*The seance pretty much wins hands down.
*Awesome period spook photos here. Get yourself some MAKE magazine gear, some bluetooth and a few Arduino boards, and it ought to be dead easy to re-create an ultra-Gothic steampunk apparitional seance, in all its table-rapping, ectoplasmatic glory.
http://www.pd.org/Perforations/perf29/violi/violi_proof_positive.htm
(...)
"It is obvious that Lombroso’s association with this environment was sure to have a startling effect, given that his standing and authority seemed to lend respectability to the culture of spectrality. Already in 1888, news of his interest in spiritualism caused controversy in all parts of the world. An article that he published in 1906 on spiritualistic phenomena soon gave rise in Italy to a unprecedented wave of interest in mediumism, documented in the articles written by the journalist Luigi Barzini, who was sent by the Corriere della Sera to take part in Lombroso’s séances with Eusapia Palladino and to describe them for a wide public.10
"Because of their accreditation by Lombroso, the spiritualist emanations produced by Palladino focused the fascinated attention also of the scientific world and, between 1891, the year of Lombroso’s first séance with her, and 1898, the ‘evidence’ they provided was witnessed in a long run of sessions in Paris, Cambridge, Rome, Munich, Warsaw and elsewhere, involving, among others, Myers and Oliver Lodge of the SPR, Richet and Albert de Rochas, the physician Shrenck-Nötzing and astronomers such as Camille Flammarion.
"A first point that can be made about these late nineteenth-century séances, and that illustrates clearly what is involved in the paradigm reversibility within positivistic science, is that the space in which the spiritualist session took place had in fact become more like an experimental laboratory, with its radiometers, electroscopes, dynamometers and photographic plates. Following Lombroso, the physiologist Filippo Bottazzi subjected Palladino to eight sessions in 1909, insisting on the primary function of ‘mechanical self-recording’ in documenting the phenomena,11 to such an extent that, in the illustrations to his 1909 book on mediumistic phenomena, it is the technology that takes the limelight, stealing the show from the iconography of the apparitions themselves. Lombroso too stresses the positivistic and systematic nature of the mediumistic experiment, gathering figures, measures and mechanical traces of the physiopathology of Eusapia Palladino in the trance state.12..."
*Things get particularly interesting when the Italian Futurists show up.
