Showing posts with label ronni thomas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ronni thomas. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Transmitting Thought: The Maimonides Dream Lab: A New Film by Ronni Thomas for Morbid Anatomy Museum Presents!


Below, Filmmaker in Residence Ronni Thomas--director of The Midnight Archive--introduces the newest episode of his Morbid Anatomy Museum Presents film series. Entitled "Transmitting Thought: The Maimonides Dream Lab," this short film introduces us to psychologist Dr. Stanley Krippner's provocative explorations of telepathic sensitivity and the dream state undertaken in 1960s Brooklyn.

You can view the film above or by clicking here; Stay tuned for more episodes which will premiere monthly on our new You Tube channel, which can be found here!
It is easy to subscribe to a set of rules when those rules are set by science rather than religion. But science lives with a bias -- that in order for an idea to be explored it must be observable, measurable and repeatable. Yet the irrational is part of our world, especially when it comes to the subject of human consciousness. Current scientific thinking brings an almost religious devotion to debunking anything that appears "irrational" or outside the rules and norms of core science. 
But such an approach leaves tremendous gaps in our understanding -- especially in questions of ESP, precognition, and other queries into non-physical intelligence. But this was not always the case. For a brief time, from roughly the 1930s to the 1960s, the field of academic parapsychology flourished in the United States. And at the forefront of the field was the American psychologist Dr. Stanley Krippner. In this film, Krippner discusses his research at the Maimonides Dream Lab in Brooklyn, NY in the 1960s. There, he and his colleagues conducted studies that explored the use of telepathy within the altered state of dreaming. 
Through numerous experiments, including one with the rock band The Grateful Dead, the Maimonides team produced substantial scientific research on the topic of ‘dream telepathy,’ until the demise of the lab's funding. Learn what we know -- and what we lost -- in Transmitting Thought : the Maimonides Dream Lab.  
— Ronni Thomas, Director

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Fragments of Faith: Victorian Hairwork: A New Film by Ronni Thomas for Morbid Anatomy Museum Presents!

Below, film maker in residence Ronni Thomas--director of The Midnight Archive--introduces his newest film for our new Morbid Anatomy Museum Presents series, on Victorian hair art jewelry, with Karen Bachmann, teacher of our popular class on the same topic.

You can view the film above or by clicking here; Stay tuned for more episodes which will premiere monthly on our new You Tube channel, which can be found here!
Victorian Hair work was one of those things I just didn't 'get' at first... But I looked into it anyway. Karen Bachmann is a friend, colleague and fellow NYC born reformed (to some degree) street punk, and happens to be the authority on the subject, combining academic knowledge with charm and flair... It wasn't until I screened the film for my sister in law that I finally 'got it'. She has no specific interest in the morbid or the tragically designed, but she reacted pretty impressively to this film... Forgive me for this but: it's hair, AND jewelry combined... It's for women... (With impeccable taste). Once I shifted my perspective from subjective to objective, it all made sense and flowed editorially. These are amazingly designed works of elaborate art incorporating skill and sentiment in pitch perfect harmony.