Leonardo, Volume 56, Issue 3 | Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University
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Contents

Editorial

Leonardo Gallery

Artists’ Articles

  • Evaporated: Explorations in Art, Science, and Salt
    Wendy Wischer
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    Abstract
    Evaporated: Explorations in Art, Science, and Salt was a collaborative art exhibition that included sculptures, photographs, video, sound, and drawing, integrated with scientific data displays that encouraged the viewer to ponder the complexity of the Bonneville Salt Flats and our relationships to the landscape. This experimental exhibition was one of the outcomes from a five-year collaboration between geoscientist Brenda Bowen and artist Wendy Wischer exploring the rapidly changing Bonneville Salt Flats in northwest Utah through the lenses of both art and science. Evaporated provided an opportunity for both scholars to experiment with different ways of sharing their research, scholarly and creative, in the hopes of promoting understanding of the connections and differences between visual art and geoscience in academic contexts.

  • The AI Laocoön: Art and the Artificial Imagination, or Survival Aesthetics in the Anthropocene
    Suk Kyoung Choi
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    Abstract
    The art-as-research described in this article—a project named The Drowned World, after J.G. Ballard’s dystopian novel of the same name—is a reflection on environmental collapse and its technical representation in the Anthropocene. Is imagination being subsumed by the artificial? Are the sociotechnic hyperobjects of artificial intelligence and global warming chimera of the imagination, or are they certainties emergent from a desire for virtuality? In The Drowned World project, the author proposes to employ text-driven image synthesis as an aesthetic apparatus obscuring the distinction between imagination (potentiality) and virtuality (artificiality) to offer a computational poetics of a world drowning in data, an imaginative ecology of the virtual sublime.

  • Programmoire: Refiguring Witchcraft for a Creative Agency via Computational Art Practice
    Batool Desouky
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    Abstract
    This paper provides a reflection on a practice-based computational art project titled Programmoire that explores the presence of computation within the medieval Arabic tradition of magic squares in both its mathematical origins and its magical mutation. The research speculates on an alternative history for technology rooted in the history of magic. Through examining the shared use of symbolic logic and active syntax between coding languages and symbolic magic, the project asks what technology can look like if used as a magical tool and how artistic practice can guide this exploration.

  • StellarScape: An Immersive Multimedia Performance Inspired by the Life of a Star
    Yuanyuan (Kay) He, Chris Impey, Winslow Burleson
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    Abstract
    StellarScape is an immersive multimedia performance synthesizing music, science, visual art, and technology. The performance includes live musicians, sensors, electronic music, and dance, all collaborating through interactive cinematography The result combines kinesthetic and acoustic sensing with astrophysical simulations of star formation in real time. This convergence research collaboration is catalyzed by the union of concepts at the confluence of astronomy, humanity artistic expression through music and dance, and sociotechnical experience. This article summarizes the authors’ motivation for undertaking the project, the interdisciplinary collaboration required to execute it, the authors’ goals for the audience experience, early results of the first performances, and ways the piece can be delivered in the future for entertainment, outreach, and education.

General Articles

  • Exploring the Third Space in Art-Science: The Identifying Successful STARTS Methodologies Project
    Denise Doyle, Richard Glover, Martin Khechara, Sebastian Groes
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    Abstract
    During a series of interviews undertaken in Identifying Successful STARTS Methodologies (2019–2021), a research project that analyzed strategies utilized by recent STARTS Prize winners and nominees, a number of the artists and scientists described having needed to build a “third space,” or to meet on “another plane,” in order to communicate and find a common language for art-science collaborations. The project team, from University of Wolverhampton (U.K.), collaborated with Ars Electronica and STARTS on the research and found ways to explore the third space concept in three collaborative art-science projects.

  • Topological Vision: The Artistic Thinking of Shigeru Onishi
    Maja Herrie
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    Abstract
    This article examines the work of the Japanese mathematician and photographer Shigeru Onishi (1928–1994) and his topologically inspired photographic experiments. It considers how his painterly play with emulsion and coloration is a visual exploration of questions of process and continuous transformation and how these experiments can be understood in relation to more general discussions of mathematical and artistic “ways of knowing “ Building on ideas introduced by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his work on late Paul Cézanne, the article introduces the concept of topological vision to describe and account for a particular way of seeing that considers the continual coming-into-being of a photographic motif.

  • Typology of Emotion Assemblages in Art and Science
    Christian Nold
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    Abstract
    This article analyzes how artists and scientists use emotion as a methodological tool to study participants and cocreate projects. It uses a science and technology studies approach to identify a typology of five emotion assemblages and the material, social, and cultural components that make them operate. These assemblages include or eliminate cultural and environmental context, the role of participants, and artist/researcher reflexivity The paper argues that there is an imperative for artists, designers, and researchers to make deliberate choices as to who or what to include and exclude when working with emotion.

  • Research, Representation, and Conservation of Mani Heaps: The Digitalization Projects
    Zhijun Peng, Han Sun, Wenyuan Tao, Haoyu Wang, Qibin Kang, Wenguang Xu, Fanyue Zeng, Chenzheng Lin
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    Abstract
    A kind of cultural heritage, a Mani heap is piled with many carving stones and used as a religious altar for prayer in daily life in Tibet. It has distinctive characteristics and high research value, providing extensive content and abundant information. This paper focuses on an overview of three digitization projects for Mani heaps. Based on the collected data of five field surveys, the three projects leverage digitization methods to introduce, analyze, and represent Mani heaps to support scholarly analysis and casual appreciation. The authors explore these projects to study, represent, and conserve Mani heaps, which are often ignored by researchers.

Technical Article

  • Deep Permutation Design: A New Potential Artificial Intelligence-Based Design Methodology
    Kostas Terzidis, Filippo Fabrocini, Hyejin Lee, Louis Daumard
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    Abstract
    An artificial intelligence-based design methodology is presented based on permutations and neural networks. Elements are combined in all possible ways to form all possible design solutions, and a neural network extracts the best solution after being trained on either objective or subjective criteria. This methodology is projected to have many applications in fashion, architecture, music, storytelling, cooking, or any other design or art field that can be represented as a set of permutations.

Statement

  • Be More Conceptual Regarding Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) as Art
    Kensuke Ito
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    Abstract
    This statement presents the author’s proposition—“Let’s be more conceptual!”—in response to the attempt to interpret Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) as contemporary art. In the context of NFTs, this opinion has the significance of finding artistry in the underlying decentralized autonomous consensus-building, and in the context of contemporary art, it has the significance of leading to the revival of early conceptual art. The second half of this statement covers the novelty and feasibility of this opinion, referring to precedents in art and engineering.

Special Section: ArtScience

  • The Epistemic Case for Sci-Art: Toward a Posthuman Praxis
    Jacob Thompson-Bell
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    Abstract
    This article seeks to strengthen the epistemic case for sci-art by demonstrating how partnerships across paradigms can combine methodologies rooted in multiple knowledge traditions. Drawing on Robin Nelson’s multimodal conceptualization of artistic research and Bruno Latour’s model of science as a circulatory system of heterogeneous human and nonhuman phenomena, the author characterizes sci-art as a form of posthuman praxis, which opens new epistemic positions through transversal forms of inquiry, thereby revealing shared human/nonhuman cultures. Sci-art is thus proposed as a means of drawing together humans and nonhumans into more productive, empathic associations.

Special Section: Disremembering the Harrisons

Special Section: Science and Art

  • Life, Matter, Poetry: Blurred Lines and Bilayered Representations of Materials Science
    Get at MIT Press

    Abstract
    This article charts the authors’ collaboration resulting from their partnership in the Leeds Creative Labs: Bragg Edition. The authors describe their motivations for working together and the conversations that developed as they discussed artificial life, synthetic matter, and shared terms from the humanities and sciences. They discuss how, after the project was delayed in 2020, they adapted to digital collaboration and secured funding for further outputs, mapping new possibilities for public engagement with materials sciences during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, the authors consider the layering of biophysical research images with experimental poems that aim to convey complex yet complementary concepts from philosophy without distorting the underlying scientific data.

Leonardo Reviews

ISSN: 
1071-4391
Title: 

Leonardo, Volume 56, Issue 3

June 2023