— — First, the backstory.

In 1903, an over-the-hill carnival attraction named Topsy the elephant was scheduled to be put to death by electrocution after having killed her abusive trainer at the Coney Island amusement park in Brooklyn.

Volunteering as executioner was inventor Thomas Edison, eager to show the world that “alternating current” electricity, the AC championed by his business rivals, was a hazard and a peril and one’s house would burn down if connected to a wire full of it (Edison was a “direct current”, or DC, man). So he got the job, gave Topsy 6,600 volts of pure AC, and she dropped like a tree (Edison thoughtfully filmed the entire gruesome enterprise with his primitive movie camera, available on YouTube).

A curious crowd gathered last week at the Carnegie Art Center in North Tonawanda, observing an attempt to contact Topsy’s spirit, and if you think I’m kidding, you don’t know about performance art.

The local art world is presently involved in an annual multi-site endeavor called “Beyond/In Western New York,” a festival of artwork that adheres to this year’s theme, “Alternating Currents,” which encourages artists to represent power and energy in their work. That inspired UB art professor Gary Nickard to come up with something remarkable: construction of a working installation along the lines of a circa-1910 “radio room.”

It is magnificent, a long table full of wires, Leyden jars to store static electricity, a kite-shaped antenna with more wires, a Tesla-styled rotary gap transmitter, a galena-crystal-and-copper receiver (the crude sort of thing with which kids experimented, when they weren’t shooting marbles or deflating the tires on Dad’s Maxwell), and an assortment of other vintage stuff appropriate for an early Buck Rogers movie.

Standing alone, Nickard’s work qualifies as art, but it’s functional as well, sort of. One part of the early history of broadcasting that tends to be left out of books is that many thought spiritual communication and radio communication were the same thing. Tune your radio properly and the spirits of the dead will talk with you, and that’s why we were at the Carnegie on this evening. We were going to chat with Topsy the elephant.

Along with all the irony, all the electricity and all the hokum present in spiritualism (and in performance art) was a Ouija board, a candelabra, a standard-issue table radio (tuned to 1485 kilocycles, believed to be the preferred frequency of the dead), and a Theramin, a small electronic musical instrument best known for spooky noises in movies whenever space aliens are on the move (and in the fading coda of the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”). The Theramin was ably played by Nickard’s assistant and wife Patty Wallace, who is a Kenmore West and Kenmore East art teacher when not moonlighting as a conduit of art and spiritualism.

Nickard cranked the apparatus up, and we heard loud static from the radio, punctuated by more and louder static as he punched out questions by Morse code on the transmitter. The questions came from volunteers at the Ouija board. Is Topsy in a better place? Yes. Did the assassination hurt? Yes. That sort of thing.

The AM radio howled with that angry and annoying aural spatter that suggests it is not properly tuned to a specific station, and voices could be dimly heard in the racket. It sounded to me like the play-by-play of a faraway hockey game came and went, but I’m no expert on art. More audience members took their turns asking questions, the Theramin whined and the candles burned down. The transmitter added noisy jolts of sound to the existing layer of droning sound, and after 40 minutes it was over. We evidently reached Topsy; she is happy, speaks English and knows Morse code.

The audience departed, fascinated and a little confused.

Nickard’s installation is a captivating confluence of art, technology and history. The early 20th century saw the beginnings of broadcasting and a surprising interest in séances and other departures into the spirit world (and why couldn’t you use a radio to communicate with the dead?); thus does this exhibit have more relevance and provenance behind it than one might first expect. The performance is, well, performance; cleverness and talent and a certain amount of nonsense wrapped in the guise of extremely low-tech apparatus.

The show will be repeated at the Carnegie Art Center on the evening of Nov. 18. I’m glad I attended, but once was enough for me. Your great-grandma likely would have been enthralled by this. Perhaps Nickard can help you contact her.

Ed Adamczyk is a Kenmore resident whose column appears every Friday in the Tonawanda News. Contact him at EdinKenmore@gmail.com.