Argues that Qohelet’s famous bit of speech on the seasons at 3:1-8 mimics and mocks proverbial poetry, as part of his larger, prosaic denial that life has discernible and usable rhythms and rhymes.

Part 2 of introduction to The Tale of Genji with bilbiography of Edward Seidensticker’s essays on the novel

The poetry of Teimuraz I’s marks a turning point in Georgian literary history. From 1629–34, the poet-king of Kartli and Kaxetia (eastern Georgia) undertook to produce a Georgian equivalent to Niẓāmī Ganjevī’s famed quintet (khamsa) that stands as one of the major achievements of classical Persian literature. While Teimuraz I imitated the form…[Read more]

Auction action – commission an artwork, listed on eBay as ART, LIMITED EDITION, PRINT | Auction action – commission an artwork #exstrange, were transformative actions that occurred within the context of the networked performance Transformations: Actions to Matter / Matter to Actions. Transformative actions within Transformations attempt to sou…[Read more]

This paper for the Journal of Media Practice / MeCCSA Practice Network Symposium titled Post-Screen Cultures/Practices on the 10/06/2016, presented four networked art practice works undertaken since 2014. The works included: – This is Real Virtuality (2014), a networked photographic and text-based performance in weblog form consisting of a first…[Read more]

The Art of Networks and Networks as Art is the title of a performance/presentation given at the 12th Annual Subtle Technologies Festival on the theme of Networks. The performance/presentation focused on the development of my work over the last five years and the role of networks within artistic practice. This was detailed in its most obvious sense…[Read more]

In under a decade and a half, net.art has developed from an obscure to a hyped form, gaining acceptance in the institution and being absorbed into popular culture. Why net.art has become associated with the web and not networks in general is evident within the form itself. The advantages the web embodies as an arena to conceive, create and present…[Read more]

On the second and final day of the conference Remote Encounters: Connecting Bodies, Collapsing Spaces and Temporal Ubiquity in Networked Performance proceedings closed with a roundtable discussion entitled Performance Systems: Making vs. Exploiting. The purpose of the roundtable was to explore performance systems used by artists and to…[Read more]

This special issue of Liminalities has been compiled from the outcomes of the conference Remote Encounters: Connecting bodies, collapsing spaces and temporal ubiquity in networked performance held at the University of South Wales on the 11th and 12th of April 2013. By providing an overview of contributions to the issue this editorial aims to both…[Read more]

This article discusses the artist Garrett Lynch’s residency in Second Life® at Yoshikaze ‘Up-in-the-air’, HUMLab, Umeå University in Sweden. The artist’s mixed-reality live performance and installation work in the ‘virtual’ world, part of a wider artistic practice on networks, focuses on the identity and role of the artist within an environment m…[Read more]

Audiences are experiencing a growing apprehension and distrust of interaction in art and a reluctance to engage with art that employs it. Interactive art can be categorised in broadly two ways: works that are highly technological or works that are highly social. While apprehension of interaction in art has always existed it is proposed that rather…[Read more]

The Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics by the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd (d. 1198) has been treated by commentators as wide-ranging as Borges, Renan, and Kilito as an exemplary case of the failure of translation. Critics who presume Ibn Rushd’s failure often concentrate on his rendering of Aristotle’s tragedy and comedy by praise…[Read more]

In Along an African Border, anthropologist Sónia Silva examines how the Angolan refugees living in Zambia during the Angolan civil war used their divination baskets to cope with daily life in a new land. To many people, these baskets are capable of thinking, hearing, judging, and responding. They communicate by means of small articles drawn in…[Read more]

As cestas de adivinhação de Angola, da Zâmbia e da República Democrática do Congo tornaram-se mundialmente conhecidas pelo seu fascinante conteúdo: várias dezenas de peças imbuídas de simbolismo. Vidas em Jogo apresenta este simbolismo em acção. As cestas de adivinhação, transformadas em oráculos, são entendidas pelos seus utilizadores c…[Read more]

The statements of researchers on the topic of basket divination and the statements of basket diviners in northwest Zambia, Africa, do not fully agree. While researchers rightly stress the importance of observation, analysis and interpretation in basket divination, going so far as to describe diviners as scientists, they fail to recognize that…[Read more]

In this article, the author explores basket divination, a technique found in Zambia and neighboring countries, as a form of material religion. Mores specifically, the author shows that in basket divination the idea of objectivity (objective knowledge) is directly associated with the materiality of the oracle used for divining. In the Luvale…[Read more]

This chapter on witchcraft in northwest Zambia shows that forms of asking and giving may be deployed to suspend suspicion about the motives of others, even as they possess the potential to kill. When a woman asks a witch for a gift of salt to flavor her food, the witch feigns generosity but forces that woman to join the coven in recompense. In…[Read more]

Instead of asking what evil is, let us see where evil takes us. Based on many conversations on the topic of witchcraft in northwest Zambia, Africa—conversations in which witchcraft is presented from the perspective of the bewitched—the concept of evil takes us to a ghastly realm of destruction and transfiguration where the discourse of mor…[Read more]

The literary relation between Parvin E’tesami and Walt Whitman remains a largely unexplored field. This article analyzes the connection between “God’s Weaver” and “A Noiseless Patient Spider” to shed light on Parvin’s creative reception of Whitman. Creating a mixed-breed spider, combining characteristics from both
Whitman’s insect and the Persi…[Read more]

This essay introduces and explores some explicitly theological concerns in the work of the Orcadian poet, novelist, and dramatist George Mackay Brown (1921–96). More specifically, its interest is with Brown’s presentation and treatment of the notion of time. Drawing on examples from a wide selection of his work, it is argued that Brown’s conve…[Read more]