TOURS
TOURS
EXHIBITIONISTS
Museum Staff
Daren Elsa NiBelly22, Vice-Curator of Exhibitions
Recently appointed Vice-Curator of Musée Patamécanique, Daren Elsa NiBelly has been an active member of the board of trustees since the museum’s inception.
His vast experience and wealth of patamechanical knowledge make him ideally suited to head up the museum’s curatorial department. His national and international projects include exhibitions with the Centre d’ Patamécanique in Paris, the Patamechanical Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Patamechanics and the National Gallery of Patamechanics in Washington, D.C.
Daren’s recent publications include: “More Pipelines to the Infinite” (with Eddy Othermen) “Further Extensions and Analyses”,” Beyond Metamechanics”, “A Brief and Possible History of Patamechanics” and “A Patamechanical Reader”.
Husband of Ana Gram, (author of A Game of Shifting Mirrors) and the father of two, he also teaches Patamechanics at the Center for Advanced Fourth Dimensional Inquiry at Tlon University - is an avid juggler, magician and unicyclist.
Martial Canterel20, Curator of Audiences
As head of our Department of Tourism Martial is keeper of one of the most ancient of museological traditions; he personally arranges every visit via written correspondence (via e-mail). This method is not unlike the procedures employed by the Wunderkammers of old, when the traveling scholar would either have to be invited by the collector or request an appointment for a private viewing.
This playful interaction with the potential visitor is what bridges the gap between literary space and performance space.
Martial is also a prominent scientist and inventor who frequently lectures on his work. He is well known for his numerous creations which he exhibits on the grounds of Locus Solus, his park-like estate located about twenty minutes outside Paris.
We are grateful for the time and dedication our learned friend shares with Musée Patamécanique.
Exhibiting Patamechanical Practitioners
Jesus Borrego Gil22,
How shall we introduce a character like Gil? Describing him is a paradoxical exercise because in Gil’s world, there is no difference between fiction and fact; 'created' reality is as real as ‘observed’ reality and vice versa; so any attempt on our part to describe him and his enigmatic work, well… can only be called fiction.
His often quoted dictum seems to sum-up this exercise;
“I am not sure that I exist, actually.”
Gil develops countless fictions and metalinguistic games for our visitors. His most recent works are derived from a wealth of philosophical sources, Berkeley and Schopenhauer in particular, and by appropriating philosophical ideas he converts them into fictions and games as well.
Let us suffice to say that his work is designed to subvert, often with gentle humor, our comforting presuppositions about our very selves, our place in the world, and the intelligibility of the material universe itself, that is, IF “The Universe” is anything more than a cerebral phenomenon.
June Muldoon
Ms. Muldoon trained at Maryland Institute of Patamechanics in Baltimore and worked as a Wall Street commodities broker before embarking upon her career as a full time Patamechanic. In the 1980s she won international recognition as a radical exponent of Neo-Geo, an American movement concerned with appropriation and parody. Following the example of Pop artists of the 1960s, June used her work to reflect the commercial systems of the modern world. She also refers back to the Duchampian tradition of appropriating an art status to selected products.
Her Vacuum pieces are classified as monuments to technology’s role in shaping contemporary consumerism and domesticity. Like her other immaculate replicas of hair dryers, car advertisements, children's toys and plastic fruits - this work is an enthusiastic endorsement of unlimited consumption.
June perceives Western civilization as a society driven by propagated insecurities and manufactured desires, flattered by narcissistic images and with a vacuous appetite for glamorous commodities. In her expressions of the ecstatic and the banal she does not hesitate to breach the borderlines of taste.
Indeed we are both honored and elated to have her latest work here at the exhibition!
Hans Spinnermen
One legend has it that at the age of seven Hans built a fully operational helicopter from his Tinker-toys in which he took flight over his family home. Another has him constructing a secret workshop in the crawlspace beneath the household laundry room where he would create numerous electro mechanical inventions such as a singing robotic version of Picasso’s Guernica, an automated storybook with moving pictures imbedded in the pages and various singing alarm clocks.
Hans shied away from a formal education in favor of the peace and solitude of his library and workshop. Success came late, and he readily admits that if it wasn’t for an inspired re-reading of the deSelby “Codex” he wouldn’t have found the inspiration for his most famous invention; “The Pointing Machine”.
This curious apparatus renders objects in a never-before-seen dimension. Any form encased within this machine is made back-less and side-less - only front-ness remains. Hans will not reveal the secret of his technology though he is on record saying that the effect is achieved through “slightly distending the laws of physics”.52
Mr. Spinnermen has included a selection his own poetry to accompany his experimental technology. These musings serve as a means to covey the numerous philosophical questions he attempts to elicit through his work.
Chipperace
(Pronounced “Chip-er-ach-ee”)
Chipperace28, known as "Chipper" to his friends and family, was born with a caul which was taken as a sign of genius and an exceptional future. Chipperace’s father played the French horn but was also a factory worker and stored acorns for the coming winter.
While his father encouraged a game of hockey with the acorns his mother was Donald Duck and thought music lessons were a rubber pancake and stuffed them up the chimney, causing family disputes. Chipperace later stated that his dad's love and respect for a toy gun battle until Donald gets blown underground to China fostered within him a deep determination to share his musical legacy with the world.
In a formal classical music competition Chipperace was upon investigation by a rooster, forced to impersonate a newly-hatched chicken. His unique brand of flair and showmanship has become a trademark of his performances ever since.29
deSelby21
de Selby‘s knack for pointing-out otherwise hidden fallacies in prevailing conceptions on the nature of existence and inserting his own, more imaginative views are the hallmarks of this towering polymaths intellectual oeuvre.
de Selbian theory abounds in his numerous and influential texts such as “Golden hours”, “Codex”, “The Laymen’s Atlas” and “The County Album”. Commentators such as Henderson, Barge, Le Clerque, Le Fournier, Kraus, Hatchjaw, Du Garbandier, and Bassett have dedicated countless volumes to de Selby’s revelatory concepts.
Here you will find him busy developing experiments for testing his numerous hypothesis. Most notable are his revaluations on the nature of night and darkness, his treatises on the unused potential of water, reexaminations surrounding the illusory nature of time and motion, and his position that the earth, far from being a sphere – is sausage shaped.
He is also credited with many inventions - exceptional among them is "D.M.P." a substance capable of extracting all oxygen from an airtight enclosure, of disrupting the sequentially of time, and of producing fine mature whiskey in a week.
Maxine Edison
Maxine Alva Edison was born in Paris and began her formal education as a student of philosophy, but soon surrendered to the lure of the fascinating yet little-known art and science of scent.
Opening her first perfumery in Manhattan less than a decade ago, her success came quickly with the launch of the now-coveted perfume, “Dark Horizon” that she developed as part of her line of “Petrola” fragrances made in collaboration with British Petroleum24. This was of course followed up with her ever popular “Love Gasoline25” hand cream, “PAH” air fresheners and the very popular unisex scent, “Sooty”.
Maxine's latest work is focused on recombining and reengineering those ubiquitous perfumes commonly found in everyday household products such as automobile air fresheners, floor cleaners, candy, shampoos, holiday candles, soft drinks and dryer sheets. She reformulates these compounds creating her own aroma hybrids and then builds machines which remediate her simulacra of scents into the Museum’s exhibition area, creating multiple orders of illusory olfactory experience.
Dr. Faustroll61
“Dr. Faustroll was 63 years old when he was born in Circassia in 1898 (the 20th century was negative 2 years old). A man of medium height and golden yellow skin, his face clean shaven apart from his mustachios’, the hairs on his head alternately platinum blond and jet black, an auburn ambiguity changing according to the suns position. His eyes two capsules of ordinary writing ink flecked with golden spermatozoa like Dazing schnapps.”
A closer examination of the above (paraphrased from the influential “Exploits and opinions of Dr. Faustroll, ‘Pataphysician”) reveals that the good Doctor is not only born from the fusion of Dr. Faust and a troll. His hairs are interspersed leaves of parchment, his eyes are printer’s ink, and his skin is a calf-skin jacket – Faustroll, is both a man and a book! His insides are a syzygy of words, riddles, influential people and ideas of his day -
All Bound in ‘Pataphysics!
Given his amorphous nature he is free embody any and all possible forms and modes of existence.
So then... everything is a kind of "Time Machine" for Faustroll, and it can be for us too – We Need Only Jot It Down!
Deloris Glymph12
She stands at just five and one half inches tall, sleeps in a fish bowl and is the winner of two Gold Medals for her native USSR in Hippocampus Dressage (occasionally referred to as "Seahorse Ballet"). She’s our spectacular specter, our penumbral presence the one - the only Deloris Glymph the Phantasmal Aquatic Nymph!
Due to an unfortunate scandal involving multiple accusations of "inappropriate touching" Dolly was compelled to flee St. Petersburg disguised as a slice of invisible cheese52. Soon after her arrival she established herself as the Prima-Phantasma-Acrobata-Assoluta-Microtata, a title she retains TO THIS DAY.
THE DELORIS GLYMPH PHANTASMAL AQUATIC ACROBATICS SHOW
Heinrich Graum30
Heinrich’s prodigious talents were visible in his earliest endeavors. At the age of seven he produced a nightingale capable of sixty four motions including thirty six separate motions of the head. He then turned his attention to the human form and after an exhaustive study of the intricacies of the human hand he revealed his first original creation; an astonishing pianist capable of playing the entire first movement of the Moonlight Sonata on a beautifully constructed seven inch piano.
At the age of twenty four he opened his first Mechanical Theater, the Zaubertheater, which was hailed by critics and commoners alike as - ”The final and richest flowering of the Mechanical arts”. The young master continued to move from triumph to triumph, shocking his audiences with deeper, richer forms of machine life. No one could ignore the haunted and enigmatic character of Graum’s work and came from as far as Paris and Rome to experience a twenty three minute automated performance at the Zaubertheater.31
Then, at the age of thirty six, after twelve years of unprecedented triumph, he released his apprentices and mysteriously closed his workshop.
Now, after years of silence, Graum has returned. His recent works are a radical departure from the master's previous oeuvre. They exists in a place where invention and imitation intersect, haunting us with meanings we cannot entirely fathom.
SEVEN SINGING NIGHTINGALES FROM THE EMPERORS ENCHANTED FOREST
Capt. Lemeul Gulliver26
Lemeul was born in Nottinghamshire where his father had a small estate. He studied for three years at Emmanuel College in Cambridge leaving to become an apprentice to an eminent London surgeon; after four years he left to study at the University of Leiden, a prominent Dutch university and medical school. He also educated himself in navigation and mathematics, leaving the University when he was twenty four years old.
Prior to the voyages which are recounted in his well know travelogue “Gulliver’s Travels” he travelled less remarkably to the Levant, and later to the East Indies and West Indies. Between his travels he married Miss Mary Burton daughter of a London hosier. In his education and travels he acquired some knowledge of High and Low Dutch, Latin, French, Spanish and Lingua Franca and Portuguese.
His current work is centered on the field of Prospective Antiquity including an example of Lagodian technology that was demonstrated for Mr. Gulliver by the “projectors” at the Grand Academy on the island of Balnibbarbi27 where Gulliver was kindly received and spent many days.