Hyperion Contributors
(listed in alphabetical order)
Mark Daniel Cohen
Mark Daniel Cohen is a freelance author who writes regularly on art in New York City, with over 400 articles, art reviews, and essays on contemporary art and aesthetics in publication in a variety of art exhibition catalogues and commercial, university, and art school journals. He is also the Assistant Dean of the Media and Communications Division of the European Graduate School, and editor and principal writer for Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics. He has recently completed The Judenporzellan of Izhar Patkin and has contributed chapters to Chawky Frenn: Art for Life’s Sake, Abstraction in the Elements, The Archeology of the Soul, and the second edition of Dictionary of the Avant Gardes. He is currently working on several volumes: The Prosthetic Soul, a book concerning the Florentine art of the Italian Renaissance, and two philosophical works, The Power of the Right and Treatise on Poetic Reason.
Together with Friedrich Ulfers, Cohen is preparing a book of Nietzsche’s ontology and cosmology, and the Eternal Recurrence of the Same viewed from a scientific perspective. Together, they have recently published several essays: “Nietzsche’s Amor Fati: The Embracing of an Undecided Fate,” published on the website of The Nietzsche Circle; “Friedrich Nietzsche as a Bridge from 19th Century Atomistic Science to the Process Philosophy of 20th Century Physics, Literature, and Ethics”; “Nietzsche’s Ontological Roots in Goethe’s Classicism,” which appears in the volume Nietzsche and Antiquity, edited by Paul Bishop; “Nietzsche’s ‘Postmodernism’: A Return to ‘Classicism’ ”; and “The Effect of Nietzsche’s Aesthetics on the Art of the Twentieth Century.”
Agnes Denes
Agnes Denes has been one of the noted innovators in contemporary art over the past several decades, and she has been and is one of the most prominent philosophical forces in the field. Her work assembles a stunning array of intellectual disciplines and puts them in service of an aesthetic ambition that challenges the viewer’s ability to comprehend the depth of her learning and the power of her imaginative transformation of her materials.
Throughout her career, Denes has reset the boundaries of artistic practice. Consistently, she has been ahead of her time, and, in many areas, remains to this day unrivalled among contemporary artists in her use of sophisticated materials of imaginative thought. She is one of the earliest of the Conceptual Artists, initiating many of the strategies that have become standard artistic practice, and a pioneer of ecological art. She has been an innovator in the use in art of serial imagery, linguistic analysis, and Deconstructive tactics, and, perhaps above all, in the artistic approach to philosophical issues, mathematics, and advanced theories of physical science.
Underlying this extraordinary range of intellectual endeavor is not only an extraordinary mind but a coherent and unified intellectual objective. Denes’s aim is to employ her art as an integrative methodology, to draw together, or rather to demonstrate the inherent relationships among, the variety of areas of advanced inquiry that she investigates and that otherwise remain isolated in their self-defined fields of specialization. She takes art to be a language of visual perception, a form of lingua franca capable of opening a flow of information among what she terms “alien systems and disciplines.” What makes such integration possible, and what innately subtends these self-distinguishing areas of investigation, is a system of universal forms and concepts. It is, for Denes, the business of art per se, and in particular of the art she has striven throughout her career to create, to visualize such forms, to dramatize them, and thereby to render a language for seeing the universal concepts—a language of “pure form,” and thus a language of “pure meaning.”
Gian DiDonna
Gian DiDonna is a playwright and a teacher. In December of 2007, his newest play, A Sinister Man, appeared in the LAByrinth Theater Company’s Barn Series at the Public Theater. In 2004, his play The Night Trombone was also presented as part ofthe Barn Series Festival. His work-in-progress, The Danube Project, was also work-shopped by LAByrinth at their 2005 Summer Intensive.
His short play, Georgia, was included in the 2006 DOWNTOWN URBAN THEATER FESTIVAL. He has recently resumed work on his historical play about the 17th Century Dutch-Jewish philosopher, Spinoza, The New Jerusalem.
In 2003, he was named Writer in Residence with the Theatre Project Ensemble, where his play Renati the King was work-shopped. In 2002, DiDonna was awarded a playwriting grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, which made it possible for him to write Renati the King.
In 1999, one of DiDonna’s earliest plays was awarded the prize of “Finalist” at The Last Frontier New Play Lab Competition in Valdez, Alaska. In 2000, the Upstart Theatre Company showcased his play The Chi in New York City.
DiDonna has taught Playwriting and Dramatic Literature at the College of Staten Island, and acting at Queensborough Community College. He also teaches English Literature at St. John’s University. He has directed both theater and classical concertos and has appeared in several major motion pictures.
Camelia Elias
Camelia Elias is an associate professor of American Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. Apart from teaching American literature, she also teaches literary theory and cultural studies. She has written a book on the concept of fragment, and edited several volumes in the Cultural Text Studies series published by Aalborg University Press. Currently she has a book-length manuscript in preparation on Lynn Emanuel’s poetry, and is working towards publishing another book on translating knowledge from narrative discourse to media representations.
Rainer J. Hanshe
Hanshe is a writer whose most recent work is his unpublished novel The Acolytes. Now, he is working on his second novel, tentatively titled The Abdication. He has also been at work on a screenplay with Yunus Tuncel about a fictional encounter between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche in Baden-Baden.
For several years, Hanshe was photographer Nan Goldin’s assistant, last working with Goldin on her major retrospective Le Feu Follet, which premiered at Centre Pompidou in Paris and traveled thereafter to prominent museums throughout Europe. He is a graduate of the New School and is in pursuit of his MA/PhD. He is interested in philosophy and all forms of aesthetics and how they may intersect, as well as consciousness and the body, space, time, and morality. He is a co-founder of The Nietzsche Circle and, along with Mark Daniel Cohen, edits Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics.
Brian Robert Hischier
Brian Robert Hischier is a writer, poet, and artist operating out of Chicago, Illinois. He is art director of the Annual Guide For The Arts Chicago and a freelance graphic designer with strong interests in book layout and the history of book design. He recently began work on his second novel entitled The Seeker of Nothing, a post-künstlerroman about art, aesthetics, seduction and gain. He is currently pursuing his MA in Media & Communications Philosophy from the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
Walter H. Sokel
Born and raised in Vienna, emigrated to the US in 1939, Ph.D. at Columbia 1953, taught German and World Literature as well as German intellectual History at a.o. Columbia, Stanford, University of Virginia, with guest professorships at Harvard, Rutgers, Universities of Hamburg, Freiburg, Graz. Commonwealth Professor Emeritus of the University of Virginia since 1994. Currently resident of San Francisco.
Served on the Executive Committee of the MLA, Elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Austrian PEN Club. Awards from National Endowment of the Humanities and The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, among others.
Published the following books:
“The Writer in Extremis” 1959. Translated into German as “Der literarische Expressionismus,” 1960. “Franz Kafka. Tragik und Ironie.” 1964. “Franz Kafka.” Columbia Univ. Press, 1966. “The Myth of Power and the Self.” Detroit, 2002.
Editor of “Prelude to the Absurd: An Anthology of German Expressionist Drama.” Doubleday Anchor Books, 1963, with several translations of German Expressionist plays by Jacqueline Sokel and Sokel included.
Numerous articles in books and scholarly journals on a.o. Schiller, Kleist, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Rilke, Musil, Kafka, Broch, Heidegger, Expressionism, Brecht, Sartre, Boell, Handke, and Existentialism.
A story “Bei unserem vergessenen Vater” has been published and part of a memoir “Growing Up Toward the Holocaust” is now in preparation of publication.