Acclaimed Taiwan-based filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang is renowned for creating some of the most nihilistic and erotic films of the 90s. His films include Rebels of the Neon God (1992); Vive l'amour (1994); The River (1997); and his 1998 Cannes golden palme-nominee, The Hole, His films often use water in its multiple capacities -- cleansing, raining, nourishing, flooding -- to sumbolize his character's emotions. Depicting the human body as a mysterious, malleable machine consuming and excreting on its own volition, bodily functions become metaphors for loneliness, desire, decay, and escape. His obsessive and isolated characters give his films a bleak outlook, but they also embody a wry sense of absurdist humor. This is the first book devoted to Ming-liang's work, and is an important addition to contemporary film studies.

Inspired by Shakespeare's famous words, "If music be the food of love, play on," "The Food of Love," by British director Peter Greenaway (born 1942), is a story of amorous obsession set in Venice and London.

Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka's love for Alma Mahler was so great that he had a life-sized model of her made. "The OK Doll," by Peter Greenaway (born 1942), is the script for an unrealized film about the doll that Kokoschka lived with for three years.

This script by British director Peter Greenaway (born 1942) follows Russian director Eisenstein to Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1930, where he worked for ten days on a never-completed film called "Que Viva Mexico."

The work of French multimedia artist Mathieu Briand confounds our preconceptions of visual language by drawing on sources outside traditional art practices. He embraces a domain that encompasses electronic media and music, the sciences, new technology, architecture, phenomenology and virtual space, as well as the protocols of games and rituals. Consequently his work is often produced in collaboration with other artists, scientists, engineers and philosophers, making him an especially appropriate candidate for Dis Voir's new "Encounters" series, which allows contemporary artists to collaborate with colleagues they would otherwise not come across, on a specific artist's book project they would otherwise not have initiated. "Ubiq: A Mental Odyssey" (the title amalgamates Philip K. Dick's "Ubik" and Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey") is presented as a "science fiction photo-roman book tour," with Mathieu Briand as our tour guide. For the journey he has enlisted the writer, Daniel Foucard, who shares Briand's own unusual synthesis of seemingly disparate genres with characters more or less junkies, more or less monomaniacs, more or less lost type and who has mixed Briand's narrative with his own work.

Humankind has imagined and depicted fantastical creatures since the formation of the first societies. Beasts such as the Chimera, the Golem, the Minotaur and Galatea could be said to be culturally symptomatic. Today, in the twenty-first century, we witness the emergence of a new class of beings: organisms that are first imagined and then--through the agency of biotechnologies--brought to life. What once was myth is today a medium. In "Eduardo Kac: Life Extreme," Kac, the pioneer of "bio art" who is internationally recognized for celebrated works such as "Genesis" and the fluorescent green "GFP Bunny," has selected 36 new organisms and invited the prominent philosopher Avital Ronell to discover these new beings. The book, published in Dis Voir's new "Encounters" series, is prefaced by Kac's "Anthroduction" and includes a whimsical taxonomy of taxonomies, offering a unique classification method for future species.

Is death necessarily inevitable? "The Man Who Refused to Die" is the improbable tale of an intransigent character, heroic in his defiance, who refuses to cast aside mortal existence without knowing why he cannot prolong it indefinitely--who refuses to die just because the rest of humanity has thus far failed to avoid such a fate. The Belgian-born, French-based writer and comic-book critic Nicolas Ancion (author of "L'homme qui valait 35 milliards") and the artist and illustrator Patrice Killofer ("Futuropolis," "Psikopat," "676 Apparitions of Killofer") draw on the researches of the molecular geneticist Francois Taddei for this latest installment in Dis Voir's new series of "illustrated fairy tales for adults," which asks "How do literature and science contaminate one another?"--seeking to mobilize scientific research to provoke dreams and meditations on the laws of the universe.