Science fiction writer Richard Sharpe Shaver believed that rocks were books imprinted with valuable information about such mythical ancient races as the Lemurians and Atlanteans. His controversial stories about an advanced prehistoric civilization and a race of evil beings living at the center of the earth appeared in Amazing Stories and other landmark sci-fi publications of the 40s and 50s.
A decade later, he was living in relative isolation and devoting himself to rock book research, a course of study that he shared with a devoted group of correspondents. Shaver believed that ancient leaders had left behind images embedded into rocks, . . . .go to book page >>

Inventor, designer, artist and musician Thomas Wilfred (1889–1968) devoted his life to the creation of a new art form—\ Lumia,\ or the art of light. He invented his own version of a color organ (a term he disliked) and dubbed it the Clavilux, from the Latin meaning light played by key. After a successful international tour in the 1920s, Wilfred reinvented these large-scale performances as self-enclosed light shows for domestic entertainment. While they enjoyed a short commercial life, Wilfred’s aesthetically elegant and interactive Clavilux and Lumia home models soon found their way into storied collections. His work was included in the Museum of Modern . . . .go to book page >>

An avant-garde comrade of Jonas Mekas, George Maciunas, Jack Smith and others, Richard Foreman (born 1937) was at the forefront of downtown New York’s experimental theater scene of the 1960s. He wrote and directed more than 80 verbally and visually singular productions with his Ontological-Hysteric Theater company in a career that spanned 45 years. Foreman’s visually arresting plays made heavy use of static tableaux, frantic choreography, projected text and Foreman himself sitting in front of the stage operating the lights and sound. While Foreman has published many of his scripts, No Title is a text unlike anything preceding it. Handwritten . . . .go to book page >>

The acclaimed Welsh singer and philanthropist Margaret Watts Hughes (1842–1907) was one of many inventors of her day fascinated by the visual documentation of sound. Her eidophone comprised a tube attached to a chamber covered in rubber, or diaphragm. Hughes covered a glass slide with grains of sand or coarse pigment, then saturated it with water or milk. By singing into the device, the vibrations of her voice would etch out patterns onto the disc: an artistic rendering of the scientific principle of standing-wave resonance. Her Voice Figures, as she called them, ranged from primitive patterns to designs resembling flowers, seashells . . . .go to book page >>

The luminous and radical dance performances of Loïe Fuller (1862–1928) at the turn of the 20th century were unlike anything that had ever been staged before. In her Serpentine Dance, she wore a large, diaphanous gown she manipulated with her arms to form undulating waves, while colored lights projected onto the fabric gave the illusion of birds, animals or flowers. While her profound influence on writers and artists such as Mallarmé and Rodin is well documented, less well known is Fuller’s passion for technology and her involvement with the leading scientists of the time.
Lecture on Radium spotlights Fuller’s scientific forays . . . .go to book page >>