Das Elektropathologisches museum, Vienna. (Hotlist).user.xpoint.at/epm/ The brainchild of Viennese physician Stefan Jellinek (1871-1968), the museum is devoted, in the antiseptic language of its website, to the study of "the effects of electric currents on humans." The results, portrayed in fastidiously realistic re-creations of accidents, complete with wax models of seared flesh and wet preparations of actual limbs, are not pretty. A trip to the museum desublimates the electrical animism animism, belief in personalized, supernatural beings (or souls) that often inhabit ordinary animals and objects, governing their existence. British anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor argued in Primitive Culture (1871) that this belief was the most primitive and essential form of religion, and that it derived from people's self-conscious experience of the intangible, such as one's reflected image or dreams. of the computer age. For weeks afterward, I suffered from a jittery electrophobia that saw in every appliance an instrument of high-voltage vengeance--the machine kingdom's payback for a hundred years of slave labor. (Again, translation is available at Google.) Mark Dery is a cultural critic whose byline has appeared in Wired, Rolling Stone, Red Herring, Suck, Feed, Salon, and the New York Times Magazine. His latest book is The Pyrotechnic insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink. |
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