Leonardo | Page 374 | Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University

Leonardo

LEON 35.1 - A Collaborative and Interdisciplinary Computer Animation Course

Animation has always required a close collaboration between artists and scientists, poets and engineers. Current trends in computer animation have made successful and effective teamwork a necessity. To address these issues, the authors have developed an interdisciplinary computer animation course for artists and scientists, in which student teams produce a professional animation that extends the capabilities of a commercial animation package. A key component of this course is the use of collaborative teams that provide practical experience and cross-mixing of student exper-tise.

LEON 35.1 - A Self-Defining Game for One Player: On the Nature of Creativity and the Possibility of Creative Computer Programs

The AARON program has been generating original artworks for almost 30 years, but is denied by its own author to be creative. The author characterizes creativity as a directed movement towards an illdefined but strongly felt end-state for the individual's work as a whole, not as a characteristic of any single work and profoundly knowledge-based in the sense of externalizing the individual's internal worldmodel and system of belief.

LEON 35.2 - The Construction of Jackson Pollock's Fractal Drip Paintings

Between 1943 and 1952, Jackson Pollock created patterns by dripping paint onto horizontal canvases. In 1999 the authors identified the patterns as fractal. Ending 50 years of debate over the content of his paintings, the results raised the more general question of how a human being could create fractals. The authors, by analyzing film that recorded the evolution of Pollock's patterns as a function of time, show that the fractals resulted from a systematic construction process involving multiple layers of painted patterns.

LEON 36.2 - Towards Epistemically Autonomous Robots: Exploiting the Potential of Physical Systems

The authors outline one path towards constructing interactive artworks with the potential for displaying novel behavior. They use Peter Cariani's taxonomy of adaptive robotic systems as a framework for comparing the capabilities of systems that interact with their environments. The authors then describe two examples of structurally autonomous systems that are able to construct their own sensors independently of a human designer. The first device, the evolved radio, is the result of a recent hardware evolution (HE) experiment conducted by the authors.

LEON 36.2 - GFP Bunny

The author describes his transgenic artwork GFP Bunny and discusses the theoretical and practical implications of creating a new mammal in the context of art. Weaving together insights from philosophy, molecular biology, natural history, cognitive ethology and art, the author places primary emphasis on the welfare of the transgenic rabbit he has created. The author rejects biological determinism and states his goals of developing a dialogical relationship with the bunny based on love and care.