Tag Archives: travel

I’m completely thrilled to be doing a double- act with the phenomenal Melissa Ferrari at the legendary Los Angeles Breakfast Club on the morning before Halloween (costumes encouraged)! You will also have an opportunity to purchase our Alice Through the Looking-Glass book! And if you can’t get enough, come and see the full Magic Lantern show at USC, and our Spectral Science exhibition in the evening!

This is what the LABC have to say:

A VERY LABC HALLOWEEN! Put on your favorite costume and come celebrate Halloween with the LA Breakfast Club! Magic Lanternist Melissa Ferrari and historian Dr. Franziska Kohlt will transform Friendship Auditorium into an immersive horror theater full of fantastical and dreamlike imagery. 

ABOUT THE PRESENTATION & MAGIC LANTERN PERFORMANCE:  On a rainy 19th-century evening, the public flocked to the Royal Polytechnic Institution of London to partake in the technological spectacle of a new Magic Lantern show. That evening, they were treated to a performance of bestselling children’s fantasy Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, whose author, Lewis Carroll, had long been an aficionado of Phantasmagorias, magic lanterns, microscopes, telescopes, and every optical spectacle the Victorian age had popularized to shape a culture.  These devices not only had a profound influence on the creation of one of the most popular children’s books of all time, but also on early cinema.

Historian of science Dr. Franziska Kohlt and magic lanternist Melissa Ferrari bring you a presentation and live Magic Lantern performance exploring the intersections of science, illusion, and the supernatural. Dr. Kohlt, inaugural Carrollian Fellow at USC, will share her research exploring how literary minds such as Lewis Carroll viewed new technologies and scientific discoveries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a means of accessing “other worlds” beyond human perception. The presentation will feature a revival of the 18th-century tradition of Phantasmagoria, a form of immersive horror theater where hidden projectors conjured apparitions and supernatural creatures, with a Carrollian twist.  Performed with authentic 19th-century Magic Lanterns and Ferrari’s handmade & antique slides, the show will feature a preview of their new collaboration Phantasmagoria: Lighting the World Beyond, premiering later that evening at the USC Doheny Library, and take you from rainy nineteenth-century London, via the mysterious sides of California, to realms unknown.