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Bernhard Lang: Critical Guides to Contemporary Composers offers a critical guide and introduction to the work of Austrian composer Bernhard Lang (b. 1957). It identifies the phenomenon of repetition as a central concern in Lang’s thinking and making. The composer’s artistic practice is identified as one of ‘loop aesthetics’: a creative poetics in which repetition serves not only as methodology, but also as material, language, and subject matter.



The book is structured around the four central thematic nodes of philosophy, music, theatre, and politics. After introducing Lang as a composer whose work is thoroughly influenced by philosophical thought, the book develops a typology of musical repetition as it is explored and activated in Lang’s oeuvre.



Pointing towards the several repetitions within the performance of Lang’s works, the book explores the heavily trans-medial nature of the repeat across domains such as literature, dance, and theatre. Finally, the book investigates Lang’s use of textual quotation and musical borrowing.



Christine Dysers is a musicologist specialising in contemporary music aesthetics. Her research centres around repetition, politics, absence, the liminal, and the uncanny. This is the first full-length study of the works of Bernhard Lang and is a new volume in the Critical Guides to Contemporary Composers series from Intellect.

This book critically analyses historical and contemporary discourses around worklessness, economic inactivity and the factors that contribute to people withdrawing from the conventional labour market.



In analysing popular portrayals of 'the workless', the book draws heavily on the sociological theories of stigma and symbolic annihilation, and conceives of the contemporary narrative about the UK's 'crisis' in economic inactivity as the latest in a continuum of periodic moral panics about worklessness. A key argument is that neoliberal definitions of 'work' and 'worklessness' are too narrow, and deny - and render invisible - the importance of various forms of unpaid labour performed by many people classified as 'inactive', notably informal caregiving and volunteering.



Methodologically, it combines analysis of historical and contemporary media and political narratives around 'worklessness' and factors that limit individuals' capacity for conventional paid work - from disability and long-term illness to caring responsibilities - with interviews with people who have lived experience of 'economic inactivity'. The scope of analysis encompasses critical discourse analysis of print and online newspaper articles from across the UK national and regional press; 'below-the-line' comments posted by audience-members beneath articles; and verbatim records of debates and speeches focusing on economic inactivity in the UK Parliament. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 individuals classified as economically inactive. These were subjected to thematic analysis.



Contrasting popular narratives with the lived experiences of ‘inactive’ people, it questions the validity of dominant stereotypes and the wider efficacy of policies designed to address ‘worklessness’

Art-based research uses artmaking as a mode of inquiry and presents the art as evidence. While sharing many qualities with science, it is distinguished by the unique character of each expression and personal dimensions that must also transcend their creators in establishing relevance to others.

Artistic intelligence is a gestating, unpredictable, and often challenging crucible of creation that furthers discovery ahead of conscious thought. Rather than treating art as data to be analyzed by social science procedures, it speaks for itself and offers empirical evidence of its contributions to human understanding.

In discussing the practice of art-based research emphasis is given to how methods emerge, sometimes unplanned, from the research process in keeping with the nature of art rather than following fixed and preexisting institutionally approved methods. Although strongly recommending format freedom for the future, the practical discussion explores how to work creatively within prescribed structures and embrace tensions with new technologies as sources of artistic transformation. It explores the role of video and digital media in generating convincing art evidence, universal accessibility involving trained and untrained artists, and the future importance of natural art experiments happening throughout the world beyond academic and professional settings.

What if art is not just a mirror of the world but a factory for its futures?



This project brings artists and writers into dialogue, exploring how each generates knowledge through distinct but complementary methods – philosophic fabulation on the one hand, perception and affect on the other. In an age where we are drowning in data yet starved for meaning, we argue that art is an urgent toolkit for survival: a laboratory of sensation and imagination that equips us to feel, not just forecast, the worlds to come.



This conversation asks not how to predict the future, but how to inhabit it – together, creatively, critically, and sensuously.

El Vez performances present a powerful message of social justice and inclusion in changing US and social contexts. Make the Dream Real interrogates how this message is activated through world-building: the use of a variety of theoretical, theatrical, and musical tactics that bring into being a progressive social space that refutes the current economic, political, social, and cultural configurations of the United States.



World-building in an El Vez show “makes the dream real” by imagining a society in which equal rights are guaranteed, inclusivity is fostered, difference is valued, and the violence of economic inequality is mitigated. But, world-building through performance is not content to reside exclusively in the individual imagination or the social imaginary; it temporarily creates this new social space in actual time and space for the audience to experience. Using a dramaturgical methodology, which marries theoretical inquiry to theatrical practice based on dramaturgical thinking, critical proximity, and intellectual flexibility, the book delves into the theoretical foundations that inform artist Robert Lopez’s work, and each chapter analyzes a different performative component he uses.



Make the Dream Real interrogates how El Vez’s playful engagements hold the United States to its egalitarian promises, voicing and enacting - however fleetingly - a just and richly inclusive social space through performance.

Lines of Inquiry: Multi-disciplinary Methodologies in Drawing and Education is a collection of essays written by researchers, scholars, and artists from nine countries around the world.



The multi-disciplinary contributors include teachers, artists, architects, psychotherapists, museum educators and curators who bring their distinct positions and experiences of using drawing in collaboration with others, in classrooms, in the community, in private practice, and as researchers interpreting and analyzing the experiences of others.The collection is organized in a way that takes the reader through a journey of what drawing is and can be; whether that is through a mapping of one’s daily route, a marking of territory, an expression of an experience, a problem-solving equation of arrows and lines, a comic, or a concept of imagined lines that demarcate power. Some contributions speak to the embodiment that drawing allows, some to learning and knowledge construction, and some to an age-old way of communicating.



The international roster of contributors provides suggestions for developing new ways of knowing, for developing empathy toward things that may lie outside our own experiences, and for seeing alternative perspectives through drawing.

Cutting Up Books - A Writing Method In Critical Thinking is an experimental exploration of writing, creativity, and knowledge-making through the radical act of cutting up books. Blending theory, practice, and art, it proposes textrapolation: a method of critical composition that uses destruction as a form of discovery.



Drawing on traditions of the cut-up, collage, and automatic writing, the book turns the materiality of text into a thinking tool, showing how breaking and reassembling language can generate new modes of understanding.



Thematically, it connects literary experimentation with philosophy, media theory, and the crisis of creativity in the age of artificial intelligence. It reconsiders authorship, education, and the function of books in a culture increasingly defined by templates, automation, and cognitive fatigue. Combining academic reflection with poetic fragments and visual-textual compositions to move between the scholarly and the personal, the analog and the algorithmic.

Over six months, Ania Malinowska dismantled over 400 books, reframing their content into 111 poetic epigrams and combining conscious methodical experimentation with the spontaneity of automatic writing. Cutting Up Books addresses the crisis of creativity in contemporary academic and cultural practices while responding to

contemporary challenges, including the crises in education and the perceived threat posed by large

language models. 

The result is both a manifesto and a manual: a hybrid text that invites readers to become practitioners. It encourages intellectual play, intuition, and embodied experimentation as ways of reanimating writing and thought. At once critical and performative, the book demonstrates how cutting up can be a method of thinking, creating, and living differently.

What can a fold be? Virtually anything and everything.

For centuries, folds and folding have captured the world’s imagination. Folds readily appear in revivals of the ancient craft of origami, amid the simplest acts of pedestrian life, within the philosophical turnings of the mind, and in art, design, architecture, performing arts, and linguistics around the world. What awaits our understanding is how deeply the fold figures into embodiment, into our very impulse to create.

This book is about folding as a vibrant stimulus for inter/trans/postdisciplinary artistic research, whether for the performative, for product realization, or simply to enliven body, mind, and spirit. Destined for artmaking—for making any art—the f/old practice etches into the very fabric of embodiment. As such, the f/old reaches outside the constraints of disciplinary silos into nice areas that embrace the unknown, with all its underlying tensions and ambiguities. In conceiving of art made differently, two seasoned facilitators Susan Sentler and Glenna Batson share the abundance of their decade-long collaboration in developing their approach to practice research in the fold. In addition to their insights, they invite eight of their collaborators to contribute, each a veteran artist of a diverse genre.

Featuring a wide variety of practice samples and images, this book reflects on a current and unique somatic-oriented arts research practice and pedagogy with an intriguing blend of interdisciplinary concern and practice.

The field of digital heritage, definable in the most elementary terms as the application of digital technologies to the practices of conservation and heritage practices, has exploded in recent years.



Today it is typical to see 3D modelling, augmented reality, virtual tours and mobile apps as part and parcel of the heritage sector in a whole variety of ways. This has been reflected in academia with a growing number of conferences and publications dedicated to these questions.



The objective of this book is to offer an interdisciplinary examination of such practices which, it is expected, will reveal more of the nuances, interplays and a wider range of interests than is found in the current literature. To that end, the book offers chapters from international scholars in several disciplines: architectural conservation, archaeology, cultural tourism, urban studies and photography; heritage, film, game, museal studies, and scenography.



Their work deals with three broad areas of activity in the digital heritage field that this book defines as the ‘digital politics of conservation’; technology as a heritage ‘storytelling’ device; and digital technologies as tools to create ‘virtual models of the past’.

The book argues that both the Republican and the Democrat political parties are responsible for the decline of democracy in the United States. It premises objective evidence of how the current political crisis in the U.S. in particular, and in the West in general, is a result of the disregard of the Greeks by the U.S. Constitution as well as the gradual withdrawal of the Classics from our educational system. The book concludes that the current state of affairs leads to a new form of totalitarianism.

The core argument of this book is that the current political unrest in America and the West is ultimately traceable to the utter failure of Western education. The purging of the Greeks from our schools with the masquerade that was modernity, combined with a constitutional anti-intellectualism in America, has bred generations of Western citizens who cannot think. In the absence of human thought market ideologies have enjoyed a long leash to establish as incontestable the idea that any existential proposition alternative to their own is nothing but an arrogant desire to redesign life itself. In our “Age of Trumpism,” where President Trump is summoned to check uncritical progressivism, and where technoligarchs have availed themselves to either side, stupefied electorates must choose from either a preanthropic or a metanthropic future.



In the absence of any anthropic constancy, either one of the alternatives are served by unfettered encroaching technologies that entail forms of totalitarianism as never before. It may be already too late, this book argues, but to bring back human thought towards the possibility of democracy and freedom, is to assess our situation out of Heidegger’s phenomenology and the metaphysical objectivity of Greek tragic art.