Leonardo, Volume 40, Issue 5 | Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University
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Contents

Editorial

Historical Perspective

  • Computer Graphic—Aesthetic Experiments between Two Cultures
    Christoph Klütsch
    Get at MIT Press

    The author presents a summary of his research on the Stuttgart School and information aesthetics as developed by Max Bense in the 1950s and 1960s. Three artists, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees and Manfred Mohr, adopted the use of information aesthetics in computer graphics. The author investigates the relation between artistic practice and aesthetic theory.

Artist's Note

  • The Teleporter Zone: Interactive Media Arts in the Healthcare Context
    Paul Sermon
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    The author discusses the recent development and implementation of The Teleporter Zone, a permanent interactive art installation commissioned by Guy's and St Thomas' Charity for the new Evelina Children's Hospital in London. The article places the production and conception of this installation in the context of the author's research in telematic and telepresent art over the past 15 years, alongside current research reports on the effects and influences of the arts on healthcare. The author also draws upon personal experiences in order to provide practical insights into the objectives and outcomes of this work in the healthcare context.

Artist's Article

  • Meaning without Borders: likn and Distributed Knowledge
    Ben Syverson
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    This paper serves as a narrative companion to likn, an artware application about the nature of knowledge, ideas and language. According to the advocates and engineers of the “knowledge representation” project known as the Semantic Web, electronic ontologies are “a rationalization of actual data-sharing practice”; but where do artists and intellectuals fit into this data-oriented model of discourse? likn critiques the Semantic Web from a postmodern perspective. This account describes how postmodern theory was scrutinized, interpreted and ultimately expressed as “features” in likn.

Special Section: Lovely Weather: Art and Climate Change

  • O-24 Licht: A Project Combining Art and Applied Research
    Angelo Stagno, Andrea van der Straeten
  • Between Reason and Sensation: Antipodean Artists and Climate Change
    Get at MIT Press

    The author, drawing on her experience as a New Zealand artist who has collaborated with meteorologists, suggests that artists may enter climate change discourse by translating (or mis-translating) scientific method into sensory affect. She examines three recent art projects from Australasia that draw on natural phenomena: her own Anemocinegraph (2006–2007), Nola Farman's working prototype The Ice Tower (1998) and Out-of-Sync's ongoing on-line project, Talking about the Weather. The author cites Herbert Marcuse's 1972 essay “Nature and Revolution,” which argues that sensation is the process that binds us materially and socially to the world.

Color Plates

Extended Abstract

Special Section: In the Light of History: Papers from the 2005 Refresh! Conference

  • Catching the History of the Media Arts
    Sean Cubitt
  • Peter Donebauer, Richard Monkhouse and the Development of the EMS Spectron and the Videokalos Image Processor
    Chris Meigh-Andrews
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    The author details the development of two early color video synthesizers, the EMS Spectron and the Videokalos Image Processor, and examines their influence on video-based art. The Spectron, developed by Richard Monkhouse for Electronic Music Studios, influenced both its creator and various artists in the development of video-based art and images. Artist Peter Donebauer collaborated with Monkhouse to produce the Videokalos, leading to several artworks and a series of live performances.

  • Re-Writing the History of Media Art: From Personal Cinema to Artistic Collaboration
    Ryszard W. Kluszczynski
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    The author reinterprets the artistic phenomena that composed historical avant-garde art. His method of interpretation is an intertextual strategy that approaches the historical artifacts through recent phenomena. The first case study is of structural film; its most important attributes appear to be artistic strategies questioning the structural/material integrity, durability and permanence of the film work. The second case study is of the avant-garde strategy of collective work, reinterpreted through the open-source work and interactive art of today. The author identifies three steps in the development of the 20th-century concept of joint creative work: avant-garde general strategies of artistic collaboration; avant-garde film works oriented toward creative collectivism; and collaborative artistic practices that manifest themselves in non-hierarchical strategies of contemporary interactive art.

Theoretical Perspective

  • Toward Other Epistemologies of Interface Culture: Dependent Origination, Tantra and Relational Being in an Age of Digital Reproduction
    Get at MIT Press

    The author formally and thematically reconsiders the Buddhist philosophical concept of dependent origination in the context of technological practice. In this context, he discusses historical attempts in Tantric art to develop an integrated practice and conceive a dynamic “entity” of the body (that of the artist or the spectator), science, technology, art, architecture, philosophy, space-time and nature; and the veracity of such concepts in the context of particular new scientific insights. Furthermore, he reconsiders notions of relational being and nonanthropocentric being, and a polyphonic “I.” The article aims to interrogate new ways of evolving current practice and thinking on themes related to the socialization and mediatization of “difference.”

Special Section: ArtScience: The Essential Connection

  • Certain of Heisenberg's Arts
    Robert Root-Bernstein, Kris Paulsen
  • Looking Beneath the Surface: The Radial Spread of Ink in Water
    Pery Burge
    Get at MIT Press

    The author discusses her use of ink in water to create three-dimensional radial spreads (outward movements of liquid about a central point). The radial spreads form patterns as the ink moves across and in the water. The patterns have both scientific and aesthetic aspects and form the basis for speculation in both areas. They also provide an exciting new dimension to the artist's work relating to fluid flow: Unique patterns, often seen only by the eye of the camera, can be generated and preserved within one photograph or a photographic sequence.

General Note

  • Governing Artistic Innovation: An Interface among Art, Science and Industry
    Jean-Paul Fourmentraux
    Get at MIT Press

    The author presents an analysis of the workings and tensions involved in the integration and articulation of academic research, artistic creation and industrial production. He makes use of the results of a study conducted among creator-researchers of a Canadian prototype for the organization of these relationships: the Montreal, Canada-based interuniversity consortium Hexagram.

From the Leonardo Archive

Leonardo Reviews

  • The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite by Ann Finkbeiner. Viking, New York, 2006. 304 pp. Trade. ISBN: 0-670-03489-4
    John F. Barber
  • The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air edited by Daniell Cornell. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, U.S.A., 2006. 205 pp., illus. Trade, paper. ISBN: 978-0520-25044-4; ISBN: 978-0520-25045-1
    Amy Ione, David Marlett
  • The King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter and the Magic of Geometry by Siobhan Roberts. Walker Co, New York, 2006. 416 pp., illus. Trade. ISBN: 0-8027-1499-4
    Stefaan Van Ryssen
  • Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia by Valerie Kivelson. Cornell Univ. Press, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A., 2006. 312 pp., illus. Trade, paper. ISBN: 978-0-8014-4409-8; ISBN: 978-0-8014-7253-4
    Stefaan Van Ryssen
  • Technology Matters: Questions to Live With by David Nye. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2006. 280 pp. Trade. ISBN: 978-0-262-14093-5
    Michael Punt, Eunjung Han
  • Seeing High and Low: Representing Social Conflict in American Visual Culture edited by Patricia Johnston. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, U.S.A., 2006. 317 pp., illus. Trade, paper. ISBN: 0-520-24187-8; ISBN: 0-520-24188-6
    Jan Baetens
  • Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions by Ned Rossiter. NAi, Rotterdam, in association with the Institute of Network Cultures, Hogeschool van Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 2006. 250 pp., illus. Paper. ISBN: 90-5662-526-8
    Geoff Cox
  • YLEM Journal: Artists Using Science and Technology edited by Loren Means. YLEM, San Francisco, CA, May-August 2006. Vol. 26, Nos 6 and 8, 27 pp., illus. SSN: 1057–2031. Journal web site: 〈www.ylem.org〉
    Robert Maddox-Harle
  • RES Magazine edited by Sue Apfelbaum and Jesse Ashlock. New York, Res Media Group, March/April 2006. Vol. 9, No. 2, 80 pp., illus. 〈www.res.com〉
  • The Angelmakers directed by Astrid Bussink. The Cinema Guild, New York, 2005. DVD, 34 min, color
    Kathryn Adams
  • Playing the News directed by Jeff Plunkett and Jigar Mehta. First Run/Icarus Films, Brooklyn, NY, 2005. DVD/VHS, 20 min, color
    Amy Ione, David Marlett
  • Hats of Jerusalem directed by Nati Adler. First Run/Icarus Films, Brooklyn, NY, U.S.A., 2005. VHS/DVD, 52 min, color
    Jonathan Zilberg
  • Leonardo Reviews On-Line

Transactions

Leonardo Network News

Title: 

Leonardo, Volume 40, Issue 5

October 2007