Leonardo Journal Volume 43, Issue 4, 2010

Leonardo is a print journal, published five times a year. Leonardo is edited by Leonardo/the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, and published by the MIT Press.
ONLINE ACCESS: Subscriptions to Leonardo include access to electronic versions of journal issues available on The MIT Press website.
ORDER: Subscriptions, individual issues and articles can also be ordered from The MIT Press.
PAST ISSUES: Browse tables of contents and abstracts of past issues of Leonardo and LMJ
Special SIGGRAPH Issue: TABLE OF CONTENTS
Conference Arts Director's Statement
by Matthew Hollern
Guest Editorial
by Lira Nikolovska
SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Awards
by Yoichiro Kawaguchi
Art Papers
Art Papers Jury
The Immediacy of the Artist's Mark in Shape Computation
by Jacquelyn A. Martino
ABSTRACT: This paper contributes to the area of computation in the production of artistic form. The author-artist describes a computational system in the form of a curvilinear, parametric shape grammar. Based on an analysis of over 3,000 entries in her traditionally hand-drawn sketchbooks, she describes the grammar that synthesizes drawings in the design language of her evolving style and serves as a tool for self-understanding of her artistic process.
Learning from Weaving for Digital Fabrication in Architecture
by Rizal Muslimin
ABSTRACT: This project restructures weaving performance in architecture by analyzing the tacit knowledge of traditional weavers through perceptual study and converting it into an explicit rule in computational design. Three implementations with different materials show the advantages of using computational weaving that combines traditional principles with today's digital (CAD/CAM) tools to develop affordable fabrication techniques.
Glowing Pathfinder Bugs: A Natural Haptic 3D Interface for Interacting Intuitively with Virtual Environments
by Anthony Rowe and Liam Birtles
ABSTRACT: Glowing Pathfinder Bugs is an interactive art project primarily aimed at children and created by the digital arts group Squidsoup. It uses projection to visualize virtual bugs on a real sandpit. The bugs are aware of their surroundings and respond to its form in their vicinity. By altering the topography of the sand, participants affect the bugs' environment in real time, facilitating direct communication between them and computer-generated creatures. This highly malleable and tactile physical environment lets us define and carve out the landscape in which the creatures exist in real time. Thus, virtual creatures and real people coexist and communicate throuh a shared tactile environment. Participants can use natural modes of play, kinesthetic intelligence, and their sense of tactility to collaboratively interact with creatures inhabiting a hybrid parallel world. This paper describes the project and analyzes how children in particular respond to the experience; it looks at the types of physical formations that tend to be built and notes how children instinctively anthropomorphize the bugs, treating projected imagery as living creatures--though with a ludic twist.
Touching Space: Using Motion Capture and Stereo Projection to Create a "Virtual Haptics" of Dance
by Kim Vincs and John McCormick
ABSTRACT: This paper describes the work of a group of artists in Australia who used real-time motion capture and 3D stereo projection to create a large-scale performance environment in which dancers seemed to "touch" the volume. This project re-versions Suzanne Langer's 1950s philosophy of dance as "virtual force" to realize the idea of a "virtual haptics" of dance that extends the dancer's physical agency literally across and through the surrounding spatial volume. The project presents a vision of interactive dance performance that "touches" space by visualizing kinematics as intentianlity and agency. In doing so, we suggest the possibility of new kiinds of human-computer interfaces that emphasize toufh as embodied, nuanced agency that is mediated by the subtle qualities of whole-body movement, in addition to more goal-oriented, tas-based gestures such as pointing or clicking.
Visual Anecdote
by Dietmar Offenhuber
ABSTRACT: The discourse on information visualization often remains limited to the exploratory function -- its potential for disccovering patterns in the data. However, visual representations also have a rhetorical function: they demonstrate, persuade, and facilitate communication. In observing how visualization is used in presentations and discussions, I often notice the use of what could be called "visual anecdotes." Small narratives are tied to individual data points in the visualization, giving human context to the data and rooting the abstract representation in personal experience. This paper argues that these narratives are more than just illustrations of the dataset; they constitute a central epistemological element of the visualization. By considering these narrative elements as parts of the visualization, its design and knowledge organization appear in a different light. This paper investigates how the "story" of data representation is delivered. By means of ethnographic interviews and observations, the author highlights the different aspects of the visual anecdote, a specific point where the exploratory and the rhetorical functions of visualization meet.
Data Portraits
by Judith Donath, Alex Dragulescu, Aaron Zinman, Fernanda Viégas and Rebecca Xiong
ABSTRACT: Data portraits depict their subjects' accumulated data rather than their faces. They can be visualizations of discussion contributions, browsing histories, social networks, travel patterns, etc. They are subjective renderings that mediate between the artists' vision , the subjects' self-presentation , and the audience's interest. Designed to evocatively depict an individual, a data portrait can be a decorative object or be used as an avatar, one's information body for an online space. Data portraits raise questions about privacy, control, aesthetics, and social cognition. These questions become increasingly important as more of our interactions occur online, where we exist as data, not bodies.
Touchpoint: Haptic Exchange Between Digits
TouchPoint Art Gallery Jury
Introduction
by Richard Elaver
Echidna
by Tine Bech
Strata-Caster
by Joseph Farbrook
Cursor Caressor Eraser
by Michael Filimowicz
Final Wisdom I
by John Fillwalk
hanahanahana
by Yasuaki Kakehi, Motoshi Chikamori and Kyoko Kunoh
The Lightness of Your Touch
by Henry Kaufman
Tools for Improved Social Interacting
by Lauren McCarthy
Dinner Party
by Hye Yeon Nam
samplingplong
by Joerg Niehage
Empire of Sleep: The Beach
by Alan Price
Lotus 7.0
by Daan Roosegaarde
In the Linie of Sight
by Daniel Suter and Fabian Winkler
Glowing Pathfinder Bugs
by Squidsoup
ADB
by Nicholas Stedman
Leonardo Network News
Updated 16 June 2010
