AFTER OUR RETURN from Burning Man-- dropping in, KrOB diverts the course of the Show toward a more intimate and conversational plateau. So the notes on Earth 18, an extraterrestrial guidebook, were partially offered and then interrupted. We touch upon Victor and Henry Frankenstein's experiments and methods. Building a creature from parts was certainly not easy, but Victor Frankenstein's greatest achievement was bringing a collection of dead material to life. The details of the procedure in the novel are frustratingly vague. Author and theorist Mary Shelley writes about a "spark of life", which could be almost anything. However, an electrical spark is the most likely contender.

The century before FRANKENSTEIN, A MODERN PROMETHEUS was written had seen tremendous advances in the understanding of electricity. One of the first people to investigate the phenomenon seriously was Stephen Gray. He was living at Charterhouse, a kind of retirement home for those who had served their country. Gray spent his retirement years conducting electrical experiments and he made a number of important discoveries. He devised spectacular demonstrations to illustrate his theories, one of which became known as "the flying boy".

Charterhouse also had a school attached and no one seemed to have minded Gray borrowing one of the boys for his experiments. The child lay on a platform that was hoisted towards the ceiling. The boy was charged with static electricity and he could then use his hands to attract pieces of paper. Sparks could be drawn from his nose. In our case, we hope to inculcate a Vital spark into a corpus assembled from disparate sources and then made to live.