Leonardo, Volume 57, Issue 5 | Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University
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Contents

Editorial

Artists’ Articles

  • Assemblage Robotic Plants: Individualizations of Many Orders of Magnitude
    Marília Lyra Bergamo
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    Abstract
    This paper focuses on the author’s artistic practice and presents robotic plant creations as assemblages using robotic autonomy unities in a Small-World Network configuration. This artistic production is significantly founded on Gilbert Simondon’s philosophical concepts about Technological Beings. Understanding these communities of robotic structures as individualizations is critical to apprehending them as individuals. The paper also discusses the implications of hardware design, coding, and the concept of artificial life related to the development of such technological organisms.

  • The Algorithmic Pedestal: A Practice-Based Study of Algorithmic and Artistic Curation
    Laura Herman, Caterina Moruzzi
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    Abstract
    This paper delineates the authors’ practice-based findings from The Algorithmic Pedestal exhibit, a practice-based research project examining the impact of algorithmic curation on visual ecology. Instagram, a platform that deploys algorithmic recommendations to select and display artworks, was instructed to choose a set of images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection to display. Fabienne Hess, a London-based artist, also chose images to display from the same collection. This article reflects on the process of producing an exhibit with curatorial inputs from both a machine and a human. It also shares and describes the selected images for the first time.

  • Sculptural Hybridization: Combining Digital Parametric Modeling and Manufacturing with Traditional Handcrafting Techniques
    Iosif Andrei Kiss
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    Abstract
    Traditional handcrafting techniques used in the art of sculpting usually produce three-dimensional works of art, while modern reproducing techniques specific to copying and printing machines usually produce two-dimensional results. Mixing these techniques has had a major role in the development of recently emergent 3D digital fabrication techniques. Through a personal case study, this article discusses the similarities and differences between specific traditional additive manual processes used in the art of sculpting and additive three-dimensional modeling and 3D printing techniques. The case study showcases the hybridization of digital modeling and 3D printing processes with traditional physical handcrafting techniques to chart and inform a mixed media approach, with an array of positive outcomes in the art of sculpting and architecture.

  • Nested Cinema: An Immersive Fiction-Film Experience
    Pavel Prokopic
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    Abstract
    Nested Cinema is an original immersive experience that complicates the boundaries between the physical and the virtual, between the real and the imaginary. Nested Cinema reimagines film through the orchestration of technology across three distinct layers of experience—traditional screens, the installation space, and cinematic virtual reality—giving rise to a new immersive mode of dramatic fiction and expanded cinema. By combining established and emerging production and presentation technologies, the project explores the narrative and atmospheric effects of a nested multimodal environment, as well as new modes of visitor engagement and novel audiovisual expression and communication.

General Articles

  • Proof-of-Stake Non-Fungible Tokens, the Distributed Autonomous Organization, and the Valuation of Art: A Proposal for a Nonprofit, Community Controlled NFT
    David Britton
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    Abstract
    This paper describes a way to use blockchain-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to address some fundamental failures of the art world introduced when the early-twentieth-century evolution of financial markets expanded to include objets d’art as commodities. It proposes the creation of a distributed autonomous organization (DAO) that uses domain experts’ Delphic consensus methods embedded in smart contracts to provide NFTs with meaningful nonfinancial assessments of intrinsic artistic qualities and merit.
    Full details of the blockchain implementation and organizational development are online, registered at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/3DF4W with the Open Science Foundation as a large-scale participant/observer social science experiment.

  • Unveiling the Unspoken and Invisible: Analyzing Artistic Responses to Radiophobia
    Kinga Anna Gajda
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    Abstract
    The persistent nuclear threat continues to loom large, particularly in the contemporary landscape shaped by the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war, often referred to as the Second Cold War. This conflict has drawn global attention and triggered an upsurge in nuclear discourse within the media, leading to a resurgence of radiophobia. This article aims to introduce the works of several artists who have undertaken the challenging task of rendering visible the imperceptible, ensuring that the nuclear threat and the repercussions of radiation are not relegated to oblivion.

  • Trafficking | Transmission | Translation: Exploring Embodiment as a Mode of Knowledge Construction in Science Art Installations
    Andrea Rassell, Heather Bray
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    Abstract
    Science art practices are often framed as science communication in a manner that overlooks the capacity of the arts to provide engagement opportunities beyond discourse. The authors perform a thematic analysis of audience interviews from scientific media art installations that depict complex, intangible, invisible, and ephemeral scientific phenomena, specifically focusing on medical nanotechnology. The analysis reveals that visitors recognize sensorial experiences beyond traditional science communication, while scientists’ experiences expanded their definition of engagement. The authors argue that scientific media art practices act as sites of meaning-making and nondiscursive engagement that create reflective and embodied contexts for encounters with emerging technologies.

Special Section: ArtScience

  • Toward Equitable ArtScience Collaborations: Synthesizing Performance Art and Social Psychology for Social Change
    Einat Amir, Yossi Hasson
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    Abstract
    The article proposes a novel model for ArtScience collaborations that is based on more equal roles. With better power balance, artists and scientists can together create projects that truly synthesize their fields. Additionally, it is suggested that these collaborations can significantly contribute to social change through socially engaged research. The article focuses on the transformative potential of the collaboration process itself. The presented case study is the authors’ collaboration in creating hybrids of participatory performance art and social psychology experiments. It contributes new methodological approaches to the expanding field of ArtScience collaborations.

Special Section: Music and Sound Art

  • Compositional Rheology: Drafting Musical Flux through Fluid Mechanics and Drawing
    Juan-José Guerra-Valiente
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    Abstract
    This article explores the fluctuating relationship between the concepts of the “smooth” and “striated” musical space and time introduced by French composer Pierre Boulez and further developed by philosopher Gilles Deleuze, as well as its connection to rheology. The study focuses on how the understanding of the Reynolds number (Re), a parameter that characterizes the way a fluid flows in a duct, might provide a new approach to investigating the aforementioned musical concepts and visualizing them through drawing. This article also introduces a way of studying and visualizing musical compositions by establishing analogies between compositional parameters and the molecular and inertial forces that exist within the stream of a fluid.

  • Sound Investments: Music and Finance at Mid-Century
    Michael Maizels
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    Abstract
    The histories of finance and music are more interconnected than they might at first appear. From ancient ideas on the mathematical harmony of the universe to ultra-contemporary approaches driven by networked data, the flow of sounds and the circulation of capital have long traced one another’s shadow. Indeed, since the publication of Jacques Attali’s Noise in 1977, musicologists and sound scholars have been probing how music as an expression of mathematical knowledge has intersected with a range of intellectual, social, and economic shifts.

  • Toward a Spatial Understanding of Openness: Richard Sennett’s “Five Open Forms” and/in Music
    Jonathan Packham
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    Abstract
    This article offers a new strategy for cognizing musical indeterminacy based on Richard Sennett’s “five open forms for the city,” an intrinsically spatial way of thinking about what is “open” and how it is open. Sennett’s five forms (“synchronicity,” “punctuatedness,” “porosity,” “incompleteness,” and “multiplicity”) are explored individually as they impact our understanding of openness and/in music, illuminated by examples from contemporary experimental music.

  • The Sound of Data: Designing a Framework for Parameter Mapping Sonification
    Tristan Peng, Hongchan Choi, Jonathan Berger
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    Abstract
    Parameter mapping sonification is a powerful tool for data display and analysis with uses in a myriad of fields of study. Despite the wide range of applications, parameter mapping sonification remains abstruse for people to utilize effectively. This article outlines an original design in the domain of parameter mapping sonification applications for a flexible, extensible, and intuitive web app that democratizes this data display method. Sonification Interface for REmapping Nature (SIREN) accomplishes these goals through an accessible interface for sonification that demonstrates various web technologies, including Web Audio API. Existing frameworks are compared in five different areas—technology, design, functionality, accessibility, and extensibility—to determine the optimal gap for SIREN.

Leonardo Reviews

Endnote

In Memoriam

ISSN: 
1071-4391
Title: 

Leonardo, Volume 57, Issue 5

October 2024