Systematurgy

How is decadence being staged today – as a practice, issue, pejorative, and as a site of pleasure? Where might we find it, why might we look for it, and who is decadence for? This book is the first monographic study of decadence in theatre and performance. Adam Alston makes a passionate case for the contemporary relevance of decadence in the thick of a resurgent culture war by focusing on its antithetical relationship to capitalist-led growth, progress, and intensified productivity. He argues that the qualities used to disparage the study and practice of theatre and performance are the very things we should embrace in celebrating their value – namely, their spectacular uselessness, wastefulness, outmodedness, and abundant potential for producing forms of creativity that flow away from the ends and excesses of capitalism. Alston covers an eclectic range of examples by Julia Bardsley (UK), Hasard Le Sin (Finland), jaamil olawale kosoko (USA), Toco Nikaido (Japan), Martin O'Brien (UK), Toshiki Okada (Japan), Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca (Spain), Normandy Sherwood (USA), The Uhuruverse (USA), Nia O. Witherspoon (USA), and Wunderbaum (Netherlands). Expect ruminations on monstrous scenographies, catatonic choreographies, turbo-charged freneticism, visions of the apocalypse – and what might lie in its wake.

This volume deals with the challenges posthumanism meets as a successor to postmodernism in the field of artistic, literary and aesthetic expression. It also explores the ways social sciences and humanities are affected by posthumanism, and it asks how posthumanism can be an expansion of humanism in the contemporary world, rather than a transcendence of humanism. The chapters’ authors come from different countries, cultural backgrounds and study areas to present a varied perspective on posthumanism.

Taking a cross-media approach to the ever-changing field of digital storytelling, this book offers an essential introduction to producing and editing interactive storytelling content, and to the platforms that host it. Merging algorithmic and AI approaches with basic writing technique, the authors begin by providing a brief history of the field before moving on to practical step-by-step guides on techniques, models and software architectures. Examples and exercises are drawn from free-to-access, purpose-built software created by the authors as well as exemplary interactive storytelling work. Assuming the perspective of the storyteller and focusing on elements shared across different fields of professional communication, the book is designed to be a primer for digital communicators, irrespective of the medium they are working with. As such, the methods provided will be applicable across the spectrum of TV, film, videogames, web and mobile storytelling. Interactive Storytelling is recommended reading for professionals as well as advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of interactive entertainment, multimedia design and production, and digital journalism.

The new boundaries between bodies and technologies constitute one of the most important developments in the last fifty years. Through technologies we not only change the relations between a natural given, the body, and a human-made artefact -- the technology but also change the ways we experience the world. How close are we to a world in which the abilities of machines are indistinguishable from those of the species that invented them? Our encounters with the new technologies change the cognitive processes and influences the modes of processing information. Moreover, it raises the question of the nature of human beings. Traversing body as emotive- being- in- the world and body as location culturally and socially constructed, there is a third dimension: the dimension of technological. Are we able to use these new dimension as a creative interface between the emotional brain, the acting body, and ICTS? In answering these questions, the book explores the action of bodies in technology, that is, how the sense of our bodies and of our orientation in the world are affected by information and communication technologies. It contributes therefore to the world-wide discussion and debates on the impact of technology, especially information technology, on the lives of human beings in the age of globalization, in particular to the present thinking of the relationship between technology and embodiment.

Merce Rodoreda depicts the story of the bizarre and destructive customs of a nameless town-burying the dead in trees after filling their mouths with cement to prevent their soul from escaping, or sending a man to swim in the river that courses underneath the town to discover if they will be washed away by a flood-through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy who must come to terms with the rhyme and reason of this ritual violence, and with his wild, child-like, and teenaged stepmother, who becomes his playmate.