THE ODDITORIUM

Event information

DOORS 7:30PM £5 advance £6 on the door
THE ODDITORIUM
‘The Odditorium is a portal into the fringes of culture; its mavericks and pranksters, adventurers and occultists, graphic novelists and psychgeographers.
Our team comprise Sony Award-winning broadcasters, musicians, best-selling authors, roboticists and comic-book heroes, here to share their passions through slide show lectures, musical performance, live experiments, audience participation and mischief. At the Odditorium subjects include the history of ghost trains, the world’s first erotic comics, Victorian prankster Reginald Bray and the extraordinary tale of a Cornish plumber who re-invented himself as a Tibetan lama and fooled the publishing world!

SARAH ANGLISS
VOICES OF THE DEAD
Musician and sound historian Sarah Angliss explores some of the stranger obsessions of the early adopters of recorded sound, as she immortalises a voice from the audience by recording it on wax, using an original Edison Standard Phonograph from 1904. When he first saw the phonograph demonstrated in December 1877, a journalist writing in Scientific American noted there was a now ‘a startling possibility of the voices of the dead being reheard’. Radios, phonographs and gramophones are transmitters of disembodied voices, a feat that seemed so remarkable to the first users, it inspired some unlikely alliances between scientists and diviners of the spirit world. This event includes tales of ventriloquism, fake psychics, memento mori, the 1920s fashion for ‘ghost radio’ and aerial parties. Sarah will perform live ‘aether music’ on the theremin and play genuine ‘voices from the grave’.

www.sarahangliss.com

DAVID BRAMWELL
THE UTTERLY RIDICULOUS HISTORY OF POSTAL MISCHIEF
The utterly ridiculous history of postal art (and mail art) covers 150 years of mischief with the British Postal Service. The story includes such unlikely characters as Genesis P.Orridge, Charles Webb (the author of the Graduate) and Victorian prankster Reginald Bray, who over his lifetime, sent over 30,000 postcards and objects through the post, ranging from frying pans, bees, knitted letters and cigarettes to himself and his dog. Speaker David Bramwell has been dabbling in this dying art too and, at the end of it all, hopes to inspire you to ‘post a flip-flop to someone you love.’

David Bramwell has spoken at TED, Idler Academy and Port Eliot. In 2011 he won a Sony Award for best Radio feature. He is co-creator of SingalongaWickerman and host of Brighton’s Catalyst Club.

www.drbramwell.com