[Book Review] The age of orphans, by Laleh Khadivi

The Age of Orphans, By Laleh Khadivi. Book review by Alev Adil. Laleh Khadivi's debut novel, remarkable for its beautiful and brutal poetry, tells the story of a lost Kurdish child and the history of "this invisible thing called Iran" [From the Author]

Narrating the archive and archiving narrative: the electronic book and the logic of the index

The creation of my hypermedia work Index of Love, which narrates a love story as an archive of moments, images and objects recollected, also articulated for me the potential of the book as electronic text. The book has always existed as both narrative and archive. Tables of contents and indexes allow the book to function simultaneously as linear narrative and non-linear, searchable database. The book therefore has more in common with the so-called 'new media' of the 21st century than it does with the dominant 20th century media of film, video and audiotape, whose logic and mode of distribution are resolutely linear. My thesis is that the non-linear logic of new media brings to the fore an aspect of the book - the index - whose potential for the production of narrative is only just beginning to be explored. When a reader/user accesses an electronic work, such as a website, via its menu, they simultaneously experience it as narrative and archive. The narrative journey taken is created through the menu choices made. Within the electronic book, therefore, the index (or menu) has the potential to function as more than just an analytical or navigational tool. It has the potential to become a creative, structuring device. This opens up new possibilities for the book, particularly as, in its paper based form, the book indexes factual work, but not fiction. In the electronic book, however, the index offers as rich a potential for fictional narratives as it does for factual volumes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leaving on a jet plane of immanence

This is about politics and protest, or rather about a politics of protest, and of rebellion. But it is also about creativity and the way in which theory and practice combine within the context of the ‘productive/creative’ process. In this case the combination is explicit and can be traced along a clear trajectory. The following will set out the way in which the accompanying piece of music – a cover of the 1969 protest song Leaving on a Jet Plane by Peter, Paul & Mary - came into being. In doing so it will make reference to a number of theoretical ideas/concepts that fed into the productive process and/or appeared relevant postproduction. It will draw on various aspects of thought from Heidegger (Standing reserve, Enframing and Authenticity), Camus (The Rebel), Foucault (Luminosity), and Deleuze (Immanence, Difference and Repetition and The Fold). [From the Author].