Book Description

When you look through the porthole of your berth aboard the ship, what do you see? The raging ocean? A lone iceberg? The world as it once was, now receding into the distance? Likewise, when you peer through your telescope at the distant boat, what do you see? An approaching storm? A drowning man? The future, drifting forever out of reach? In their latest book, Doctor Falke's Oraculum, Kahn & Selesnick invite you to look through the peep hole where you shall find scenes of people trying to parse that which is to come, speak with those departed, or just finding their pleasure amid the florid decay of a world in decline. For when personal and societal mythologies supersede facts, when the promise of virtual realities threaten to supersede the real thing, what better way to approach an uncertain future than through the arcane method of augury-after all, is not prophecy the original fake news?The Oraculum continues the adventures of the Truppe Fledermaus, a cabaret troupe of anxious mummers and would-be mystics who catalogue their absurdist attempts to augur a future that seems increasingly in peril due to environmental pressures and global turmoil. Presented as an unbound collection of photographs and text, the Oraculum is by turns a travelogue, an oracle, an art book, a box of prints, a meditation on the future, and an instruction manual of interpretative dance moves. The loose nature of the pages allow the viewer to treat this volume as a bibliomancy oracle where pages can be shuffled and selected at random to receive messages and prophecy, much as one uses the tarot and other cartomancy decks.The artists also examine the notion of the carnivalesque-traditionally the carnival was a time when the normal order of society was upended and reversed, so that at least for a day the fool might become king, men and women might cross dress, and sacred ceremonies and normal mores were spoofed. The Truppe ask you to consider: is it the carnival that is upside-down, or perhaps the real world that it purports to burlesque?