View from an elder: Closing essay

Excerpt: The history of the book seems direct and pure. It exemplifies only positive aspects of advances in civilization and the preservation of those accomplishments for generations to come. Rather indisputable, we assume. Yet there is the dark side, always a dark side, to human endeavors even the most well meant ones

The experience of enchantment in human-computer interaction

Improving user experience is becoming something of a rallying call in human–computer interaction but experience is not a unitary thing. There are varieties of experiences, good and bad, and we need to characterise these varieties if we are to improve user experience. In this paper we argue that enchantment is a useful concept to facilitate closer relationships between people and technology. But enchantment is a complex concept in need of some clarification. So we explore how enchantment has been used in the discussions of technology and examine experiences of film and cell phones to see how enchantment with technology is possible. Based on these cases, we identify the sensibilities that help designers design for enchantment, including the specific sensuousness of a thing, senses of play, paradox and openness, and the potential for transformation. We use these to analyse digital jewellery in order to suggest how it can be made more enchanting. We conclude by relating enchantment to varieties of experience.</p

Library Newsletter, Volume 15, Issue 1

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A ritual demystified:The work of anti-wonder among Sufi reformists and traditionalists in a Macedonian Roma neighborhood

This article describes how an iconic mystical Sufi ritual of body wounding, zarf, was stripped of its mystical credentials and conventional efficacy amid tensions between Rifai reformists and traditionalists in a small Roma neighborhood in Skopje, Macedonia. The death of a sorcerer and a funeral event-series set the scene for acts of ‘anti-wonder’ and demystification by the Rifai reformists. Despite the history of socialist secularism and inadvertently secularizing Islamic reforms in the region, demystification signaled not the loss of enchantment per se, but a competition for legitimate forms of wonder. In addition to accounting for socio-historical context and relational forms of Islam, the real challenge is how to see a demystified ritual for its explicit intellectual capacity to stimulate speculation about itself

Ad imaginem suam. The Adamic Model and Exclusive Monoanthropism in Human Simulacra

The aim of the present paper is to trace the Nachleben of the logics characterizing the Adamic episode within the fictional reflection on human simulacra. In fact, Judeo-Christian ‘exclusive monotheism’ is based on the strict ontological differentiation of God, the unique Creator, from the World, as his Creation. Such a conception of monotheism is, as Jan Assmann pointed out, strictly connected to a repressive exercise of violence and to God’s opposition against every possible form of ontological rivalry. In the Genesis, Yahweh turns this law machinery even against his simulacra, the creatures made «in his own image»: Adam and Eve are removed from Eden and condemned to mortality only as a result of their attempt to become «like God, knowing good and evil». By means of a brief analysis of some exemplary literary cases, an attempt will be made to show how the fear and violence exercised by man towards his simulacra are deeply linked to a secular revival of the theological-juridical complex intertwined with the Adamic model