Leonardo, Volume 56, Issue 1 | Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University
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Contents

Editorial

Artists’ Articles

  • Views on Thresholds by Transdisciplinary Partners: A Shared Journey Continues
    Silvio Wolf, Inna Rozentsvit
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    Abstract
    This article is a reflection on a journey of transdisciplinary partners from two different and unusually paired “sets” of disciplines: photography art (Silvio Wolf, SW) and cross-pollinated research in the fields of applied clinical neuroscience and psychoanalysis (Inna Rozentsvit, IR). This relationship originated in examining the “beholder’s share” phenomenon and moved on to further collaboration on the topics of “thresholds” and “visible/invisible,” as they relate to these two individuals’ personal and professional beings.

  • Interactive Moiré Patterns Reflecting on the Traditional Nanjing Baiju
    Ye Yang, Guangxi Chen, Mengqi Li, Kang Zhang
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    Abstract
    This article presents a human-machine design approach to the artistic and metaphorical representation of the traditional weaving scenes featured on Yunjin brocade as interactive moiré patterns accompanied by Nanjing Baiju performance. After extracting the basic elements of the eye-shaped moiré patterns, the authors systematically recomposed them to mimic the weaving process. They then wrote an algorithm to generate moiré patterns that respond dynamically to the unique sounds weavers make while weaving, symbolizing the gazes and eye contacts among the weavers. This became an interactive sonic installation, Sweating Weaving Room, which represents the rhythmic machine sounds, the Nanjing Baiju, and the hard labor and harmonious work hidden behind the glamorous brocade.

General Articles

  • Dancing with Objects: A Psychological and Neurophysiological Analysis
    Marc Boucher
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    Abstract
    This article uses the psychological concept of body schema and the neurophysiological notion of peripersonal space to discuss the phenomenon of dancing bodies that wear, handle, and share objects. The author shows the complex and dynamic relationship between body and object to be central to the experience of dancing with objects, which is investigated in terms of multisensory integration, most notably in relation to proprioceptive, haptic, and tactile perception. It is posited that, although stemming from different theoretical approaches, both the psychological and neurophysiological perspectives demonstrate how the body incorporates and is incorporated by the things it moves with.

Technical Article

  • Leonardo da Vinci’s Visualization of Gravity as a Form of Acceleration
    Morteza Gharib, Chris Roh, Flavio Noca
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    Abstract
    Despite limited tools, Leonardo da Vinci displayed ingenious problem-solving. The authors examine a combination of Leonardo’s thought and physical experiments regarding the acceleration of falling objects. Leonardo recorded that if a water-pouring vase moves transversally (sideways), mimicking the trajectory of a vertically falling object, it generates a right (as in orthogonal) triangle with equal leg length, composed of falling material lining up diagonally (forming the hypotenuse) and the vase trajectory forming one of the legs. On the hypotenuse, Leonardo wrote “Equatione di Moti,” or equalization of motions, noting the equivalence of the two orthogonal motions, one effected by gravity and the other prescribed by the experimenter. The authors present an analytical solution using Newtonian mechanics to confirm Leonardo’s “Equivalence principle.”

  • Portrait Map Art Generation By Asymmetric Image-to-Image Translation
    Yuxin Zhang, Fan Tang, Weiming Dong, Thi-Ngoc-Hanh Le, Changsheng Xu, Tong-Yee Lee
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    Abstract
    The authors propose a deep neural network–based algorithm to automatically generate portrait map art (PMA), a modern art form created by British portrait artist Ed Fairburn. The authors formulate the generation of PMA as an adaptive dual-to-single image translation problem. The authors’ proposed model analyzes the appearance of one portrait and one map image using two encoder networks and utilizes their hidden encodings as representations of the portrait and map image to generate new PMA using a decoder network. An adaptive style harmonization module is proposed to fuse the two hidden encodings. Optimized by cycle-consistency constraint, the model can produce new PMA images without baselines.

Statement

  • Plantae Agrestis: Distributed, Self-Organizing Cybernetic Plants in a Botanical Conservatory
    Harpreet Sareen, Yasuaki Kakehi
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    Abstract
    Conventional digital logic embodied in silicon-based materials has long neglected the capabilities of natural systems. This work seeks to embody a new hybrid form, analogizing chemical signaling to electrical signaling and vice versa. Through an installation at a botanical garden, technological functions in this setting are relegated to plant controls. Several plants are interfaced individually through their own internal signals with robotic extensions and self-organize in a botanical conservatory. The authors observe emergent behavior to consider implications to bioelectronics models, materials, and processes.

Special Section: Indeterminacy after AI

  • Indeterminacy after AI: Introduction to Special Section
    Natasha Lushetich, Iain Campbell
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    Abstract
    There is a close connection between the avant-garde—Dadaist, Surrealist, and Constructivist—use of indeterminate procedures and the early-twentieth-century scientific theories of indeterminacy, such as those of Niels Bohr, Kurt Gödel, and Alan Turing. The Dadaist disruption of ingrained logics, through collage, chance operations, and the simultaneous poem, transcended causality to liberate “an infinite set of processes and possibilities” [1]. Surrealist psycho-archaeological techniques—automatic drawing, writing, and frottage—redefined automaticity as a source of a deeper, nonconscious surreality. Constructivism, similarly, made use of incongruous micro and macro fragments, collapsing orders of magnitude to “reassemble” the world along different axes. In quantum physics, Bohr demonstrated the entanglement of the observer, phenomenon, conceptual framework, and measuring apparatus. Given that all quantum experiments presuppose a question about either position (the particle aspect of a phenomenon) or movement (its wave aspect), but not about both at the same time, they could not deterministically predict an(y) individual atomic process, only statistical regularities. Gödel similarly demonstrated the incompleteness of formal axiomatic systems by showing that there are propositions that can neither be proven nor disproven. Elaborating mathematician David Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem—the question about the final decidability or predictability of universal logics—Turing likewise demonstrated that some functions cannot be computed.

  • Transformed Strangely: Lyotardian Indeterminacy in John Cage’s Child of Tree
    Anthony Gritten
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    Abstract
    The author sketches a Lyotardian reading of John Cage’s plant pieces of the mid-1970s. Given that at the time both Jean-François Lyotard and Cage were concerned with working through Marcel Duchamp’s multifarious legacies, the author uses Lyotard’s writings on Duchamp to unpack the operation of indeterminacy in Cage’s ecological events.

  • I am _your_Pyrate Dancer: Choreographic Computabilities Dancing inside the Interstices of a Visceral World
    Marcia Mauro-Flude, Jo Pollitt
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    Abstract
    The article proposes that the interstitial as an analytical category advances transdisciplinary developments in contemporary choreographic practice. The techniques and conventions of passing, marking, and parsing are described as concomitant agencies that act as notational scores connected to the informatic procedure of writing as dancing. A case study is provided as an example of how gesture, executable code, computational poetics, script, and syntax can endure beyond the performance event as choreographic score and artifact. The novel application of plain text computing, with all its constraints, not ordinarily connected to terpsichorean practices, paradoxically exhibits a nascent realm in which dance-making futures may endure.

  • Exercises in Humility: Gregory Bateson on Contingency, Croquet, and Revising Habits of Thought through Play
    Doug Stark
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    Abstract
    Though critics consider games fundamentally indeterminate, common sense dictates that game-based contingency is paradigmatically delimited—possible moves and outcomes preset and immutable. Drawing on cyberneticist Gregory Bateson, this article elaborates a second paradigm for game-based contingency wherein the game neither determines possibilities beforehand nor excludes aberrance but integrates contingency by recursively modifying its structure. It explicates this second paradigm’s ethical import vis-à-vis the croquet match in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and “fumblecore” video game Sumotori Dreams. Whereas most games encourage prediction, reinforce norms, and furnish a sense of mastery, these recursive games can frustrate calculation, unsettle habits, and humble players.

  • Entangled Realities: Emerging Performances of Relating Humans, Sonatars, and Spaces
    Andreas  Pirchner
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    Abstract
    This article investigates music performances with audiovisual components in extended reality setups that are not score based, but composed, emerging from a discursive process of interrelating human performers and computational counterparts such as virtual performance partners, virtual instruments, and potentials related to particular spaces. Rooted in notions of earlier avant-garde music and digital games, the performances are understood to emerge from a bottom-up process of relating human-technological agencies. A dichotomy of preexistent physical and virtual realities that would be extended or mixed is consequently replaced by a notion of entangled realities, as the artistic reality of the artwork emerges with the performance.

  • Dithering Eyes: Or, Correspondences with Erratic Bodies
    Christina Jauernik
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    Abstract
    This article discusses an experimental seeing machine and its spatial, sensorial, and technical implications. By examining this real-time motion tracking and visualization system and reflecting on how it engendered embodied experiences of sharing movement across physical and virtual bodily spheres, the author raises questions about the construction of identity, visibility regimes, technical glitches, indeterminacy, and error. The mediating space, emerging through the coexistence of and interference between these distinct technologies/bodies brought together in common points of view, also suggests another mode of perception, perhaps unsettling what it means to “see.”

  • The Politics of Visual Indeterminacy in Abstract AI Art
    Martin Zeilinger
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    Abstract
    In Perception Engines and Synthetic Abstractions, two generative AI art projects begun in 2018, Tom White experiments with visual abstraction to explore the indeterminacy of perception, interpretation, and agency. White’s AI systems produce images that will be interpreted as abstract artworks by human viewers, but which also confront human audiences with the realization that what is here deliberately rendered indeterminable for them will remain near-perfectly legible for AI-powered image recognition systems. This difference in perceptual and interpretive agency foregrounds an underlying politics of visual indeterminacy. White’s projects thus increase awareness of how machine vision—for example in automated online filtering systems—can diminish the horizon of what human audiences can or cannot see in an AI-driven digital cultural landscape, and how, in the process, underlying biases are normalized and human viewers become habituated to the dramatic shrinking of perceivable/viewable online image content mediated by AI.

Special Section: Music and Sound Art

  • Music, Art, Machine Learning, and Standardization
    Taylor Brook
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    Abstract
    This paper explores current and hypothetical implementations of machine learning in the creation and marketing of cultural commodities such as music. Building on Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industry, this article considers the role of machine learning and artificial intelligence as a force for stylistic standardization and further consolidation of economic power in music and art.

  • Signal to Noise Loops: A Cybernetic Approach to Musical Performance with Smart City Data and Generative Music Techniques
    Stephen Roddy
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    Abstract
    This article introduces the Signal to Noise Loops project, which consisted of a series of performances and installations that took place worldwide between 2017 and 2022. The project utilized open data from a network of Internet of Things sensors placed around Dublin, Ireland, in the context of experimental music performance and composition. This network was underpinned by a theoretical framework from the field of cybernetics that united and integrated methods and approaches from the wide-ranging fields of data-driven music, generative music, rhythm analysis, and smart cities research.

  • The Music of Heart Rate Variability
    Jan Schuller, Ulf Henrik Göhle
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    Abstract
    The variability of the heart rate reflects the regulatory status of the autonomous nervous system. For analytic purposes accessible to laypersons, the authors developed methods to transform heart rate variability into acoustical information, through either direct sound synthesis or the production of MIDI files (musical instrument digital interface) to trigger other devices. The authors describe the methods and some results and discuss applications for analytical and artistic purposes, such as music composition and biofeedback. The resulting “music” is complex and rhythmic and often has unexpected and interesting implied harmony.

Special Section: Science and Art

  • Hacking Hearts: Establishing a Dialogue in Art/Science Education
    Kayoko Nohara, Betti Marenko, Giorgio Salani
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    Abstract
    This paper discusses Hacking Hearts, a transdisciplinary educational collaboration between the art school Central Saint Martins (U.K.) and a science and engineering university, the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan). The concept of performativity—which was brought into the construction of the workshop setting—is used to explain the mechanisms of interaction across disciplinary boundaries commonly accepted in these institutions and academic areas. The collaboration transformed performative elements into a resource by creating an educational environment that enabled communication through encounters “on stage” between research scientists and art/design students. The discussion is situated within a growing literature on art/science education and offers lessons for establishing collaborative workshops between diverse participants.

Leonardo Reviews

The Network

Endnote

  • Game Forms of the Possible: A Personal Obituary of Leonardo Contributor and Co-Founder of Computer Art Herbert W. Franke, 1927–2022
    Jürgen Claus
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    Abstract
    Is it possible to be a puppeteer and a computer scientist, a speleologist and a science fiction author, in one person, and have all that interconnected somehow? There stood Herbert W. Franke, born in Vienna in 1927 and by now 95 years old, smiling at the exhibition of his computer-designed graphics, amused by the great response they generated. He died in July 2022, only a few weeks later. He was the young-at-heart dinosaur of computer art, born to a professor of electrical engineering, whom he followed faithfully with a dissertation on electron optics. The subtle difference that distinguished the young scientist from his colleagues was his aesthetic curiosity. He had access to the emerging first generation of computers in the laboratories of Siemens, and used it. While informal, gestural abstraction dominated artists’ studios in the 1950s, Franke was thinking of an art that could be scientifically grounded. In conversation he conveyed to me, “Aesthetic structures are those that optimize the processes of perception.”

ISSN: 
1071-4391
Title: 

Leonardo, Volume 56, Issue 1

February 2023