Elemental Disappearances


Book Description

"Elemental Disappearances casts a wanderer's eye upon an ever-expanding configuration of sites of disturbance. The things sought after are apparitional: they appear and disappear at will; they perfect the art of materialization and vanishing. Such is the nature of living dangerously, and with it the short duration of enchantment. This collection tracks provocative ideas, artifacts, and phenomena rising and fading across different territories of the contemporary world. Through a constellation of powerful thought-images, the authors uncover spaces of an ephemeral and fugitive nature in order to generate a fractal vision of our time and beyond." (back cover)




Elemental Disappearances


Book Description

The things sought after here are apparitional: they appear and disappear at will; they perfect the art of materialization and vanishing. Such is the nature of living dangerously, and with it the short duration of enchantment. This collection tracks provocative ideas, artifacts, and phenomena rising and fading across different territories of the contemporary world. Through a constellation of powerful thought-images, the authors uncover spaces of an ephemeral and fugitive nature in order to generate a fractal vision of our time and beyond. A former communist prison island in the Adriatic Sea, now abandoned and overgrown with wild plants; the stone garden of a deaf Iranian peasant who dances ecstatically among his geological formations; a Belgian sculptor who combines wax and flesh to depict human and animal forms in states of half-manifestation, incompletion (missing limbs), or branching (morphing into other organisms); a cultural movement in Brazil that takes the discarded debris of urban centers and transforms their splintered wood pieces into massive labyrinths and underground caverns; a blacksmith poet in Afghanistan who alternates between tasks of hammering metal and writing lyrical verses amidst the smoke-clouds of his forge; a Cuban writer whose delirious fixation with the sea compels him to invent a language of pure untimeliness. There are countless sites of disturbance within the postmodern landscape, and yet far too often these disruptive “scenes” remain untheorized and misaligned, treated as random deviations and thus afforded no surpassing consequence or philosophical complexity. Such micro-trajectories necessitate an archive and conceptual matrix that will steal them from their false obscurity and decipher them instead as the passcodes to an imminent global turn. For this, one must return to the amorphous outlook of “the marauder” or “the wanderer.” This book, then, aims to devise an ever-expanding configuration of radical outsides: elemental fronts that lead to unforeseen principles; alternative profiles of experience (intense becomings); incendiary, ominous, or vitalistic signs in circulation across the epochal horizon.




Elemental Forces


Book Description

Once again two worlds become inextricably entangled in an engrossing tale of mystery and adventure. On Earth Rahlys continues her training with Quaylyn, Melinda's dreams are haunted by the taint of Droclum, Jack Faulkner, an old marine buddy of Vince's, holds the key to solving a mystery, and Leaf, the youngest wizard, and the toddling twins, Crystal and Rock, charm their way into the hearts of all. On Aaia (Anthya's World) Rojaire still seeks his long-lost Kaylya and a secret valley hidden in the Crescent Mountains on the Devastated Continent consolidates the first steps toward revolution on a world that values population control over individual freedom. And somewhere... Brakalar still possesses the rune-covered chest containing the rod of destruction. Elemental Forces awakens one's sense of wonder and discovery on a spellbinding adventure that ranges from the boreal forest of the northern Susitna Valley and the rugged Bristol Bay coastline in Alaska to the swamps and highlands of southern Louisiana... and beyond.




Elemental's Creed


Book Description

My name is Tom. I am a sergeant in General PyranA[a¬a[s militia, as well as a Fire Adept with remarkable power. I have been thrust into a war that is not my own. I must struggle to protect my friends as I battle with werewolves, dragoons, mercenaries, and even my own people, as I fight to discover the truth behind the battles, the disappearances, and my dreams. I have been called. I have the potential. But, can I control it, master myself to save us? That is the question. Can I become a key? Or will I lose everything I hold dear, everyone I love?




Elemental: the First


Book Description

"Teenage Famous Five mixed with a bit of Heroes"Just who is Halíka Dacomé?To Rose Frost, moving house every six months is normal. Another town here, another school there, her ability to adapt is as easy as breathing. But everything changes when her parents go overseas and Rose moves in with her grandmother. She enjoys meeting new friends and catching up with old ones from her childhood holidays--except now she must hide a precious secret from everyone, a gift from birth that defies modern day science.Her dreams become riddled with a warrior woman called Halíka Dacomé, but are they visions or messages from the future? She starts her own investigation but encounters more questions than answers. Living right on the edge of Warminster in Wiltshire doesn't help with its folklore and myths about strange lights in the sky and ghost stories of the Salisbury Plain.Not only that, her troubles really take hold one night when the mysterious Aiden Deverill with his alluring smile, his gorgeous dark looks and hypnotising blue eyes, saves her from a freak fire. Or did he?For Rose, her new life is beginning but she soon realises that despite assurances people are not always what they seem. What she always believed to be a happy family and a friendly town soon turns on its head when she discovers that her family secret, Aiden Deverill and the truth behind Halíka Dacomé is at the heart of the whole conspiracy.-This book is perfect for teens aged 14 or upwards.You can visit the authors website at alexandramay.co.uk




Human Rights and the Phenomenon of Disappearances


Book Description

"This book offers solutions to the challenges of storage and manipulation of a variety of media types providing data placement techniques, scheduling methods, caching techniques and emerging characteristics of multimedia information. Academicians, students, professionals and practitioners in the multimedia industry will benefit from this ground-breaking publication"--Provided by publisher.




The Blind Man


Book Description

The Blind Man: A Phantasmography examines the complicated forces of perception, imagination, and phantasms of encounter in the contemporary world. In considering photographs he took while he was traveling in France, anthropologist and writer Robert Desjarlais reflects on a few pictures that show the features of a man, apparently blind, who begs for money at a religious site in Paris, frequented by tourists. In perceiving this stranger and the images his appearance projects, he begins to imagine what this man’s life is like and how he perceives the world around him. Written in journal form, the book narrates Desjarlais’s pursuit of the man portrayed in the photographs. He travels to Paris and tries to meet with him. Eventually, Desjarlais becomes unsure as to what he sees, hears, or remembers. Through these interpretive dilemmas he senses the complexities of perception, where all is multiple, shifting, spectral, a surge of phantasms in which the actual and the imagined are endlessly blurred and intertwined. His mind shifts from thinking about photographs and images to being fixed on the visceral force of apparitions. His own vision is affected in a troubling way. Composed of an intricate weave of text and image, The Blind Man attends to pressing issues in contemporary life: the fraught dimensions of photographic capture; encounters with others and alterity; the politics of looking; media images of violence and abjection; and the nature of fantasy and imaginative construal. Through a wide-ranging inquiry into histories of imagination, Desjarlais inscribes the need for a “phantasmography”—a writing of phantasms, a graphic inscription of the flows and currents of fantasy and fabulation.




Disappearances


Book Description

A description of mystical experiences, along with context and commentary.




State of Disappearance


Book Description

Disappearance is marked by a devastating absence. It constitutes a form of violence that rips open a wound in time, offering no viable recovery and no meaningful justice. It provides alibis to perpetrators while denying victims their humanity. For those who are left to live with its presence, the terror is infinite. State of Disappearance brings together the power of artistic testimony and witnessing with critical voices to ask deeper questions about extreme violence, the normalization of human vanishing, state and ideological complicity, and memorialization, along with wider concerns about what it means to be human in the twenty-first century. A gallery of dedicated artworks by Mexican abstract painter Chantal Meza inspires each chapter, bringing the aesthetic into critical conversation and leading to a multidisciplinary collection that charts a new path for recovering humanity in the face of its annihilation. Featuring contributions from theorists of violence who are concerned with the issue of forcibly removing humans from the surface of the earth, while also appreciative of the complex layers of appearance and disappearance in the contemporary world, the book attends to the many ways disappearance occurs and the ethical questions this raises. State of Disappearance traverses the difficult terrain of human denial to rethink some of the most devastating chapters in human history and their enduring relevance to our lives.




Galactic Adventures Collection


Book Description

All four books in 'Galactic Adventures', a series of science fiction novels by Scott Michael Decker, now in one volume! Bawdy Double: The Premier's adult daughter begins behaving with an utter absence of wherewithal and insight. Meanwhile, an Admiral's dreamboat son engages in five years of profligate behavior after his sterling, top-of-his-class Academy graduation. A doctor called in to examine both scions determines they're mutaclones. Her wife kidnapped and her clinic bombed, the doctor flees across the galaxy - straight into the stronghold of her antagonists. The Gael Gates: Held together for millennia by the ancient Gael Gates, The Federation is on the verge of collapse. After three people disappear into the mysterious portals, Culann Penrose is called in to investigate. Discovering that the ancient system is crumbling, he orders they be shut down. The Druids, still seething at his denunciation of Magic twenty years ago, vehemently oppose Penrose’s inquiry. But then Culann discovers that the weakening technology has inflamed a new Elemental - one which is out to destroy him. Can Culann unravel the enigmatic mystery of the Gates in time for Science to save him, or will his Magic save the Science of the Gael Gates? Legends of Lemuria: After the collapse of an ancient empire, four people each acquire a crystal with extraordinary properties. Casper, Nadika, Jayani and Sharif accidentally unleash the powers of their crystals in search for Lemuria itself, and release the forces that caused the collapse of civilization. Their minds and futures forever intertwined, the four begin a journey among the stars to find clues about the mysterious empire and discover its secrets. By doing so, they set forth a chain of events that will shape the future of the whole galaxy. War Child: After a near-term princess is betrayed in the battle to conquer the galactic core, her unborn daughter Serena is taken from her body, raised in a foreign empire, and trained to be a lethal weapon. Twenty years later, attempts are made on Serena's life, but she will defy anyone who would use her toward their own ends. Chased across the galaxy, she begins a deadly mission against her oppressors. But can she discover who she really is?