Michael Jackson

14 Feb 1983

Michael Jackson releases "Beat It"

"Beat It" is a song by American recording artist Michael Jackson. It was written by Jackson and co-produced by Quincy Jones for the singer's sixth solo album, Thriller (1982). Jones had wanted an ambitious black rock 'n' roll song, however, Jackson had never previously shown an interest in the genre. Eddie Van Halen was drafted in to add the distinctive overdriven guitar solo with tapping, but initially thought the phone calls from J...

Michael Jackson Timeline

1958 Aug 29	Michael Jackson Born Michael Joseph Jackson was born in Gary, Indiana (an industrial suburb of Chicago, Illinois) to a working-class family on August 29, 1958. The son of Joseph Walter "Joe" and Katherine Est...
1969	The Jackson Five debut In August 1969, shortly before Michael turned 11, the Jackson 5 opened for Diana Ross at the L.A. Forum, and in December, they issued their debut album, Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5....
1972	Michael Jackson's first solo hit “Ben” reaches No. 1 "Ben" is a number-one hit song recorded by the teenaged Michael Jackson for the Motown label in 1972. The song, the theme of a 1972 film of the same name, spent one week at the top of the...
1974	Michael Jackson introduces "The Robot" In 1974, during a performance on "Soul Train," Jackson introduced a dance called the robot, made of moves that were mimicked on dance floors across the country.
1978	Michael Jackson plays "The Scarecrow" in the movie "The Wiz" alongside Diana Ross, Richard Pryor and Nipsey Russell. The Wiz is a 1978 American musical film produced by Motown Productions and Universal Pictures, and released by Universal on October 24, 1978. An urbanized retelling of L. Frank Baum's The...
1979	"Off the Wall" solo album catapults Michael Jackson to superstar status Off the Wall is the fifth studio album by pop musician Michael Jackson, released August 10, 1979 on Epic Records. The album follows Jackson's critically well received theatrical performan...
1982 Nov 30	Michael Jackson Releases "Thriller" Thriller is the sixth studio album by American recording artist Michael Jackson. The album was released on November 30, 1982 by Epic Records as the follow-up to Jackson's critically and c...
1983 Jan 2	Michael Jackson releases "Billie Jean" "Billie Jean" is a dance-pop R&B song by late American recording artist Michael Jackson. It was written by Jackson and produced by Quincy Jones for the singer's sixth solo album, Thriller...
1983 Feb 14	Michael Jackson releases "Beat It" "Beat It" is a song by American recording artist Michael Jackson. It was written by Jackson and co-produced by Quincy Jones for the singer's sixth solo album, Thriller (1982). Jones had w...
1983 Mar 25	Michael Jackson popularizes the moonwalk The moonwalk or backslide is a dance technique that presents the illusion that the dancer is stepping forward while actually moving backward, giving the appearance of a person moving alon...
1984 Jan 27	Michael Jackson burns hair during Pepsi commercial While filming a Pepsi Cola commercial at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, he suffered second degree burns to his scalp after pyrotechnics accidentally set his hair on fire. Happening...
1985 Mar 14	"Donga", Starring Chiranjeevi and Radha, Released in India Donga (Thief) is a Telegu film which was released on March 14, 1985. This film was directed by A. Kodandarami Reddy, and stars Chiranjeevi and Radha. This film is produced by T. Trivikram...
1987 Aug 31	Michael Jackson releases 7th studio album "Bad" Bad is the seventh studio album by Michael Jackson. It was released on August 31, 1987 by Epic/CBS Records. The record was released nearly five years after his last studio album. 20 years...
1988	Michael Jackson releases "Moonwalk," an autobiography Moon Walk is an autobiography written by American musician Michael Jackson. The book was first published in in 1988, a year after the release of Jackson's Bad album, and named after Jacks...
1993 Feb 10	Oprah Winfrey interviews Michael Jackson Jackson gave a 90-minute interview with Oprah Winfrey in February 1993, his first television interview since 1979. He grimaced when speaking of his childhood abuse at the hands of his fat...
1993 Aug 17	Michael Jackson accused of and investigated for sexual abuse In 1993, Michael Jackson was accused of abuse by Evan Chandler, on behalf of his then-13-year-old child, Jordan Chandler. Jackson and Jordan had become friends in May 1992, to the father'...
1993 Nov 12	Michael Jackson cancels "Dangerous" tour in Mexico City Jackson began taking painkillers, Valium, Xanax and Ativan to deal with the stress of the allegations made against him. By the fall of 1993, Jackson was addicted to the drugs. His health ...
1994 May 26	Michael Jackson marries Lisa Marie Presley In May 1994, Jackson married singer-songwriter Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of Elvis Presley. They had first met in 1975 during one of Jackson's family engagements at the MGM Grand Ho...
1996 Jan 18	Lisa Marie Presley divorces Michael Jackson. Presley and Jackson divorced less than two years after getting married in the midst of Jackson's child sexual abuse scandal and, at the time, it was speculated by the tabloid media that t...
1996 Nov 15	Michael Jackson marries Debbie Rowe During the Australian leg of the HIStory World Tour, Jackson married dermatologist nurse Deborah Jeanne Rowe, who bore him two children, a son, Michael Joseph Jackson, Jr. (also known as ...
1997 Feb 13	Michael Joseph (Prince) Jackson Jr. born to Michael Jackson and Debbie Rowe During the Australian leg of the HIStory World Tour, Jackson married dermatologist nurse Deborah Jeanne Rowe, who bore him two children, a son, Michael Joseph Jackson, Jr. (also known as ...
2009 Jun 25 2:18PM	Michael Jackson Rushed to Hospital in Cardiac Arrest LOS ANGELES -- Pop star Michael Jackson has been taken to UCLA Medical Center by ambulance suffering from cardiac arrest, fire officials confirm. Los Angeles Fire Department Captain St...
2009 Jun 25 3:09PM	Michael Jackson dies at 50 Michael Jackson, whose quintessentially American tale of celebrity and excess took him from musical boy wonder to global pop superstar to sad figure haunted by lawsuits, paparazzi and fai...
2009 Jun 29	Michael Jackson's mother, Katherine, gets temporary custody of his children On Monday, the children, ages 7, 11 and 12, were placed under the temporary guardianship of their paternal grandmother, Katherine Jackson, by a Los Angeles judge. The biological mothe...
2009 Jul 1	Michael Jackson Tops Charts and Breaks Records Again After Death As soon as the news of Michael Jackson’s death began to spread last Thursday afternoon, radio programmers around the country cued up his songs, and fans rushed to retail and online outlet...
2009 Jul 7	Public Memorial Held for Michael Jackson at Staples Center in Los Angeles Michael Jackson's public memorial started out more spiritual than spectacular Tuesday, opening with a church choir singing as his golden casket was laid in front of the stage and a shaft ...
2009 Jul 15 5:00PM	Video Footage of Michael Jackson's Hair Catching Fire During the Filming of a Pepsi Ad Released Jackson suffered a setback on January 27, 1984, causing repercussions for the rest of his life. While filming a Pepsi Cola commercial at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, he suffered ...

Harry Potter Timeline - Timelines.com HOPE THIS HELPS

Harry Potter Timeline

1997 Jun 30	Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone Released in the UK Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is the first novel in the Harry Potter series written by J. K. Rowling and featuring Harry Potter, a young wizard. It describes how Harry discover...
1998 Jul 2	Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Released in the UK Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, is the second novel in the Harry Potter series written by J. K. Rowling. It continues the story of Harry Potter during his second year at Hogwarts...
1998 Sep 1	Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone Released in the US Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is the first novel in the Harry Potter series written by J. K. Rowling and featuring Harry Potter, a young wizard. It describes how Harry discovers h...
1999 Jun 2	Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Released in the US Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, is the second novel in the Harry Potter series written by J. K. Rowling. It continues the story of Harry Potter during his second year at Hogwarts...
1999 Jul 8	Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Released in the UK Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the third novel in the Harry Potter series written by J. K. Rowling. The book was published on 8 July 1999. The novel won both the 1999 Costa B...
1999 Sep 8	Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban Released in the US Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the third novel in the Harry Potter series written by J. K. Rowling. The book was published in the UK on 8 July 1999 and in the US on 8 Septemb...
2000 Jul 8	Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Released Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is the fourth novel in the Harry Potter series written by J. K. Rowling, published on July 8, 2000. The book attracted additional attention because of ...
2001 Nov 4	Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (film) released Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (released in the United States and India as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) is a 2001 fantasy/adventure film based on the novel of the same...
2002 Nov 15	Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Film) Released Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is a 2002 fantasy adventure film, and the second film in the popular Harry Potter series, based on the novel by J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the...
2003 Jun 21	Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Released Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the fifth and antepenultimate novel in the Harry Potter series written by J. K. Rowling. The novel features Harry Potter's struggles through h...
2004 Jun 4	Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Film) Released in the US Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is a 2004 fantasy adventure film, based on the novel of the same name by J. K. Rowling. Directed by Mexican film maker Alfonso Cuarón, it is the t...
2005 Jul 16	Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Released Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, released on 16 July 2005, is the penultimate of the seven novels from British author J. K. Rowling's popular Harry Potter series. Set during Harry ...
2005 Nov 18	Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Film) Released Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is a 2005 fantasy adventure film, based on J. K. Rowling's novel of the same name. The film was the fourth installment in the Harry Potter film series,...
2007 Jul 12	Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Film) Released Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a 2007 fantasy adventure film, based on the novel of the same name by J. K. Rowling. Directed by David Yates, produced by David Heyman's compa...
2007 Jul 21	Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Released Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the seventh and final of the Harry Potter novels written by British author J. K. Rowling. The book was released on 21 July 2007, ending the series ...
2009 Jul 15	Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (film) Released Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is a 2009 fantasy-adventure film based on the novel of the same name by J. K. Rowling. It is the sixth film in the Harry Potter film series. It is d...

Harry Potter Timeline - Timelines.com

President Barack Obama hosts 'beer summit' for Prof Henry Gates and Sgt James Crowley - Telegraph

President Barack Obama hosts 'beer summit' for Prof Henry Gates and Sgt James Crowley

In perhaps the most unusual sitdown of his administration, President Barack Obama hosted Prof Henry Gates, a prominent black scholar, and Sgt James Crowley, a white police sergeant, for beers in the White House Rose Garden on Thursday evening.

 

By Philip Sherwell in New York
Published: 12:04AM BST 31 Jul 2009

President Barack Obama, right, and Vice President Joe Biden, left, has a beer with Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., second from left, and Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley at the White House Photo: AP

Mr Obama was hoping to defuse the angry racial furore that has raged since Sgt Crowley arrested Prof Gates for disorderly conduct at the Harvard academic’s own home in Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 16.

The President has acknowledged that he fuelled the controversy when he said that the police “acted stupidly” for arresting Prof Gates after he protested vociferously about Sgt Crowley’s actions during a burglary investigation.

Mr Obama invited the two men and Vice-President Joe Biden to join him for a symbolic beer and chat and to talk over their differences. It was not, he insisted, a summit, although they met in a setting where previous presidents have often hosted international leaders.

The White House allowed cameramen to shoot some long-range pictures of the start of the meeting before they were ushered away.

The photographs showed Mr Crowley and Mr Gates in dark suits, despite the warm weather in Washington, while Mr Obama and Mr Biden opted for the choreographed casual look of white shirts after shedding their jackets.

A White House employee carried the beers out on a tray to the four men as they sat around a white table. They drank from clear glass mugs and snacked on peanuts and pretzels served in small silver bowls.

Mr Obama drank Bud Light, Sgt Crowley opted for a Blue Moon, Mr Gates chose a Boston favourite, Sam Adams Light – despite earlier indications he was going for a Jamaican Red Stripe – and Mr Biden sipped a Bucklers.

In the 30 seconds that a pool reporter was allowed to observe events from 50 feet away, Sgt Crowley was doing most of the talking and Mr Gates appeared to be leaning in, listening intently. At one point, the President laughed heartily.

The two protagonists brought their families to the White House and they toured the East Wing together before the sit-down, then met Mr Obama in the Oval Office before moving out into the Rose Garden.

Sgt Crowley had been called to investigate a possible burglary at Mr Gates’ house after the academic was seen by a passer-by forcing his way into his own home because of a broken door.

Mr Gates had claimed that he was the victim of racial profiling after he was arrested while Sgt Crowley insisted that he out him in handcuffs after coming under a barrage of verbal abuse. The charges were dropped but the police officer said he would not apologise.

The incident sparked a bitter debate about race relations in America, sucking in the country’s biracial President and distracting him from his push for heathcare reforms. Whether the beer diplomacy did anything to soothe the contretemps was not clear from the pictures.

President Barack Obama hosts 'beer summit' for Prof Henry Gates and Sgt James Crowley - Telegraph

Doctors @ your Home - THESE DOCS ARE JUST ASKIN' FOR IT- Home Doctors - Hotel Doctors

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Doctors @ your Home - Home Doctors - Hotel Doctors

Paris Fashion Week: Dunhill shoots for the moon, scores

"Quantum of Solace,"

12:12

lvmh lover

Ooooohhh...another Neverfull gets special treatment, this time from the store in Deauville, France. Re-opened in the early part of Summer 2009, this small but quaint boutique boasts fabulous architectural elements that Normandy is famous for. Christened Villa Vuitton, it's definitely high on my agenda list for stores to visit. LVoe it!!!

If it weren't for her Cabas Piano, I would have kicked the living daylights outta her!!! He isssshhhhzzz mine!

Well Mr, Thanks to you, I can't stop myself from reading your blog almost daily. And thanks to you I just went and bought the damier Etole in the middle of summer. Now all I can do is wish for a cool summer night so I can start using it. I would have love to get my hands on the Bordeaux but I was told it's not being release in North American. BOOO!! Now if I only know how to tie a scraf. Never worked with anything as big as a etole before. Any suggestions would be greatly apperiated. Apprently this is what everyone is doing, so here's a picture of some of my LV goods. Keep up the good work. Awww...thanks for sharing, Erik!!! It's people like you who makes blogging about Louis Vuitton all worthwhile. LVoe it!!!

Hmmm...I do LVoe fur but the colour seems a tad bit too vermin for my taste. I received this pic from Bagaholicboy.com ages ago and it seemed to have been buried in my inbox. Well, today is the resurrection and feature of this Fall Winter bag. Made out of mink fur, this Pochette Accesoires will surely turn heads and PETA for sure!

My SA showed me the new colours for the Sprouse Leopard Stole when I was last in the boutique and I must say that I am not so wild about them. I guess I am biased because I LVoe, LVoe, LVoe the colourway on mine.

I am really liking the Pailletes Collection for Fall Winter 2009 2010. I am just so undecided if I should get one. Any thoughts?

I am always thrilled when I see a Celeb decked in Louis Vuitton whilst travelling. Here's Victoria Secret's Miranda Kerr with her Sac Chien in Monogram, Pegase in Damier and the ohhh so wonderful Mahina. LVoe it!!!

While I am roasting in 90 degree weather, Christine from Australia is enjoying her winter with her Stephen Sprouse Leopard Stole. I can't wait to use mine again for this season. That silk and cashmere is absolutely fabulous. Thanks for sharing, C. LVoe it!!!

I dunno who she is but she absolutely fabulous. LVoe it!!! UPDATE: She is Taiwanese actress An Yi Xuan. Thanks, guys!

Paris Fashion Week: Dunhill shoots for the moon, scores | All The Rage | Los Angeles Times

Feds Search Vegas Properties of Jackson Doctor

As the investigation into Michael Jackson's death continues, authorities searched the Las Vegas home and medical office of Dr. Conrad Murray, Jackson's personal doctor. (July 28)

First Person: Spaceship Firm Gets Mideast Boost

British billionaire Sir Richard Branson signed a deal Tuesday to sell a third of his space travel startup to a Mideast investment fund. Soon after, Branson took his first ride in WhiteKnightTwo, designed to launch a ship into space. (July 28)

Coast Guard rescues woman from rock

DALY CITY, Calif. An HH-65 Dolphin helicopter crew from Coast Guard Air Station San Francisco rescues a 22-year-old woman, from Pacifica, Calif., after she reported being stranded on the rocks at Fort Funston here. (Coast Guard video by Air Station San Francisco) JUNEAU, Alaska - A Coast Guard Air Station Sitka, Alaska, MH-60 Jayhawk rescue helicopter crew conducts a medevac for an injured hiker 35 miles southeast of Juneau, Thursday, July 2, 2009. (Coast Guard video/Air Station Sitka). Watch this video and other Coast Guard media in high resolution at http://cgvi.uscg.mil/media/main.php

History of Quacks: Who're Dr. Murray - Dr. Koplin - Dr. Klein - Dr. Nichopoulos?

Follow Nichopoulouzo @mrjyn http://www.twitter.com/mrjyn FOR MORE NEWS AND VIDEO
Los Angeles officials have searched the offices of a second doctor connected to late superstar Michael Jackson as the hunt for the singer's medical files continues.

On Tuesday, officers from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) swooped on the house of Jackson's personal doctor, Conrad Murray, who was with the star on the day of his death last month.

Officers confiscated Murray's computer and cell phone from his Las Vegas residence as they investigate possible manslaughter charges against him.

Now a second medic is facing the police probe. Los Angeles County Assistant Chief Coroner Ed Winter searched the Beverly Hills medical offices of Dr. Lawrence Koplin on Wednesday, reportedly looking for records from the medic's nurse anesthetist David Fournier.

Jackson's dermatologist, Dr. Arnold Klein, performed procedures on the star at Dr. Koplin's office with Fournier administering anesthesia, according to TMZ.com.

On leaving Koplin's offices, Winter confirmed he is "still looking for medical records involving Michael Jackson."

Listening Post

Listening Post is a ‘dynamic portrait’ of online communication, displaying uncensored fragments of text, sampled in real-time, from public internet chatrooms and bulletin boards. Artists Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin have divided their work into seven separate ‘scenes’ akin to movements in a symphony. Each scene has its own ‘internal logic’, sifting, filtering and ordering the text fragments in different ways.

By pulling text quotes from thousands of unwitting contributors' postings, Listening Post allows you to experience an extraordinary snapshot of the internet and gain a great sense of the humanity behind the data. The artwork is world renowned as a masterpiece of electronic and contemporary art and a monument to the ways we find to connect with each other and express our identities online.

Listening Post has been presented to the Science Museum by The Art Fund.

http://www.artfund.org

Disclaimer

Listening Post features uncensored fragments of text from live chatroom data. It may occasionally include content that is unsuitable for children or which some visitors may find offensive. The material is not produced or solicited by the Science Museum, so the Museum is unable to accept responsibility for the nature of the content that the work may extract from these sources.

'Anyone who types a message in a chat room and hits "send" is calling out for a response. Listening Post is our response.' Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin

Monument to the present¹  - the sound of 100,000 people chatting

Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin's Listening Post immerses us in a rhythm of computer-synthesised voices reading, or singing out, a fluid play of real-time text fragments. The fragments are sampled from thousands of live, unrestricted internet chatrooms, bulletin boards and other online public forums. They are uncensored and unedited. Stray thoughts resonate through the space in sound and voice as texts surge, flicker, appear and disappear, at varying sizes and speeds, across a suspended grid of over 200 small electronic screens. An ambient soundtrack accompanies the activity with isolated pulses reminiscent of computer modems, clatterings, footsteps and the beeping of mechanical answering machines. At intervals darkness and silence take over, creating momentary pauses before Listening Post continues with its next movement.

The artists' starting place for Listening Post was simple curiosity - what might 100,000 people chatting online sound like? Hansen and Rubin agreed that the project should have a strong social component, so whilst initial research centred on statistical representations of websites, they rapidly moved towards concentrating on actual language from chatrooms, 'from which a kind of music began to emerge... the messages started to form a giant cut-up poem'.

The piece responds to a special moment in history. At no other time since the birth of communications technologies have ordinary people - independent of news channels, corporations or political parties - had the opportunity to exchange views so immediately and on such a large scale.

Every day, at every hour, hundreds of thousands of us go online to meet friends, exchange news and share thoughts. Listening Post interrogates this phenomenon by continually drawing down fragments of these online discussions, including them in its cycle of orderings, siftings and filterings - so that, in the artists words, it turns 'public chat room data into an experience that conveys the yearnings of people out there to connect with each other'.

The patterns identified by the artists allow Listening Post to build up a multi-sensory 'portrait of chat'. Some of its movements concentrate on the most common first words of new postings - 'I am...', 'I like...', 'I love...' - which themselves speak volumes for the ways in which we choose to identify ourselves online. Others list least-used words or work in topic clusters, arranging selections from thousands of simultaneous conversations by content and revealing emerging topics of the day, the hour, or indeed the moment. From the profound to the frivolous or personal, from the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center to the disappearance of British toddler Madeleine McCann, Listening Post presents us with whatever is occupying our collective thoughts right now.

The result presents a 'sculpture' of the 'content and magnitude' of online chatter. Through Listening Post Hansen and Rubin provide us with insights into the vast scale of online social activity, and the gradations of human expression which exist within it. Our assertions, opinions, hopes and dreams, extracted from their original contexts but otherwise unaltered, are given sharper, different and wider meanings which range from the poignant to the absurd. The mundane is rendered monumental and the monumental mundane as Listening Post levels the politically volatile with the light-hearted, lecherous, plaintive, expressive and banal.

The power of Listening Post emerges from the artists' skill in pooling their combined philosophical, artistic and technological interests to achieve an exceptional distillation of collective interests as well as 'the content and patterns evident in different information channels'. Mark Hansen's computer programmes collect, sample and process thousands of live online public conversations which are then sorted by theme, while Ben Rubin's voice-synthesiser tones and sound effects respond to shifts in the data streams, carefully building up the musical score. Together these activities go beyond simple redisplay or reinterpretation of data patterns, to create something 'that expresses the meaning of data gathered from the internet'.

As a work of art and a piece of technological ingenuity in its own right, Listening Post is hard to categorise. An extraordinary investigation into the meaning and malleability of statistics, it combines a Minimal art aesthetic with the elements of chance and randomness common to experimental art from the early 20th century to the present day. But its engagement with media technologies and sophisticated data-analysis techniques differentiates it from traditional visual art. It relies not on the found objects of Modern Art but on found data and extracted thoughts - the very unstill lives of a hundred thousand active minds. Listening Post is an acknowledged masterpiece of electronic art; it references issues and themes central to software and interactive art, while subverting notions of interactivity. By anonymously drawing from active public places on the internet for its raw material, using thousands of expressions from thousands of unwitting online contributors, it repositions the point of interaction to the point of source rather than the point of encounter. It is itself as much a voyeur as the gallery audiences to whom it performs its findings.

Listening Post has a finite life span. The messaging phenomena that it feeds upon were enabled by the evolution of networks and mass access to continual bandwidth over HTML bulletin boards and internet relay chat (IRC). Changes to the text-based nature of these environments - the proliferation of video, graphics and animation - are in turn bound to radically change the content sources that Listening Post relies on, perhaps even rendering it silent one day.

For now, and as long as the sources it depends upon are available to its constant trawling, Listening Post remains an astonishing, awe-inspiring and strangely humbling 'instrument of mass, if random, surveillance and a chapel to the human need for contact'.²  Hansen and Rubin's creation can at times seem like a modern-day oracle, a snapshot of the text-based internet as we know it today or a monument to the ways we find to connect with each other online.

Hannah Redler, Head of Arts Projects

Listening Post has been presented to the Science Museum by The Art Fund.

Science Museum - About us - Listening Post

Dream Director

The Dream Director

Where do you go when you dream?

Luke Jerram’s The Dream Director is a unique event, installation and exploration investigating the hidden realm of dreaming. Where do people go when they dream? What do they see? What do they experience? And can the shape of dreams be influenced as the dreamer is sleeping? These are the questions posed and explored by artist Luke Jerram in his participatory work, The Dream Director. The Dream Director explores the boundaries of participants’ conscious and subconscious minds, prompting questions about the ethics of and possibilities for, creating art in dream space. It is also a new tool for sleep science and clinical applications that raises questions about the rules of interaction and boundaries of science and art.

The Dream Director invites people to sleep overnight in a gallery. Specially designed “pods” house the dreamers who don eye-masks that detect rapid eye movement, indicating the dreaming stage of sleep. When the dreamers reach their dream state, their eye masks trigger ambient sounds via a computer, which are played into small speakers mounted into the pod, in an attempt to affect the nature and content of their dreams.

“An innovative and aesthetically beautiful piece of work, which completely encompasses the viewer, fulfilling the main and crucial artistic aim, whilst spanning the realms of science and engineering, very entertaining and exciting.”
Previous participant in The Dream Director

Jerram was commissioned in 2007 by Watershed through the Clark Bursary, the UK Digital Art Award, to investigate the complexities of sleep and dreaming. He built upon original research carried out with sleep psychologist Chris Alford at The University of West of England, to create a new installation that merges art, science and digital media.

Dream Director

The Effect of the Invention of Anaesthesia on the Development of Surgery

The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL continues to build on its proud tradition of excellence in furthering the academic study of the history of medicine and an awareness of its importance. History counts, as anyone reading about current events recognises. The Centre remains committed to furthering the knowledge of medicine's past in order to offer analyses of the complexities and ambiguities, as well as the hard-won knowledge, surrounding health, diseases, and their treatment.

To find out more, please see the About The Centre section of this website, or view the Centre Brochure.

Henry Solomon Wellcome (1853-1936). Oil painting by Hugh Goldwin Reviere. Credit: Wellcome Library, London

Kass Lecture

The Effect of the Invention of Anaesthesia on the Development of Surgery

Dr Sherwin Nuland (Yale University School of Medicine)

22nd September 2009

Details To Be Confirmed

New Statesman - Strange meetings

A century ago in Vienna, madness and creativity existed side by side. The artists and thinkers who gathered there would shape the modern world

Vienna at the fin de siècle was a crucible of modernity. Amid the nervy multicultural babble of tongues in the imperial city, writers, artists, composers and architects jostled with philosophers, social reformers and scientists. Sacher-Masoch, Freud, Wittgenstein, Boltzmann, Schnitzler, Karl Kraus, Mahler (Gustav and Alma), Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele, Adolf Loos . . . the city’s roll-call of greats goes on and on, sometimes even to include Trotsky, who stopped by to play chess. In cafes and cabarets, at exhibitions and in salons and lecture halls, these dreamers and schemers met and talked and reinvented the times. They also reinvented the mind and theories about how to treat its disarray.

Madness, it seemed, was not only out there, locked up in the Narrenturm, the 18th-century asylum poised just outside the city, but in here, in everyday dreams and slips, in unruly bodies, in the shape of our sexual lives, in anxieties, hysterias and neuroses. It was also the result and part of the very fabric of modernity. If society could dream collectively, the great Viennese novelist Robert Musil wrote in The Man Without Qualities, it would dream Moosbrugger – the anarchic rapist-murderer who shadows the life of his book. That nightmare shadow would take on flesh in the horrors of the First World War and even more terrible substance in the politics of Vienna’s one-time citizen, the failed artist Adolf Hitler. Vienna, as the satirist Karl Kraus said, was also a laboratory for world destruction.

Since the opening of the Wellcome Collection’s new, light-filled premises in 2007, the gallery has given us a number of conceptual exhibitions that mingle art and medicine in illuminating ways. “Madness and Modernity”, the most recent of these, may share the gallery’s ground floor with Bobby Baker’s excellent “Diary Drawings”, about her journey through mental illness, but its limited space does nothing to detract from the fascination of what is on display and the thoroughness of the long research that has gone into the making of the exhibition.

Focusing on the interaction between madness, the visual arts and architecture, and how each tangled with and stirred the others, the exhibition opens with the old: 18th-century Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s grimacing heads. Trapped in extremes of emotion and sculpted in the last eight and reclusive years of the one-time society portraitist’s life, these “characters”, who may be the artist himself, peer and leer out at us. Rescued from oblivion and exhibited to the Viennese in 1907, Messerschmidt’s scowling and twisted sculptures caused a stir. With their expressionist aura, they also served as something of an inspiration to artists looking for a way to convey inner excess and their jangled times.

At the Wellcome, Messerschmidt’s heads look out at a model of the Narrenturm, the 1784 panopticon that predates by at least a year Jeremy Bentham’s vision of a disciplinary institution. A haunting film by David Bickerstaff takes us through the circular tower’s now empty rooms and eerie corridors, designed to confine “dangerous lunatics”.

By 1900, notions of both madness and confinement had changed, as had art and architecture. When the Austrian authorities set out to have a new psychiatric institution built, doctors and architects alike had a hand in the planning.

They wanted a quasi-utopian environment that would soothe and alleviate. What resulted was Steinhof, a mammoth hospital, housing private and public patients, for the “cure and care of mental and nervous disorders”. Set atop the gently sloping Viennese hills in outlying Penzing and overlooking the city, Steinhof was planned by Otto Wagner, a member along with Klimt of the Vienna Secession group, and himself a native of Penzing. Wagner believed that buildings needed to reflect their function and that “new human tasks and views called for a change or reconstitution of existing forms”. The hospital and the fine church at its crest were in some respects his crowning achievement. Form and function were married here to contribute to the humane treatment of the mentally ill and to provide respite for despairing urbanites.

Steinhof was something of a sparkling new town, encompassing 60 separate buildings. There were “pavilions”, all with the latest facilities, to house 500 staff and 2,500 patients. Some were for those who needed confinement; others for those free to roam in its pastoral grounds or stage and attend plays and concerts in its theatre.

A poster publicising the hospital calls out to Vienna’s “mad” – to anyone suffering from “neurasthenia, hysteria, hypochondria, the neuroses, cocaine or morphine addiction” – and promises progressive treatment in bucolic surroundings. Inmates lovingly created a large model of their glimmering church, here displayed. Artists, perhaps inspired by the iconography of Jean-Martin Charcot’s much-photographed hysterics and neurologically deformed patients, came in and out to paint sufferers. Their brushstrokes were labile and as expressive as their palettes in their painterly attempts to capture the physiognomy of mental pain and make inner torment visible.

Kokoschka came here to paint the writer Ludwig Ritter von Janikowski, an early patient. When the portrait with its lurid hues and jagged lines was exhibited, it caused a great stir: the anguish of its subject was visceral in impact. Psychological and pathological portraiture were born. They became an emphatically Viennese genre. Kokoschka and Schiele – whose in­imitable nervous line and gaunt, tormented self-portraits are undiminished even in the reproductions displayed here – were only two of its greatest exemplars.

Max Oppenheimer was so taken with Kokoschka’s work that his psychological portraits were sometimes mistaken for the latter’s. The nervy, long-fingered hands he gives his portrait of Heinrich Mann are as evocative as Schiele’s lines, and seem to signal breakdown.

For the wedding of Freud’s daughter Mathilde, a portrait of her father was commissioned from Oppenheimer. Like Lotte Franzos, who hated Kokoschka’s jarring rendition of her, Mathilde was dismayed by the result. This was no Freud she recognised. Unbearded after his trip to America, Oppenheimer’s clear-eyed, moustachioed and serene Freud seemed to her nothing like her father. This is, ironically, an “unpsychological” portrait.

The brown-hued painting depicts a small object at Freud’s side. Its original is part of the exhibit, together with a small selection of other objects from Freud’s large collection of antiquities, loaned by the Freud Museum London, as is one of the Persian rugs which cover his iconic couch.

Freud had a penchant for the domestic, that shaping ground of the psyche, and for the buried archaeology of the mind. Fundamentally stoical and anti-utopian, decidedly verbal rather than physiognomic in spite of Freud’s neurological training, his psychoanalytic project stands in stark contrast to its exhibition neighbour: the Sanatorium Purkersdorf. This was a state-of-the-art facility, designed down to the last functional detail by Josef Hoffmann, an important figure in that artistic production house which was the Wiener Werkstätte. Light, elegant, airy and set in open countryside, Purkersdorf was an inspiration to Le Corbusier. The sanatorium served as a treatment centre for Vienna’s fashionable elite when they wanted a change from the urban consulting rooms of Freud and his colleagues.

Here, architecture itself provided a rest cure. Rational design was understood as enabling rational thought. The displayed objects include graceful light fixtures and chairs, including a chessboard armchair flown over from the Neue Galerie in New York. There are also treatment machines: an exercise bicycle, a modish electro­therapeutic cage in which the patient stood as a current travelled round the wooden enclosure.

Such tools of the psychiatric trade are nowhere to be seen in the paintings of the patient Josef Karl Rädler, a porcelain painter before his institutionalisation for the last 24 years of his life. His watercolours depict himself and a host of other patients engaged in mundane tasks, often in sociable groups. There is a rustic, naive, occasionally Dürer-like quality to these, and apart from the inscriptions surrounding the tableaux front and back, there is little evidence of “madness”. “I myself see this home as a church, these poor souls as living saints,” reads one of these unstoppable streams of writing. Mauer-Öhling, the rural psychiatric centre at which Rädler was latterly interned, still functions. Its most recent famous patients were Elisabeth Fritzl and her children, who sheltered here just after they emerged from long captivity in Josef Fritzl’s cellar.

Curated by the architectural historian Leslie Topp and the art historian Gemma Blackshaw, this is an enthralling and beautifully mounted exhibition. If there is a lack, it is of the ideas which permeated the work of the mind doctors of the period. Their understanding of what it was that had disturbed their patients, what made them tick in troubled ways, is a terrain that visual representation and architecture cannot quite reach. The excellent catalogue provides a useful verbal supplement.

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Exploring mental health in Vienna | BBC NEWS | Health

Exploring mental health in Vienna

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Explore inside the 'Tower of Fools', an 18th Century mental asylum in Vienna (Footage courtesy of David Bickerstaff)

The ominous round, Narrenturm, nicknamed the "Tower of Fools", still stands in Vienna. It is where the city sent their insane during the late 18th Century.

The winding corridors seem to echo with the pain of the 140 inmates who were chained to the walls and provided only with straw mats for sleeping.

"They were treated as animals and were considered dangerous lunatics," said Dr Leslie Top, an architectural historian and curator of Madness and Modernity, a new exhibition at The Wellcome Collection, London.

Anxious Vienna

Model of Steinhof mental asylum, where patients lived parallel lives

The exhibition looks at the relationships between mental illness, the visual arts and architecture in Vienna around 1900.

"While the whole of Europe was interested in mental health during this time, what was different about Vienna, is that it also had a cultural interest explored through the visual arts," said Dr Topp.

The exhibition includes designs for utopian psychiatric spaces, drawings of the patients confined within them and pathological photos used by doctors to indentify a diseased body.

Dr Topp adds: "Vienna acted like a magnet, drawing in people from far and wide to make their way. However, this lead to a widespread cultural anxiety, a lack of rootedness.

"Coupled with this were fears about the modern city and a faster pace of life. There was the perception that people would become mentally unhinged."

Parallel life

An electrotherapeutic cage used in Steinhof mental hospital.

A film installation by artist David Bickerstaff, which explores Narrenturm mental asylum, is part of the display. It contrasts with another video of Vienna's mental hospitals, the Steinhof, built approximately 100 years later.

"From the mid 19th Century onwards, there was a strong acceptance that the mentally ill were not inhuman - they had to be confined, but they could enjoy their liberty within the institution.

"There was an enlightenment, which went along with philosophy at the time concerned with human rights and prison reform, a belief that buildings could play a role in transforming lives," said Dr Topp.

Steinhof, partly designed by the father of modern architecture, Otto Wagner, was a kind of model town for the insane.

"Patients lived a parallel life to those in Vienna. There was a farm, theatre, elaborate landscaping, and a chapel.

"A big model of Steinhof from 1907, is my favourite part of the exhibition," said Dr Topp.

"This was used to publicise the institution was now open. The Government of Austria wanted its people to know what it had been doing".

The exhibition

Asylum architecture is just one of the six areas explored in the exhibition.

Others include: The Patient Artist, which is devoted to art made by two patients who were confined to psychiatric institutions, and Pathological Portraits, which exhibits photographs of psychiatric patients in circulation at the time to show a 'diseased' body.

Madness and Modernity is on at the Wellcome Collection, London, from 1 April to 28 June.

BBC NEWS | Health | Exploring mental health in Vienna

Inside the Head: Art and Mental Illness Explored - Globespotters Blog - NYTimes.com

June 2, 2009, 6:00 am

Inside the Head: Art and Mental Illness Explored

By Gary Moskowitz

Wellcome Collection The “Madness & Modernity” exhibit at the Wellcome Collection.

LONDON | Emaciated self-portraits, an electro-therapeutic cage, photo journals of extreme conditions like gigantism: welcome to the Wellcome Collection’s exploration of the relationship between mental illness and the arts.

The “Art & Mental Illness” exhibit, open now through June 28 at the Wellcome Collection gallery (183 Euston Road, NW1 2BE, Euston tube top, Victoria Line and Northern Line, 02-07-611-2222), is broken up into two distinctly different sections.

The first is “Madness & Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900,” a quirky history lesson that aims to deconstruct the intersection of how Viennese people at that time understood and clinically treated the mentally ill, and the evolving modernism in art and architecture that was underway in Vienna at that time.

Wien Museum, Vienna A “Character Head” by Franz-Xaver Messerschmidt, circa 1770.

Film footage shot recently at Vienna’s late 18th-century “Tower of Fools” institution leads the viewer through thick, prison-like doors and the rounded corridors at a facility initially built to confine those deemed “dangerous lunatics” in their day. A large model and floor plans show what the “Am Steinof” psychiatric hospital looked like when it opened in 1907. An old electro-therapeutic cage, which used strong electric currents to increase metabolism to calm hysterics, is also on display. Photo journals of patients with hereditary myopathy, gigantism, and infantilism are on display, as are wax “character studies” of exaggerated facial expressions (“ultimate simpleton,” a “lecherous and careworn fop”).

Self-portraits by the artist Egon Schiele, consisting of paintings of his emaciated body lead, in turn, to a series of dark, earth-toned “psychological portraits” created by young artists in Vienna, all depicting their subjects looking withered, unhealthy, twitchy, and nervous.

Next to antiquated pieces of patient exercise equipment from the Am Steinoff ward are small bronze and copper statues of human (plus a baboon) that once lined the shelves of Freud’s Vienna apartment during the same time period.

The final portion of the exhibit contains a series of watercolors by Karl Radler, who spent his adult life in two institutions in and near Vienna. Many of his portraits show daily hospital life happening all around his blank-stare subjects, with intricately-drawn borders around each painting

THE second part of the Art & Mental Illness exhibit is “Bobby Baker’s Diary Drawings: Mental illness and me, 1997-2008.” Baker, whose performance work has previously been funded by the Wellcome Trust, provides a contemporary viewpoint on the subject of art and mental illness, from the perspective of the patient.

A large collection of her journal entries show a linear story of Baker’s journey through 11 years of counseling sessions, behavior therapy, mixing tranquilizers with alcohol, her family get-togethers, and tendencies to self-harm. Underneath many of the images are brief descriptions about what Baker was dealing with when she made a particular journal sketch or painting.

Baker’s sketches are simple in technique, but completely revealing. In one, her body is ripped in two; in another, mental health professionals are digging inside of her head, and blood drips onto the floor. In one sketch, Baker depicts what she assumes her fellow patients might be texting each other after her arrival back at a mental health center for treatment: “Bobby is here. She’s a nightmare. Yuk! Bobby Baker is a liar!” The often (darkly) humorous drawings offer equal amounts of praise and critique of today’s mental healthcare system.

During a recent visit, a group of middle-aged women meandering through the exhibit broke into a fairly loud debate at one point, and minutes later were chuckling about some of the out-of-date contraptions used to treat mentally ill patients. Luckily, reacting openly to the exhibit is perfectly acceptable at this particular gallery. Based on the hundreds of notes left in the gallery’s comment book, a written debate is taking place as well.

Inside the Head: Art and Mental Illness Explored - Globespotters Blog - NYTimes.com

Madness & Modernity | Wellcome Collection

'Madness & Modernity'

Three weeks before the exhibition opens, the curators look ahead to the opening and discuss the themes of the exhibition; from the mad body to the influence of psychiatry on modernist architecture.

Madness & Modernity | Wellcome Collection

How to make a wax model, with Eleanor Crook | Wellcome Collection

How to make a wax model, with Eleanor Crook

Eleanor Crook, a sculptor specialising in wax anatomical and surgical models, demonstrates a few of the techniques employed when making a wax model.

Running time: 9 min 41 s

How to make a wax model, with Eleanor Crook | Wellcome Collection

'Exquisite Bodies': Curator's perspective | Wellcome Collection

Exquisite Bodies: Curator's perspective

Kate Forde, the exhibition's curator, looks at a few of the key exhibits from 'Exquisite Bodies' and discusses one of the exhibition's aims: to show how 2D techniques of representing the body's layers move into 3D form, particularly with the flourishing of waxwork modelling in the 18th century.

Running time: 8 min 11 s

'Exquisite Bodies': Curator's perspective | Wellcome Collection

Anatomical entertainment| Audio slideshow: BBC NEWS | Health

Audio slideshow: Anatomical entertainment

Intricate wax models of humans - and their internal organs - helped educate medical students during the 19th Century. But they also offered the general public an unusual afternoon's entertainment.

As the Wellcome Collection in central London tells the curious and grotesque story of the anatomical model - take a tour with curator Kate Forde.

Warning: Contains some graphic images.

Some photographs courtesy Wellcome Library. Music courtesy KPM Music.
Slideshow production by Paul Kerley. Publication date 29 July 2009.

BBC NEWS | Health | Audio slideshow: Anatomical entertainment