Leonardo
Volume 30, No. 3 (1997)
Issue Contents
October/November 1995
Leonardo is a print journal, edited by Leonardo/the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, and published by the MIT Press. Subscriptions and individual issues can be ordered from the MIT Press.
TO ORDER.
SPECIAL SECTION
Art and Biology
Editorial: Art and Biology
by GEORGE GESSERT
Empire and Extinction: The Dinosaur as a Metaphor for Dominance in Prehistoric Nature
PAUL SEMONIN
The Science for Art Prize: Genesis of Forms
by FRANCIS D. MASSIE
Art and Biology Bibliography
by GEORGE GESSERT
Words on Works
by SARA ROBERTS, ROBERT KENDALL, TIM COLLINS AND REIKO GOTO, JESSICA HOLT
Artist's Article: Evanescent Realities: Works and Ideas on Electronic Art
by CARLOS FADON VICENTE
Artist's Note: Dreiklang: Word, Sound, Image
by SUSANNA NIEDERER
Theoretical Perspective: Linguistic, Pictorial and Metapictorial Competence
by JOZEF MUHOVIC
Document:
From Kaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd: Notes Toward an Archaeology of the Media
by ERKKI HUHTAMO
Document:
A Science of Vision for Visual Art
by FRANCOIS MOLNAR
Artists' Statements
A Short Synopsis of the Workings of Ignisfatuus
Morphological Ontology: Toward a Wider Minimalism
by JONATHAN WILLARD
Reviews
by ISTVAN HARGITTAI, STEPHEN WILSON, EVA BELIK FIREBAUGH, I. VANECHKINA
Endnote: Art Criticism and the Death of Marxism
by DAVID CARRIER
About the Cover
Richard A. Wilson, Untitled, computer-generated file using Easy Life and Adobe Photoshop. The illustration is based on "Life," a computer game first developed in the 1970s to illustrate the complex behavior of cellular automata generated by simple rules. This illustration was "seeded" with a representation of the Leonardo logo. In a reflexive two-dimensional space of 120 x 60 cells, this pattern will continue to develop, reaching a static state only after about 2300 generations.
The rules of "Life":
The state of each cell for the next generation is determined by the state of its neighbors (that is, cells that are adjacent horizontally, vertically or diagonally) in the current generation. Three simple rules apply: (a) if there are two neighbors that are "on," the cell will remain in its current state ("on" or "off") in the next generation; (b) if it has three neighbors "on," it will be "on" in the next generation; (c) if it has any other number of neighbors "on" (0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7 or 8), it will be "off" in the next generation.
For further information, see William Poundstone, The Recursive Universe (Chicago, IL: Contemporary Books, 1985) and Reggie McLeod, Easy Life 2.0 for Macintosh (shareware) (Winona, MN, 1995).
