An illustrated lecture with artist Jeanne Kelly
Date: Tuesday, May 31
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
543 Union Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215
Presented by Morbid Anatomy
The Hyrtl Simulacrum is a multimedia, interactive augmentation to the museum experience that makes curiosity contagious and infects others with a sense of wonder. It uses museum artifacts as the foundation for creative historical fictions. These fictions are discovered through digital forensic facial reconstructions and analog interaction with story machines.
The stories begin with 8 of the 138 human skulls that combine to make up the Hyrtl collection, found in the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, PA. Durning the late 1800’s Dr. Joseph Hyrtl wrote what he knew about each person directly onto their skulls. The Hyrtl Simulacrum grew from these short stories written directly on bone. A famous Viennese prostitute, a tight-rope walker who died of a broken neck, a child murderer and a Tai bandit are only a few of the very real people chosen from the collection to become characters in this new narrative.
Combining her love of artistic anatomy, conceptual visual narrative, history, science and good story telling, the project has grown to include high-resolution CT scans of the original skulls, vintage photography, a variety of forensic reconstruction techniques, digital painting and image editing, large wooden interactive curiosity cabinets with miniature handmade dioramas inside and much more.
Jeanne Kelly is an award winning conceptual artist, designer and all around creative. Research as design, scholarship as artistic medium, institutional insertion, collective narratives, public interventions and scripted spaces are the focus of her current work. In the creation of her own work and in collaboration with others, she has utilized everything from welding, painting and wood carving to flash animation, video projection and 3d modeling. Focusing over 20 years experience in the arts, she aims to enhance the current ideas of curation through the augmentation of the museum experience through fine art, interaction and narrative. Jeanne received her BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University and her MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons The New School for Design.
