Guests

William Franke is a Franco-American philosopher of the humanities, poet, and professor of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University (formerly and concomitantly Professor Catedrático and Head of Philosophy and Religions at the University of Macau, 2013-2016). A main exposition of his philosophical thinking is A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014), a book which dwells on the limits of language in order to open thought to the inconceivable. On this basis, the discourses of myth, mysticism, metaphysics, and the arts take on new and previously unsuspected types of meaning. This book is the object of a Syndicate Forum and of a collective volume of essays by diverse hands in the series “Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion”: Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy. Franke's apophatic philosophy is based on his two-volume On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts (2007), which reconstructs in the margins of philosophy a counter-tradition to the thought and culture of the Logos. Franke extends this philosophy in an intercultural direction, entering the field of comparative philosophy, with Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions Without Borders. In On the Universality of What is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking, Franke argues for application of apophatic thinking in a variety of fields and across disciplines, from humanities to cognitive science, as key to reaching peaceful mutual understanding in a multicultural world riven by racial and gender conflict, religious antagonisms, and national and regional rivalries.

Kythe Heller is an award-winning poet, interdisciplinary artist, and scholar whose work spans text, film, music, performance, and multimedia social practice. She earned a ThD/PhD at Harvard University in Comparative Studies in Religion, with a PhD secondary field in Literary Arts, Film, and Visual Studies/Critical Media Practice. Previously, she received an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School, an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and a BA in English Literature from Reed College.

Recently published work includes a collection of poems, Firebird (Arrowsmith), nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award, and several critical studies on medieval and contemporary mysticism and spirituality, phenomenology of the senses, aesthetics, and the arts, including “An Ethnography of Spirituality” in Arvo Pårt’s White Light: Media, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press), “Living Backwards” in Quo Anima: Innovation and Spirituality in Contemporary Poetry (Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics), and “The Heart Receptive of Every Form: Representations of Fire in the unio mystica of Mahomet” (Harvard Divinity School Graduate Journal). She has received fellowships and grant awards from the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Mellon Foundation, Harvard University, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Film, performance, and installation work has been screened and exhibited across the United States and Canada.

She is also the founder and creative director of Vision Lab, a global art and research collective in the future of the human spirit, founded at Harvard Divinity School and now independent. Vision Lab creates work to address contemporary spirituality, social and environmental justice,and technology. She edits the international art and culture journal Forecast, and is a poet on the faculty of Bard College's Language and Thinking Program.

Béatrice (Anne-Marie, Marie-Jeanne) Machet is a French born poet, living between France and the USA, whose dance lessons as a child influenced and still influence her writing. As a teen she learned a lot from the Native American point of view about Native American history and Native cultures, until she felt impregnated with them. After having been involved in the French science-fiction milieu, flirting with cartoons and magazines such as Actuel, Charlie Hebdo, Fluide Glacial, she met Jean-Hughes Malineau, a Gallimard editor, who encouraged her to begin a career as a poet. From this initial meeting, each published poetry book of hers will testify to an evolution in her writing practice. At her credit some 25 books and chapbooks of poetry (three of them in English) plus Native American poets’ collections she translated into French, and three anthologies gathering 40 Native American contemporary poets whom works she translated into French. She gives lectures and conferences about contemporary Native American literature in Europe and China.

She is used to collaborating with artists from all kinds of disciplines such as painters, sculptors, musicians, composers, video-makers, dancers and choreographers, and with whom she performs her poetry. She is on editorial boards of french poetry magazines such as Recours au poème, Sur le dos de la tortue, Les cahiers d’Eucharis etc.

She has had writer residences, is regularly invited in international poetry festivals in France and abroad. She leads creative writing workshops, is called for teaching and performing in schools and colleges. She also launched and created Radio cultural programs, poetry oriented, from 1984 to 1986 and from 2018 to nowadays. She is responsible of a monthly radio program (Radio Agora) dedicated to contemporary poetry.

She taught at the University of Macao in the creative writing program of the English department, Her work is translated into Dutch, Romanian, Bulgarian, Spanish, English, Spanish, Albanian, Russian and now into Chinese.

She lives between France and the USA.

John F. Simon Jr. (b. 1963; Shreveport, Louisiana), a software art pioneer, holds degrees in fine art, geology, planetary science, and computer art. Throughout his career, Simon has explored various mediums, including plotter drawings, acrylic sculptures, charcoal, LCD screens, and web-based systems. Drawing inspiration from contemplative drawing practices, Simon’s daily drawings inform his larger artworks. His works have been featured in major exhibitions and are in the collection of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; as well as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His seminal work Every Icon was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and he collaborated with Björk to develop an app for her groundbreaking album Biophilia (2011).

Ruby Justice Thelot is a designer, artist & cyberethnographer based in new york city. he is an professor of design and media studies at nyu. His work focuses on digital phenomenology, virtual ontology and the implications of being-on-line. he writes about  virtual realms, digital communities, and artificial intelligence. his work and research have been presented and published in journals, magazines and conferences, all over the world. he is the author of the books "a cyberachaeology of checkpoints" and "a few essays of taste" (metalabel's 2025 zine of the year). he is the founder of 13101401 inc,  a design and research studio. he currently works as a product manager.

he's on substack, youtube, twitter and instagram.