Waking to strong offshore breezes, I created a new photographic work, mindful of Nick's observation in The Great Gatsby that "... man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation ... face to face with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."
I met a fox today, hiking home on the Ridge Trail. This is our first truly sunny day at the Djerassi Ranch, and I chose, perhaps unwisely, to pack a lunch and go exploring for natural pigments. On the way back, I was struggling with an incline, drenched with sweat, stopping for rest at every small pocket of shade along the path. I came over a small rise and there he was, three short paces away, frozen in the middle of the path. He seemed as surprised as I to share this moment in the woods.
Scientific Delirium Madness, Djerassi 2018. An Essay
Here on the ranch, on the western side of the Santa Cruz mountains, the sea mist begins its slow roll back towards the Pacific Ocean.
We saw breakers yesterday out at San Gregorio, a flash of white foam on the horizon, the rest of the ocean blanketed in fog. Drove the Skyline through the Redwoods, past old Methuselah. A tree so old and big we had to stop, all be it briefly, to stand with our mouths agape trying to see the top.
While writing a novel at Djerassi, I've been drawn sideways to create a phootographic work capturing the creative fire and awe induced by this place.
As a writer of a novel, experiencing the first week of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program has been both distracting and provocative.
You know you’re desperate when you start writing a screenplay. But that seemed the only option left to Frank Malina and Jack Parsons as they struggled to build their rockets in Pasadena in 1937. Malina, a Caltech aeronautics grad student, was just 25 years old. Parsons, a self-taught chemist, was only 23. They had been brought together two years before by their shared belief that rockets were the only technology that could transport mankind into outer space. In this belief, however, they were quite alone. No university, corporation, scientist, or politician in America thought there was any future in rockets. Most believed that travel off the planet was impossible. There was no money, no facilities, no textbooks to help them. But there was Hollywood.
A 2018 fellowship has been awarded to Sarah Rosalena Brady, a 2018 UCLA Media Arts graduate.
Leonardo/ISAST is proud to announce our partnership with Zhuangshi, the Chinese Journal of Design, published through Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Zhuangshi's March 2018 issue includes a special section commemorating Leonardo journal's 50th anniversary with articles selected from Leonardo's history.
Sho-Joung Kim-Wechsler and co-founder Linda Helen Gieseke brought the first If So, What? art and design festival to San Francisco on 26–29 April 2018. The festival aimed to foster discussions within the Silicon Valley community about the intersections of art, design and technology.
As a result of 50 years of publishing work on the cutting edge, Leonardo has become the leading international peer-reviewed journal on the use of contemporary science and technology in the arts and music and, increasingly, the application and influence of the arts, design and humanities on science and technology.
