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Decadent scenography: Angel Rose Denman, Hollywood Goth
Get PDFThis article considers how decadence manifests and takes on meaning and significance in artistic practice today by focusing on the scenographic work of the Anglo-American artist Angel Rose Denman. Denman’s scenographies are informed by decadent style as it emerged in Europe during the fin de siècle, when decadence was associated with decay, obsolescence, and the refinement of that which others might find distasteful. However, she also draws inspiration from a broader range of genres and personalities from the twentieth century including disco, divas, goth subculture, and kitsch. Where decadence at the dawn of modernity was a reaction to instrumentalism in capitalist industry and the bourgeois tastes that emerged from its ascendancy, it is stagnating economic growth and productivity in postindustrial societies that contextualize decadence today, alongside changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality and the progress that these attitudes are understood to represent. This demands a shift in how we identify decadence if it is to be at all legible in a twenty-first-century context. The politics of Denman’s “decadent scenography” in two of her films – The Green Carnation (2012) and The Rose (2014) – is rooted not in the unconventional bodies and things found in the environments she crafts, but their arrangement. Her practice disturbs binaries that underpin hierarchies of taste and value including function and filigree, productivity and lethargy, essence and pose, and newness and antiquation. Ultimately, I find value in its lack of fit in a twenty-first century context, both “of” its time and a time long past, and in how Denman’s decadent scenographies disorient the regulation of gender, sexuality, and taste
Histories of Extraction, Toxicity, and River Ghosts on and Beyond the Page
Get PDFThis editorial introduction contextualizes three multimodal interventions that take seriously ethnographic methods while also emphasizing the potential of experimentation. It does so by describing how the authors of the pieces included in this special issue interact with still and moving images—how they take, collect, print, and juxtapose these visual traces—to produce (audio)visual reflections that explore how humans interact with landscapes affected by histories of toxicity, extraction, and pollution. It argues that the authors’ sensorial engagements with rivers, deserts, and arctic territories make it possible to understand more complexly how communities make sense of climate crisis and its everyday effects. Given that the authors and image-makers showcased in this special issue work across different media forms—from the filmic to the photographic, from the digital to the analogue—the text is also a reflection on the potential of multimodal scholarship and the role of platforms and initiatives that make it possible to make public work that straddles the ethnographic and the aesthetic. Finally, this introduction considers how multimodal anthropological scholarship can invent new ways to visually evidence the depth and breadth of ecological crisis, as well as the urgency with which we should consider how ecological violence operates socially and politically, but also visually and textually. Here landscape and ecology—memory practices and archival interventions—all serve as a point of departure for rethinking the transformative potential of visual ethnographic methodologies that—be it in or beyond the page—make visible and narratable the violence of extraction and the social value of engaging with environments and ecologies in more sensorial and active ways
Transforming anxiety, depression, and quality of life in rural remote workers with GAD via music therapy: A quasi-experimental study
No full textGeneralized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), often accompanied by comorbid depression, poses significant challenges to mental health, particularly among remote workers in underserved rural areas. These individuals frequently face unique stressors such as isolation, blurred work-life boundaries, and limited access to psychological support, further exacerbating their mental health challenges. Although receptive music therapy has shown well-documented benefits in reducing anxiety and depression in various populations, its effects on remote workers suffering from GAD in rural settings remain unexplored. This study aimed to evaluate the independent efficacy of receptive music therapy in reducing anxiety symptoms and depression symptoms while enhancing quality of life in this population. Using a quasi-experimental design, 60 participants were divided into experimental and control groups, with the experimental group undergoing 12 sessions of receptive music therapy. Validated instruments, including the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), and World Health Organization Quality of Life (WHOQOL) questionnaire, were used to assess outcomes. Statistical analyses, including ANCOVA, revealed significant reductions in anxiety scores (24.6 %, effect size = 0.54) and depression scores (12.7 %, effect size = 0.20), alongside a 10 % improvement in quality of life (effect size = 0.10). These findings highlight the potential of receptive music therapy as a standalone, scalable intervention to address mental health disparities among remote workers, offering a novel and accessible solution for improving psychological well-being in underserved populations
Digital twin embodied interactions design: Synchronized and aligned physical sensation in location-based social VR
Get PDFDigital twin technologies have become increasingly relevant in virtual reality, offering precise 1:1 mapping between physical environments and their virtual counterparts. While previous work has focused on object interaction through passive haptics, little attention has been given to how such environments can support social and embodied interactions that feel natural and expressive. In this work, we extend the digital twin paradigm by integrating full-body avatars, hand tracking, and voice-driven facial animation into a location-based VR environment. To explore the interactive potential of this dual-realm environment, we propose three categories of cross-realm embodied interaction: (1) Tangible interaction, exemplified by spatially aligned object manipulation; (2) Social gesture, supported through expressive hand and body movement; and (3) Social touch, including co-located tactile actions such as handshakes and hugs. We developed a prototype system showing all three embodied interactions, supported by passive haptics, precise spatial alignment, and real-time multiplayer synchronization. We also introduced a low-cost, Wi-Fi-based motion tracking prototype to enhance interaction with movable physical elements. We evaluate the system through expert interviews, identifying key themes related to spatial trust, tactile realism, and interpersonal presence. Our findings suggested that precise alignment and embodied social cues significantly enhance immersion and social connectedness. This work contributes towards a replicable framework for designing socially immersive digital twin experiences and opens new directions for location-based VR in collaborative and educational contexts
DynaMentA: Dynamic Prompt Engineering and Weighted Transformer Architecture for Mental Health Classification using Social Media Data
Get PDFMental health classification is inherently challenging, requiring models to capture complex emotional and linguistic patterns. Although large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Mental-Alpaca, and MentaLLaMA show promise, they are not trained on clinically grounded data and often overlook subtle psychological cues. Their predictions tend to overemphasize emotional intensity, while failing to capture contextually relevant indicators that are critical for accurate mental health assessment. This paper introduces DynaMentA (Dynamic Prompt Engineering and Weighted Transformer Architecture), a novel dual-layer transformer framework that integrates the strengths of BioGPT and DeBERTa to address these challenges. BioGPT captures fine-grained biomedical indicators, while DeBERTa provides context-aware disambiguation. The ensemble mechanism dynamically weights their outputs, guided by a simulated feedback loop that refines the predictions during training. Unlike previous studies that treat classification statically, DynaMentA incorporates dynamic prompt engineering to better align with evolving linguistic and emotional signals. Evaluated on three benchmark datasets, DepSeverity, SDCNL, and Dreaddit, DynaMentA achieves precision of 92.6\%, 91.9\% F1-score and 0.94 AUC-ROC, consistently outperforming the existing benchmark, including general-purpose LLMs and domain-specific mental health models. This scalable and interpretable framework establishes a state-of-the-art methodology for computational mental health analysis in high-stakes applications, such as suicide risk assessment and crisis intervention and early detection of severe depressive episodes
De zwemmer
No full textDutch translation of my short story 'The Swimmer' by Anne van der Zwan, included in literary journal PLUK
Rewilding After Imperial Ecology
No full textThis essay considers artists and art collectives whose practice may be understood as exemplifying ways of, following Ariella Azoulay, “unlearning” imperial ecology. In her writing on planetarity, Spivak calls attention to the need to push back not only against overt forms of eco-fascism but the kinds of “unexamined environmentalism” that sit all too comfortably within ongoing systems of colonial violence, extractivist agriculture, neoliberal homogenisation, and the fortress-model of conservation. Artist Åsa Sonjasdotter and Åsa Elzén and Art/Science/Agriculture residency Sakiya, working respectively from Sweden and Palestine, have developed artistic research methods that involve processes of “unlearning” imperialist ecology, de-domestication, and rewilding pedagogy through archival research, experiments with durational practices of ecological care, nurturing biodiversity, reviving local subsistence and agricultural practices and a commitment to radical practices of commoning
Eating as Planetary Bodies
No full textEssay commission by COOKING SECTIONS for their exhibition catalogue of their major retrospective at Fundacion Botín in Santander. The essay explored the CLIMAVORE methodology that the artists have developed in collaboration with communities of fishers, pastoralists, farmers, restauranteurs and municipal authorities in the islands of Skye and Raasay in Scotland and in the Istanbul wetlands, and how they work with cultural institutions to 'amplify civic resistance'. This means re-directing the often-appropriative dynamics of the art world to ask how cultural organisations can act as transformative examples and re-distribute their resources in the service of ecological resurgence and social justice. Through an extended and adaptive process in which metabolism is both a ‘lens’ and a ‘tool’, they map the dysfunctional food webs of these post-industrial ruins and explore how these novel ecologies might be reimagined as sites of healing. The essay argues that Climavore seeks to foster multi-species commoning practices as regenerative and reparative alternatives that revive culinary heritage, vernacular stewardship and traditional ecological knowledge so as to ‘metabolise’ climate change impacts
Disruption and resistance in sonic spaces
Get PDFJune Reid conducted this interview with DJ Chillz, as an inter-generational conversation, between women DJ soundsystemers. Reid considers continuities, as well as change, from the perspective of being part of a female duo DJ since the 1980s Nzinga Soundz, with Lynda Rosenior-Patten. The conversation emerges from Reid’s theorisation of women DJ’s as space invaders and disrupters. The analysis forms part of a larger body of research conducted by Reid, informed by Black feminism, as a postgraduate student studying a module on Feminist Methods at Goldsmiths, University of London. If June Reid had not had terminal cancer, which took her on 12th September 2025, she would have gone on to undertake further research for a PhD