the complex faith traditions that develop around the sanctification of one of humanity’s oldest fears, and continue a conversation that began at Viva La Muerte!, a  lecture and panel discussion, hosted by the Morbid Anatomy Library at The Observatory in Brooklyn, New York.

For more information, and ongoing engagement, head over to the project page: skeletonsaint.com and follow us on Twitter at: @MostHolyDeath

-

R. Andrew Chesnut, Ph.D., holds the Bishop Walter F. Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies and is Professor of Religious Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is currently conducting research on the new religious economy of Latin America and the cult of Santa Muerte (Saint Death).

A specialist in Latin American religion, he is the author of “Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy” (Oxford University Press, 2003), “Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint” (Oxford University Press, December 2012), and of “Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty” (Rutgers University Press, 1997)..  He also blogs for the Huffington Post.

-

David Metcalfe is an independent researcher, writer and multimedia artist focusing on the interstices of art, culture, and consciousness. He is a contributing editor for Reality Sandwich, The Revealer, the online journal of NYU’s Center for Religion and Media, and The Daily Grail.

Metcalfe writes regularly for Evolutionary Landscapes, Alarm Magazine, Modern Mythology, Disinfo.com, The Teeming Brain and his own blog The Eyeless Owl.  His work has been featured in The Immanence of Myth (Weaponized 2011), Chromatic: The Crossroads of Color & Music (Alarm Press, 2011) and Exploring the Edge Realms of Consciousness (North Atlantic/Evolver Editions 2012). Metcalfe is an Associate with Phoenix Rising Digital Academy, and is currently co-hosting The Art of Transformations study group with support from the International Alchemy Guild.

Photograph made of Dr. Bindelof via his instructions

“My name was Dr. Bindelof…Will you be the disciples of a dead man?”

The Spirit of Dr. Bindelof  focuses on one little known episode of physical mediumship, Gilbert Roller’s utterly charming and disarming autobiographical account of a group of teenagers who experimented with seance phenomena and contacted an alleged spirit named “Dr. Bindelof.”

On Tuesday, May 21st at the Observatory Room in Brooklyn, New York, photographer Shannon Taggart and Liminal Analytics will host author Rosemarie Pilkington for a presentation presenting the details of the Bindelof case using personal accounts, along with photographs and artifacts created during the Bindelof sessions. There will be a brief overview of extraordinary physical mediums and the feats they perform, placing the Bindelof case within this wider framework.

Rosemarie Pilkington, a writer, musician, and educator has a Ph.D. in psychology (consciousness studies) from Saybrook Institute. In addition to The Spirit of Dr. Bindelof, she recently compiled and edited Men and Women of Parapsychology: Personal Reflections Vol II,a follow up to the popular anthology Men and Women of Parapsychology: Personal Reflections Vol I.

For more information on the event please head over to The Observatory Room event page.

Odd questions like this become more relevant as developments in cybernetics and communication technology allow for strange interactions with the world around us. Without the aid of creative imagination you get a bizarre bit of cultural kitsch, delving deeper you can encounter profound questions that crack into the mystery of mind and body, and the synaptic symetry defining so much of our self perception. If you tread carefully you enter the realm of Sacred Geometry, encountering applications of mathematics and ratio that bridge the gap between material science and the more aetheral realms of human existence.

It may seem counter-intuitive to connect Sacred Geometry to cybernetics, but in this kind of wider application is exactly the domains where theories of integral mathematics can be most fruitfully applied. The neuro-chemical maps that connect our nervous system to our body and allow us to move are predicated on mathematical relationships that can be found throughout manifested reality. Seeking to understand these relationships, and the structural web that they work throughout the universe, can provide a revolutionary change in how we view our place in the world, and guide our applications of science to more material concerns.

In partnership with Evolver Learning Labs, I’m hosting a live, 5  part, interactive video course starting on Sunday, April 21st, which will explore the connections between modern advances and ancient algorithmic insights, while looking forward to how these ideas can be used to guide us into more mindful use of our technological proficiency. We’ve invited some of the leading scholars in sacred geometry to bring their specialties together for a rare opportunity to open up this art to contemporary concerns.

Our guests include:

With a field of inquiry which can quickly slide into gross speculation, we’ve cultivated a group of scholars willing to remain intellectually adventurous while keeping their insights grounded in conscientious methodology. We will be covering everything from the natural emergence of these patterns in geological formations to the impact of these forms on our conscious perception.

This potent meeting of minds will foster an expansive discussion which seeks to work through the full implication of these ideas. My recent trips to the Morbid Anatomy Library and Observatory Room in Brooklyn have demonstrated how fruitful a thoughtful gathering can be. I’m hoping that this webinar can be an extension of that into the digital sphere, while carrying the same potential for connections and creative growth.

There’s still time to sign up if you are interested in joining us for the series, and I’m sure those of you that do will find your immersion into these areas of investigation as intimately fascinating, and personally fulfilling, as those of us who are creating the event.

Head over to the seminar page at Evolver Learning Labs for more information.

(This invitation was first published on Modern-Mythology.net)

-

David Metcalfe is an independent researcher, writer and multimedia artist focusing on the interstices of art, culture, and consciousness. He is a contributing editor for Reality Sandwich, The Revealer, the online journal of NYU’s Center for Religion and Media, and The Daily Grail. He writes regularly for Evolutionary Landscapes, Alarm Magazine, Modern Mythology, Disinfo.com, The Teeming Brain and his own blog The Eyeless Owl. His writing has been featured in The Immanence of Myth (Weaponized 2011), Chromatic: The Crossroads of Color & Music (Alarm Press, 2011) and Exploring the Edge Realms of Consciousness (North Atlantic/Evolver Editions 2012). Metcalfe is an Associate with Phoenix Rising Digital Academy, and is currently co-hosting The Art of Transformations study group with support from the International Alchemy Guild. For more information on his collaborative work please visit Liminal-Analytics.org.

Peculiar Channels – A Psychical Serial,  attempts to capture this feeling, isolating the elements left over from narrative film adaptations and heightening them to create atmospheric short films that focus on critical encounters with the anomalous and unknown. These animations are hosted by The Eyeless Owl, an experimental online journal of consciousness studies and mythopoesis.

The Eyeless Owl presents…

Peculiar Channels – A Psychical Serial:

Asemic pulp fiction from the celestial edge, a vigorous alchemical marriage of sound and image. These are Neo-Platonic narratives of love and strife, aetheric sci-fi seances leaking out from the borders of Ghostland.

Enjoy the following selections from the ongoing series, or browse the entire collection here.

Saturn – The Dweller

Lights on the Prairie

We Always Find Those We Want