Conditions for Emergence

The Touch Aesthetics Fellowship

"No story is fully told until it is felt."

— Vanessa Chang and Sultan Sharrief, Leonardo Vol. 59, No. 2

Most galleries enforce a silent code: Do not touch. The Touch Aesthetics Fellowship had something else in mind.

A three-month collaboration between Leonardo CripTech Incubator and ASU's Narrative and Emerging Media's Haptics for inclusion lab, the fellowship invited disabled artists to explore haptic technologies not as accessibility accommodations, but as a primary creative medium—ensuring disability-led practice actively shapes the future of immersive storytelling.

From Vanessa Cruz and Selwa Sweidan's Crip Haptic Flower Techno Jam, to Olivia Ting's Field Guide to Decoding Gobbledygook, to Antonella Mazzoni's Blackout, the works that emerged were poetic, technical, and entirely new. 

All three works were presented at a public showcase in Los Angeles and published as a Leonardo Showcase in Leonardo Vol. 59, No. 2, 2026.  

The fellowship set out to explore haptics as a creative medium. What emerged were new possibilities—for artistic practice, accessibility, and forms of sensory experience that neither the artists nor researchers could have fully anticipated.

"When we met Vanessa Chang and the inspiring awardees of the Touch Aesthetics Fellowship lab at ASU, it was officially my son's first time in a haptics vest and haptics glove. For a child like my son, whose hands don't move as fast as his mind does because the spasticity affects certain fine motor skills, having a haptics glove in a chemistry lab would level the playing field."

—Nadine Naidoo, parent

Augmented Wisdom

Leonardo partnered with Tsinghua University's ZHUANGSHI to produce Augmented Wisdom—an experimental, bilingual, peer-reviewed issue selecting 14 articles spanning Indigenous scholarship, neuroscience, design, and cross-cultural approaches to knowledge. Leonardo created a custom chatbot to navigate the issue and then built and tested a custom methodology: abstracts from the 14 selected articles were run through DeepSeek to generate bilingual prompts, which were then rendered as images through Midjourney.

The finding was specific and troubling. Even when the prompts were drawn directly from Indigenous, East Asian, and cross-cultural scholarship, the generated images defaulted to Western visual conventions. Diversifying the source material was not enough to change what the system pictured. The problem runs deeper than the data.

The findings were presented at the AI Unlocked Festival in Alexandria, Virginia—bringing an arts-centered research methodology into a conversation typically dominated by technologists. The issue itself drew 98 submissions from researchers across five continents, with a 14% acceptance rate—among the most selective in Leonardo's publishing history.

What began as a cross-cultural publishing experiment became original evidence in one of the most contested debates in contemporary technology: whether bias in AI can be solved simply by diversifying inputs. The findings suggested a deeper challenge—one embedded not only in data, but in the assumptions and visual conventions underlying the systems themselves.

The background for this section is a 6 by 6 grid of the images generated from the From Artificial Intelligence to Augmented Wisdom abstracts, showing subjects ranging from robots, animals, landscapes, and machines, in a variety of styles, from graphic pop, to ink painting, to realistic.

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CYBOTAGE

Zeina Barakeh grew up in Beirut. She knows what it means to live inside the consequences of military technology. That knowledge is the substrate of CYBOTAGE.

A Leonardo-ASU Planetary Health Seed Grant gave Barakeh the early support to develop a an inquiry into the ethical implications of military brain-computer interfaces—technologies that blur the boundaries between human cognition, machine intelligence, and warfare. The question at its center: when the body itself becomes a networked system, what happens to agency?

The resulting work is a three-channel site-specific video installation of floor-to-ceiling animated figures—digital colossi inspired by the guardian statues of Ancient Egypt's Abu Simbel. Their bodies are not built from circuits or code, but from seashells, corals, jellyfish, and fish parts. The choice is deliberate: military enhancements are ultimately inspired by nature. These figures shift between threat and protection, between guardian and weapon, between human and machine.

"The CYBOTAGE figures embody an ambiguity—oscillating between threat and protection—that speaks to their role as guardians of cyberspace," Barakeh says, "and, more deeply, as protectors of our humanity."

In 2025, the work moved from speculative inquiry into major public exhibition contexts, including a solo show at Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco and ASU's MIX Center. Recognition followed, including the 2024 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award and a published review in Leonardo journal.

But the project's significance extends beyond exhibition. As both an artist and a scholar of security studies, Barakeh occupies a rare position at the intersection of artistic practice, neuroscience, military technology, and ethics. CYBOTAGE demonstrates how hybrid practitioners can bridge domains that rarely engage one another, creating space for critical inquiry into emerging technologies before their consequences become fully visible. The project has also generated dialogue beyond the gallery through workshops with veterans and conversations with experts, bringing diverse perspectives to the questions at the heart of the work. What began as a seed grant became a form of public scholarship at the intersection of art, neuroscience, and global security.

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Da Vinci’s Cube

Most innovation systems assume that breakthrough ideas emerge primarily from research laboratories, engineering teams, and technology startups. Artists are often invited into the process later—to communicate, visualize, or humanize innovations developed elsewhere.

Leonardo serves as a core research partner in a National Endowment for the Arts Research Lab led by Virginia Tech's Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology. Together, the research team is investigating a different proposition: that creative practitioners contribute a distinct and essential dimension to innovation itself.

The project's central contribution—da Vinci's Cube—is a framework that expands traditional innovation models by introducing contemplation of sentiment as a vital third dimension. The framework suggests that artists do not simply illustrate innovation; they help generate it by exploring human meaning, values, emotion, and experience in ways that other disciplines often overlook.

Over two years, the research team conducted discovery interviews with industry professionals, developed three arts-integrated case studies, presented findings at six conferences, and published a book chapter, The da Vinci's Cube: A New Model for Understanding Innovation at the Edges of Art and Science. The framework was introduced to engineering educators, industry innovators, government representatives, and emerging researchers simultaneously—a deliberate strategy to seed the model across the systems that shape how innovation is defined and rewarded.

The framework is now moving beyond research into education, industry, and policy conversations. A second phase of funding will expand the evidence base through additional case studies and new analytical tools designed to better understand how innovation emerges across disciplines. The next challenge is not demonstrating that artists contribute to innovation—it is helping institutions recognize, support, and systematically integrate that contribution.

LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) Talks

In 2025, the LASER network hosted 52 salons across more than 60 cities worldwide, adding Bergen, Xiamen, and Chengdu—each rooted in a different disciplinary home.

In Bergen, digital artists and ecological researchers Alinta Krauth and Jason Nelson bring LASER into the intersection of electronic literature, more-than-human inquiry, and environmental art. Krauth, a former Leonardo-ASU Imagination Fellow, is among a growing cohort of Leonardo alumni who have become network stewards—carrying the organization's convening model into new institutional contexts.

In Chengdu, the network found a home inside the Big Data Research Center at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China—a signal that LASER's informal, cross-disciplinary model is resonating within engineering institutions, not just arts ones. In Xiamen, the Institute of Creativity and Innovation at Xiamen University anchors a third new node, extending Leonardo's presence along China's southeastern coast.

Together, these additions reflect what LASER has always been: a distributed listening network for early signals across emerging fields and transdisciplinary practice. Its low-barrier gatherings allow questions to surface early, relationships to form across disciplines, and local communities of practice to connect with Leonardo’s broader global ecosystem.

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