Imagining the Impossible: International Journal for the Fantastic in Contemporary Media

Imagining the Impossible: International Journal for the Fantastic in Contemporary Media https://tidsskrift.dk/imaginingtheimpossible This international and double blind peer-reviewed journal is dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of the fantastic in today’s entertainment media. The journal is double blind peer-reviewed and 1-3 issues are published per year. University of Southern Denmark en-US Imagining the Impossible: International Journal for the Fantastic in Contemporary Media 2794-3690 Author may use a more restrictive Creative Commons than 4.0/by but should then contact the journal Authors agree to the Copyright Notice as part of the submission process Review:The Dragon in the West: From Ancient Myth to Modern Legend https://tidsskrift.dk/imaginingtheimpossible/article/view/137360 A review of Daniel Ogden's The Dragon in the West: From Ancient Myth to Modern Legend.  Audrey Taylor Copyright (c) 2024 Audrey Taylor https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 2024-01-23 2024-01-23 3 1 10.7146/imaginingtheimpossible.137360 Everything and Nothing https://tidsskrift.dk/imaginingtheimpossible/article/view/145604 Kathe Koja’s strange horror novel The Cipher (1991) is a peculiar genre fiction that immediately attracts the attention of both horror connoisseurs and philosophers alike. It is at once a visceral, psychological horror and a theoretically intriguing dilemma. It follows the fascinating and horrific events that transpire after a disc of pure nothingness opens up in the protagonist’s home, consuming the lives of the characters just as it does the plot. This non-object pushes readers to discern its peculiar ontology but yields, as one would expect, nothing. This essay reads The Cipher through Martin Heidegger’s equally unorthodox version of the nothing (das Nichts), demonstrating how Heideggerian metaphysical thought can help to illuminate the novel’s strange nothingness, and how Koja’s novel can help us to see the horror inherent in Heidegger’s philosophy. It suggests that horror may be found not in the nihilistic lack of meaning but in our “imprisonment” in meaning. Alexander Sell Copyright (c) 2024 Alexander Sell https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 2024-10-11 2024-10-11 3 1 10.7146/imaginingtheimpossible.145604 The Fathomless Ocean of Objectivity, Death, and Memory https://tidsskrift.dk/imaginingtheimpossible/article/view/141813 Stanislaw Lem's 1961 sci-fi classic Solaris features one of the most enduring, strange, and seemingly inexhaustible presentments of the concept of an ocean. Lem’s economy of craft resonantly renders the premise of the text on the idea that there are inescapable ontological gaps between objects encountering one another. Using immense detail, and a scientific, specifically historiographic, naturalist, and philosophical style of prose, Lem frames this idea as the complete failure of human beings to understand an extraterrestrial intelligence. The narrative follows a team of terrestrial scientists as they attempt to probe, examine, and communicate with the oceanic surface of the planet Solaris from a research station hovering above it. Based on years of research and study, the Solarists deduce that the planet, through its oceanic membrane, can somehow manifest the ability to (re)produce human secrets and guilt into material form. That form, which physically appears on the station and confronts its crew, is dependent on the specific consciousnesses of each scientist aboard. The research of the Solarists also reveals that any human attempt to formalize and concretize the phenomenological occurrences of the ocean that 'make sense' always fail. For Lem, “[t]he peculiarity of those phenomena seems to suggest that we observe a kind of rational activity, but the meaning of this seemingly rational activity of the Solarian ocean is beyond the reach of human beings” (Lem 1989).  As a type of 'memory-machine', Lem's ocean seems to act as some kind of psycho-emotional repository in which and from which various psycho-emotional affects are repressed, restored, and reproduced. Because of the radical indeterminacy of human understandings of the ocean, it is difficult if not impossible to say “why” the Solaris ocean does what it does, to attribute to its processes anything intentional, or to ascribe any anthropocentric teleology or technology to its phenomena and processes. While critics have applied numerous, and typically psychoanalytically-informed readings of the Solaris ocean, such a move subjectivizes the ocean at the expense of the seemingly inexhaustible and interesting aspects of its objectivity (its status as an object). An object oriented approach allows us to better tease these out, and open up the depths of alienness and familiarity that, while ostensibly akin to the psycho-emotional trenches of the human unconscious, are externalized in the form of a truly strange object which in turn (re)produces truly strange objects. In view of the above, this paper seeks to accomplish the following: 1) to assert that an object oriented approach will offer better footing from which to prosecute any reading concerning the Solaris ocean's relationship with trauma and opportunity, (re)exposure, and healing; 2) offer a Post-romantic, object oriented analysis of Lem's well-crafted, detailed representation of radical alienness through the paradoxically concrete, albeit also radically indeterminate, image of an ocean-like entity/superstructure/hyperobject/space; 3) explore the encounters between the oceanic space with both human actors and the technology that mediates said interaction. Kwasu Tembo Copyright (c) 2024 Kwasu Tembo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 2024-10-07 2024-10-07 3 1 10.7146/imaginingtheimpossible.141813 ‘Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty’ https://tidsskrift.dk/imaginingtheimpossible/article/view/138420 This article explores the motifs of pet and play in the Alien franchise. It is grounded in biocultural theory and draws on play research from anthropology, ethology, and linguistics (Huizinga, Burghardt, Bateson) and research in pets from animal studies and philosophy (Melson, Tuan, Fudge). The article develops three levels of play to discuss the audience’s engagement: immersed play (play1), shifting in and out of a play frame (play2), and distanced looking-at-play (play3). The pet function in the Alien series is performed by various beings, such as the cat Jonesy and dog Spike, the Alien, the clone Ripley 8, and the androids David and Walther. Pet and play have until now been overlooked in analyses of the franchise, but this article develops a new perspective that concludes with a reflection on the Alien as an animal "’good to think’" (Lévi-Strauss) with, in that the audience can use the Alien as play pivot in a game of pet domestication, domination, and mastery. Rikke Schubart Copyright (c) 2024 Rikke Schubart https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 2024-12-12 2024-12-12 3 1 10.7146/imaginingtheimpossible.138420 Crafted for the Digital World https://tidsskrift.dk/imaginingtheimpossible/article/view/145367 The growth of computer-generated (CG) effects in live-action films has gradually expanded to the creation of digital characters and costume design. In many contemporary films, all aspects of characters and costumes are built digitally. Yet very little is known about the process of designing digital costumes, nor is there a critical theoretical examination of the areas emerging from the practice. This article explores digital costume design development using the CG feature films Avatar (Cameron 2009) and Avatar: The Way of Water (Cameron 2022) as case studies. The data consists of interviews with the films’ costume designer, Deborah L. Scott, and comparative analysis of the costume renderings, physical materials from the design development process and their digital reproductions. The data reveals how the physical costume fabrication process and motion testing are integrated into the process of designing digital costumes. In addition, costume designs still evolve during their digital creation. The article sheds light on the creative opportunities digital costume design poses and offers important grounding for further research on the wider range of theoretical areas related to digital costume design. Maarit Kalmakurki Copyright (c) 2024 Maarit Kalmakurki https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 2024-11-28 2024-11-28 3 1 10.7146/imaginingtheimpossible.145367 World-Building through Garments and Accessories in Dungeons & Dragons Illustrations https://tidsskrift.dk/imaginingtheimpossible/article/view/145055 In tabletop role-playing games, the game master and players in a group are encouraged to construct their own fictive world in which they can play. By using a critical world-building approach, we analyse the garments and accessories in the illustrations in Player’s Handbook (2014) for Dungeons & Dragons (5th edition) and find that clothes have four conspicuous functions in establishing a world of possibilities from which a group of players can build their game world. The four functions are: to convey that the world is one of action and magic, to provide a range of cultural and historical alternatives to the traditional pseudomedieval fantasy world, to communicate what is important about particular groups, and to maintain a difference between female wizards as physical and sexualised and male wizards as people of knowledge and military competence. Stefan Ekman Viktoria Holmqvist Copyright (c) 2024 Stefan Ekman, Viktoria Holmqvist https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 2024-12-09 2024-12-09 3 1 10.7146/imaginingtheimpossible.145055 Alterity, Inside and Out https://tidsskrift.dk/imaginingtheimpossible/article/view/152170 Stephen Joyce Christian Mehrstam Per Israelson Rikke Schubart Copyright (c) 2024 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 2024-12-12 2024-12-12 3 1