Leonardo | Page 369 | Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University

Leonardo

LEON 37.3 - Smell Your Destiny: Web Interaction with the Fifth Sense

Smell Your Destiny is a fishy tale that parodies the quest for success exhibited in the 21st-century cyber-personality. This article is adapted from the author's web project, where traits formerly considered undesirable and now considered desirable for achieving success are administered to the populace by means of aromatherapy. Play-on-word medications, derived from the names of actual pharmaceuticals, are prescribed in pill form for ingestion by fish that swim in community gene pools. The pills induce curative fish fragrances that are exuded by the fish into the environment.

LEON 37.3 - The Turbulent Structure of Sfumato within Mona Lisa

The author describes a particular way of looking at the Mona Lisa whereby evidence of a turbulent structure (based on underlying sfumato) that reveals an infinity of hidden faces behind the famous figure can be seen. When light is progressively reduced by a “squinting process,” the effect is especially striking in the last face on the edge of the painting's dark areas. The author interprets this visual phenomenon in the context of entropic skins geometry, which he has developed to describe the geometry and statistics of turbulent flows.

LEON 37.3 - Resisting Surveillance: Identity and Implantable Microchips

Surveillance technologies and centralized databases are threatening personal privacy and freedom. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) microchip technology is one of several potential human tracking and authentication systems. The author's interactive art installation Pop! Goes the Weaselaims to explore opportunities for resisting surveillance by altering underlying assumptions concerning identity. Viewers are encouraged to experiment with resistance by avoiding access control, intervening in the database and subverting notions of a stable or single identity.

LEON 37.3 - Divisions of the Plane by Computer: Another Way of Looking at Mondrian's Nonfigurative Compositions

The article discusses a novel way of looking at Mondrian's nonfigurative paintings. Different periods of Mondrian's life correspond to distinct types of nonfigurative compositions, but can the distinction be formalized? How many bits or numbers are needed to characterize a typical composition? Can the rules of a composition type be expressed in the language of the computer? If distinct composition types require different computer programs, can these be based on a common frame-work, a mechanism, perhaps?

LEON 37.3 - Orai, or How the Text Got Pleated: A Genealogy of La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairytale

This paper is an attempt to make sense of the Japanese word orai and to consider in what way the author's own “comings and goings” across artistic, literary and esoteric pathways led to the formulation of his practice, later to be theorized as telematic art and to be understood as a form of associative connectivism. The paper focuses on La Plissure du Texte, his first project involving distributed authorship.