Experience Halloween -- Exploratorium style. Join in costume for a ghoulish grab-bag of tricks and treats as the Exploratorium transforms into a Phantasmagorium of spooky science and frightful fun. In its first annual October 31st Halloween fright night, the Exploratorium digs six feet under the cultural and scientific phenomena behind Halloween, Dia de los Muertos, and death. This event is open to the public and included in the price of admission to the Exploratorium.
Among the many things you can do that night, find out how nature deals with death and regeneration with a decomposing snake at the Energy from Death exhibit. Get sucked into the finer points of leech science with nurses (in costume, but for real) from the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN). Walk through a "graveyard" dedicated to debunked science ideas, including the recently entombed Pluto is a Planet (1930 - 2006). For the stout of heart, we'll let you enact your own funeral by trying on a coffin for size. And, as a fanciful exercise, you'll be able to compose your own obituary afterwards.
For those with a sweet tooth, we’re serving up an Iron Science Teacher competition where teachers compete before a live audience -- with Halloween candy as the special ingredient -- and offering a sugar skull candy-making demonstration with master confectioner Irma Ortiz.
In the spirit of All Souls' Day and Dia de los Muertos, we'll also contemplate death and remembrance. Everyone is invited to bring artifacts and personal mementos to add to our community-built altar for the beloved and departed, and to witness the creative process behind cartoneria (Mexican paper sculpture) with Oakland-based artist Ruben Guzman. Protege to the legendary Linares Family of Mexico City, Guzman was one of the main forces that brought the Dia de Los Muertos celebration to the Bay Area. Be sure to check out his calaveras (paper skulls), skeletons, and other colorful, intricate creations.
Also that night see Halloween Night Films, beginning at 7:30pm. They include Shelf Life by Don Bernier(2007, 29 min.). At this film, meet Bay Area resident Ray Bandar. A retired science teacher and lifelong skull collector, Ray has transformed his home into a morbid museum of his life's work. Filmmaker Don Bernier follows Ray from the dissection of fresh corpses on the beaches of San Francisco to the rafters of his basement lined with mammal skulls. In its sympathetic portrait of a lover of the natural world, Shelf Life reveals the importance of death in the life sciences.
In The Ossuary by Jan Svenkmajer (1970, 10 min.), a black-and-white documentary shot in Czechoslovakia's forbidding Sedlec Monastery, an ossuary contains the skeletal remains of some 40,000 victims of war and plagues from the 14th and 15th centuries. Amazingly, the mountains of bones were sorted and rearranged into grisly sculpture by a live-in artist at the end of the 19th century. -- www.exploratorium.edu
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