Hybrid Creature Research Articles

A Review of Liger and Tigon Based on Posthuman Bodies Theory

Human society is moving toward a posthuman era as theories by scholars such as Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, and Keith Ansell Pearson gain attention. Meanwhile, hybrid creatures such as Ligers and Tigons captivate public interest. However, no study has connected these hybrids to posthuman body theories. This literature review examines how Liger and Tigon articulate or challenge these theories, reflecting humanity's transition to the posthuman era. The research argues that these human-engineered hybrids break species binaries yet reflect human exceptionalism, as they serve human interests and demonstrate humanitys control over nature. However, while Liger and Tigon support theories of biotechnological vitalism and human enhancement, their genetic defects and health issues reveal the limitations of human intervention. Liger and Tigon indicate that the posthuman vision of using biotechnology to enhance the body has limitations. Although biotechnology can overcome biological constraints to a certain extent, it does not constantly enhance the body but can even hurt it. Additionally, although these hybrids blur the boundaries between nature and culture, public attitudes towards them reflect the persistence of the nature-culture binary. People still regard Liger and Tigon as human property despite their representation of the interaction between humans and animals in shaping identities, which contradicts Haraway's theory of equality between humans and companion species. Ultimately, this review argues that while Liger and Tigon break species boundaries, they also highlight human exceptionalism, suggesting that the collapse of the species binary does not necessarily lead to equal relationships between humans and other creatures.

Ethnolinguistics and Folklore Poetics. 4. «A Mother Bewitches her Son into a Snake»

The article is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of the Bulgarian folk songs «Mother turns her son into a snake», which are distinguished by a unique mythological plot and describe the transformation of a person due to the magic activity of the mother into a hybrid creature – half-man, half-snake. The study focuses on the structure of the song and the combination of repeated and unique content blocks. A special place is given to mythological aspects – the description of gypsies as carriers of magical knowledge, herbs that separate spouses, preparation of a witch’s potion, the characteristics of how a demonological character is presented in the songs and in other folklore genres. The explicit didacticism of the song is shown – using the example of reprisals against the mother, the ideas are conveyed that slander, hatred in the family, and black magic are punishable. The conclusion contains the main ideas of the depiction of ethnographic reality with folklore poetic means.

Treatment of intellectual property in the bankruptcy legal framework of the GCC states

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states have made a number of efforts to reform bankruptcy laws in recent years. The modernization of bankruptcy law in GCC countries presents the question of how IP assets and bankruptcy proceedings relate and intertwine. Problems for insolvency proceedings centre on valuation. An even more complicated but extremely common scenario is when the IP is licensed. Licensing effectively creates a new ‘sub-bundle’ of rights from the original property rights. Another issue is the classification of a licence and whether it is a property right or a contractual right, or some type of hybrid creature. Complications are exacerbated by the fact that many IP licence agreements will contain an ipso facto clause. The purpose of this article is to address these issues by examining the laws of the UAE, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and how IP assets are treated in bankruptcy proceedings.

Visual Metaphors: On the Linguistic Structure of Hybrid Creatures in Art

Abstract Metaphors make possible creative and personally expressive ways of describing the world in a way that exceeds blunt literal description. In this article, the author considers (1) the ways metaphors function, (2) the ways that connotation, association, and implication can enrich and inflect the meanings of our words as we use them, and, finally, (3) the significance that these issues concerning verbal or linguistic meaning hold for our comprehension of parallel forms of meaning in the visual arts. The emphasis is on the artistic representation of hybrid creatures in painting, because where metaphors lead us to see one thing in the light of the other, so with hybrid creatures we can see either or any part of the hybrid in the light of the other part or parts. With some of the similarities between metaphorical speech and visual perception and interpretation identified, I turn to works by Caravaggio, Fuseli, the Parthenon sculptures, Botticelli, Picasso, William Blake, and Hieronymus Bosch.

Magical Monsters: Hybrids and Witchcraft in Early Modern Art

Abstract Studies of early modern images of witchcraft interpret the motif of hybrid creatures as representations of demonic incarnations intended in part to demonstrate the artists’ inventive prowess and capacity for phantasia. This article broadens the scope of analysis by arguing that the hybrid functions as a prolific site of reflection on the symbolic analogy between art and witchcraft, highlighting the common creativity attributed to the artist and the magician both. A comparative analysis of Italian, German, and Dutch images produced in the long sixteenth century identifies three distinctive aspects of the hybrid: as the offspring of Circe's magic of transformation in the works of Pellegrino Tibaldi and Annibale Carracci, as the figurative expression of witchcraft-associated features in Jacques de Gheyn II's engraving, and as an artistic invention in a theatrical design after Raffaello Gualterotti and an engraved grotesque ornament by Heinrich Aldegrever.

Visual Analysis of Creature Characters in Digital 3D Animated Films -Focus on Hybrid Creature Characters-

Visual Analysis of Creature Characters in Digital 3D Animated Films -Focus on Hybrid Creature Characters-

Beyond “Volute Capitals”: Materials, Meaning, and Adaptations of a Phoenician Motif

ABSTRACTThe stylized volute motif is attested throughout the Levant and in areas of Phoenician settlement or cultural influence. Much of the debate of this motif has focused on the volute’s appearance in Israelite monumental architecture (the so-called Proto-Aeolic capital). This article provides a fresh discussion of the motif’s depiction within Phoenician art and iconography through various media, including ivory and sculpture. The architectural versions in stone derive from a much larger repertoire in portable media and in wood, which included inlaying techniques and color patterns not easily transferable into stone. This essay stresses the symbolic meaning of the volute motif and its adaptability by other Mediterranean cultures, from Israel and Cyprus to Iberia. The volute, moreover, has the quality of an otherworldly hybrid entity, strongly associated with hybrid creatures and other stylized vegetal motifs invoking eternal regeneration, which explains the use of the motif in funerary and sacred contexts.

Being Online

Abstract: Two critiques of mass media in the twentieth century gestured at its effects on the capacity of patience. Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and Daniel Boorstin's The Image examine how the media changed our imagining of the world, the scope of its relevance for us, and our ways of being in it. This article follows their lead by inquiring how being online further undermines the capacity for patience, manifested most clearly in the self-generating rage characteristic of social networks' discourse. It refers this effect to three basic elements of the online world: the ubiquitous timeline format, the hybrid creature of written speech created by it, and digital objects that adapt themselves too closely to our needs, imaginings, and desires. All three foster a disruption of distances, where the remote and unfamiliar are experienced as unbearably close, a blurring of distinctions between inner life and external reality. A world composed of digital objects has lost what Hannah Arendt described as its power to "relate and separate people at the same time."

Hybrid Creature—Dragon-tailed Lion Motif in Eurasian Textile Imagery

The dragon-tailed lion motif is a hybrid creature motif usually composed of a lion’s body with a dragon’s head serving in place of the tail. As a decorative motif, the dragon-tailed lion mixes imagination and reality in Eurasian textile imagery, and is an excellent entry point for understanding medieval social culture. This article seeks to examine the symbolic meaning and development of this hybrid creature in different cultural contexts via Eurasian textile imagery and ancient documents. Broadly, the resulting shows that the combination, shape and symbolic meaning of the dragon-tailed lion are variable, whose symbolic functions are directly related to the cultural context of the lion and the dragon. The dragon-tailed lion motif as a long-standing imagery tradition and aesthetic, reflecting the common concept of creation and the extensive and diverse cultural connections in the Eurasian continent in the Middle Ages.

Entre le griffon et le monstre marin, entre le kētos et le sēnmurv. Réflexions sur les créatures hybrides du chancel de Santa Maria Assunta d’Aquilée (ixe siècle)

Le décor sculpté sur les plaques de chancel de la cathédrale Santa Maria Assunta d’Aquilée donne à voir un univers harmonieux qui canalise une matière en cours de transformation, à l’image de la spiritualisation du charnel par les sacrements. Les différents éléments qui composent cet univers sont liés les uns aux autres pour mieux mettre en lumière la cohérence de la Création. Dans cet espace construit, les frontières entre végétal, minéral, animal et ornemental se fondent et se confondent, tout comme la distinction entre animaux connus et imaginaires. Sur l’une des plaques du chancel, deux créatures empruntant des caractéristiques à des espèces animales terrestres, célestes et aquatiques s’abreuvent à l’Arbre-Fontaine de Vie, tirant un trait d’union entre ici-bas et au‑delà et apportant un espoir de salut. Affrontés, ils s’opposent pour faire obstacle au passage du fidèle, renforçant la fonction séparatrice du chancel, délimitant la frontière entre nef et chœur, entre les laïcs et les clercs. Présentés sur un support vertical face au fidèle, ces êtres composites participent au rapprochement de l’homme avec Dieu en l’invitant à faire corps avec le Christ par la communion, à s’en remettre, corps et âme, à l’Église. Faisant appel à l’ordre, la variété et la mesure, cet univers visuel rythmé invite à dépasser la frontière du visible, du sensible, du matériel, à se détacher de l’opposition ressemblance/dissemblance pour progresser vers l’invisible, l’intelligible et l’immatériel.

An Ecological Reading of Interspecies Mutation in Annihilation

Humans’ detachment from nature, as justified by an alleged exceptionalism falsely granted by our ability to reason, has resulted in the ecological crisis we face today. Besides, our fear and suspicion of wilderness has also prompted us to master the natural world on our terms. This article aims at exploring how Alex Garland’s film Annihilation (2018) discomforts the audience by challenging our assumptions about a nature that we believed already conquered. The analysis will focus on how the film portrays mutations that produce hybrid creatures mixing animal and plant DNA thus destabilizing the limits between human and non-human. This crossing of porous boundaries illustrates our vulnerability as species and our dependance on the ecosystem that surrounds us.

Guardians of the Text: Griffins and Sphinxes in the Neapolitan Ovid (BNN ms. IV F 3)

This article investigates the origins and significance of images of griffins and sphinxes—hybrid creatures of Greco-Roman tradition—in the marginal decorations of the so-called “Neapolitan Ovid” (BNN ms. IV F 3), the first illuminated manuscript of the Metamorphoses, probably from the late 11th century. Their form and style suggest specific iconographic origins and links with the decorative motifs from Antiquity that circulated in artistic objects around Bari, the manuscript’s place of origin. Among the many figures that provide a pictorial response to the poem’s content, the presence of these griffins and sphinxes offers compelling evidence of the survival of ancient imagery; they also invite us to explore the relationship between image and text in the illuminated book. From this analysis, we can better understand the complex role of these hybrid figures in the manuscript. Their existence is testimony to the continuity of marginal decorative systems derived from Antiquity that are present in objects and were articulated through the Islamic and Byzantine formal vocabularies accessible in Puglia at the time.

Failing Femininities: The Femmes of MS Additional 37049

This article offers a gendered analysis of the illuminations that bleed, sin, and pray their way through a fifteenth-century Carthusian miscellany from Northern England. British Library MS Additional 37049 may have been a tool for private affective devotion or it may have moved beyond the borders of the charterhouse to meet the spiritual needs of the pious laity. Each of its users would have encountered an extensive, didactic illustrative program that is so interwoven with the text as to be inseparable. These illuminations have previously received academic attention for their performative potential, significations of morality through medieval dress, and their role in affective devotion. A gendered analysis, however, remains to be done despite recognition of the illuminator’s reliance on performative bodies.  The comprehensive, symbolic nature of the Carthusian miscellany makes it a rich case study for thinking through late medieval femininities. From submissive monks and beastly whores to penetrative devotional acts and deadly sins bedecked in all the fashionable excesses of fifteenth-century England, this article argues that the illuminations in this manuscript can benefit from a framework that accommodates femininities beyond binary bounds. In turn, it advocates that this manuscript — itself a hybrid creature of poetry, prose, and image — illuminates medieval complexities that invite a rethinking of modern expectations about the past and future of gender.

Animals in the Mirror of Anthropomorphism in Richard Adams’ Watership Down and Amitav Gosh’s The Hungry Tide

Writers of literary works have long used animals to promote favored morals and values. The depiction of animals in literature renders these nonhumans to social actors enhancing a narrative viewpoint that the animal itself is totally unaware of. This appropriation between humans and nonhuman behaviors is mostly achieved through anthropomorphism, the interpretation of non-human features and events in terms of human characteristics. The relationship between humans and animals has been evolved in literature. There’s quite a variance between earlier literature and more modern works. The past few decades have witnessed a dramatic shift in the way the relationship between humans and animals is demonstrated in modern fiction. Novels that were composed during the second half of the last century frequently displayed fantastically hybrid creatures that owned such exclusive human abilities as linguistic expression and philosophical thought. This is observed in Richard Adams’ Watership Down, in which wild rabbits have not only linguistic capabilities similar to ours, but also their own culture and mythology. As the cultural world continues distancing itself from the natural world - with the advance of technology, and environmental degradation- during the 2000s, there was an intention among authors to move beyond anthropomorphism and imagine the animal standing for itself, without representing or symbolizing humans. Animals were frequently compared to humans, as creatures that struggle against man. This is reflected in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. In The Hungry Tide, Ghosh introduces the Sundarbans as a living entity, where animals stand as rivals to humans.

Deer or Horses with Antlers? Wooden Figures Adorning Herders in the Altai

Among the burials of horse herders who lived in the 4th–3rd centuries BCE Altai Mountains of South Siberia were some that contained small wooden figures of four-legged hoofed animals that represent horses, deer, or hybrid creatures. They decorated headgear buried with select commoners of the Pazyryk Culture. Although the people, material possessions, and horses of the elites were frequently ornamented with imagery often associated with the so-called Scytho-Siberian animal style, these figurines are generally more realistic and less stylized representations of natural creatures, either cervids or horses. There is, however, ambiguity in these representations; in some cases, figures that are horses have inset recesses on the tops of their heads, in addition to holes for ear inserts. This recalls the elaborate headdresses on some horses outfitted with large displays of antlers or horns made of wood, leather, and felt buried with the Pazyryk leaders. The implication of this ambiguity is explored here. Horses were “cultural capital and tokens of clout” (see Andreeva Introduction, this volume) in the Pazyryk Culture, as well as the base of the economy. Deer were foundational to older belief systems in Siberia. The commingling of horse, mountain goat/ibex, and deer features in Pazyryk Culture imagery has inspired this study.

Italian Immigration in the American West: 1870–1940

Italian Immigration in the American West: 1870–1940

From the Narratives on Mythical Beasts to the Voicing of Power

Taking as the case study the Ikkeri Nayakas’ Vīrabhadra temple in Keladi (the current Karnataka state), the paper discusses the potential correlation between the narrative and the image in terms of the temple’s artistic programme and the myths it draws on. With the assumption that the artistic production can serve as a political tool aimed at expressing a ruler’s agenda, our focus is on the depictions of certain hybrid creatures found within the premises of the temple and their multidimensional symbolism attested to in Hindu narratives. Our analysis of the visual and the narrative material against the backdrop of the early history of the temple’s royal patrons suggests that in the centre of their interest, while designing the temple, was the desire to set out their claims to power and present the milieu they lived in.

Tubo-Sogdian Relations along the Silk Road: On an Enigmatic Gold Plaque from Dulan (Qinghai, China)

In 2018, some tombs that belonged to early Tibetan-related elites at the site of Dulan (Qinghai, China) were disturbed by looters’ activity. One of the gold objects confiscated by local police officers displays a curious composite creature that could be called a winged ichthyocentaurus or triton. This creature includes the torso of a dressed man with a beribboned crown holding a rhyton-like horn and a coiled fish tail. This article discusses the possible function and meaning of this type of composite creatures that appear also on some artifacts from Central Asian archaeological sites and Sino-Sogdian funerary monuments. The iconography of the hybrid creatures seems to be rooted in Greek art. Sogdians possibly transmitted it to the Tibetan Plateau along the so-called Silk Road in the 7th-8th cc. The horn held by the creature is reminiscent of one attribute of the ancient Chinese wind god “Feng Bo” (风伯, “Master of the Wind”) that has been depicted in the funerary milieu since the Han period (202 B.C.-220 A.D.) because of its association with immortality. This object could allow us to identify the iconography of the Sogdian wind deity Weshparkar (Avestan Vayu) who sometimes had a “wind blowing horn” like in the Dulan gold plaque. The study of this specific detail could help to shed light on the multicultural background of early Tibetan societies that definitely had contacts with Central Asia and China along the Silk Road trading network.

Learning Virtual Chimeras by Dynamic Motion Reassembly

The Chimera is a mythological hybrid creature composed of different animal parts. The chimera's movements are highly dependent on the spatial and temporal alignments of its composing parts. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm that creates and animates chimeras by dynamically reassembling source characters and their movements. Our algorithm exploits a two-network architecture: part assembler and dynamic controller. The part assembler is a supervised learning layer that searches for the spatial alignment among body parts, assuming that the temporal alignment is provided. The dynamic controller is a reinforcement learning layer that learns robust control policy for a wide variety of potential temporal alignments. These two layers are tightly intertwined and learned simultaneously. The chimera animation generated by our algorithm is energy efficient and expressive in terms of describing weight shifting, balancing, and full-body coordination. We demonstrate the versatility of our algorithm by generating the motor skills of a large variety of chimeras from limited source characters.

‘Man carries all animals within himself’

This article addresses Rubens’s perspective on the human-animal by focusing on the satyr as one of his favourite mythological characters. This profoundly liminal being appears in a variety of roles throughout his oeuvre, including several paintings that remained in his private collection. In some of them, the satyr is primarily a figure for unbridled lustfulness and sensuality. In many others, however, this hybrid creature appears to hold the key to some of the mysteries of nature itself. Another facet of this analysis concerns the long-standing connection between this mythological character and literary satire. Rubens’s satyr-themed images bear a number of salient qualities of this literary genre as one that destabilizes boundaries: between the beautiful and the repulsive, the tragic and the comical, the sublime and the grotesque.