Leonardo | Page 395 | Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University

Leonardo

LEON 34.1 - A Painter's Eye Movements: A Study of Eye and Hand Movement during Portrait Drawing

The mental processes that al-low an artist to transform visual images-e.g. those of his model-into a picture on the canvas are not easily studied. The authors re-port work measuring the eye and hand movements of a single artist, chosen for his detailed and realis-tic portraits produced from life. His eye fixations when painting or drawing were of twice the duration of those when he was not painting and also quite different from those of novice artists. His eye-hand co-ordination pattern also showed dif-ferences from that of novices, be-ing more temporally consistent.

LEON 34.1 - Brain Activities in a Skilled versus a Novice Artist: An fMRI Study

Functional Magnetic Reso-nance Imaging (fMRI) scans of a skilled portrait artist and of a non-artist were made as each drew a series of faces. There was a dis-cernible increase in blood flow in the right-posterior parietal region of the brain for both the artist and non-artist during the task, a site normally associated with facial per-ception and processing. However, the level of activation appeared lower in the expert than in the nov-ice, suggesting that a skilled artist may process facial information more efficiently.

LEON 34.1 - La beauté tragique: Mapping the Militarization of Spatial Cultural Consciousness

The author investigates the militarization of immersive cultural consciousness, as initiated by the aerial bombardment of civilians at Guernica and during World War II. Parallel to this trend he observes an ambient-immersive impetus in post-war art, which he traces in the example of the Espace group, and in the currently developing technology of virtual reality.

LEON 33.5 - “Reality” Artificial Reproduction, and Sexuality

Multimedia artist Jose Carlos Casado, with the assistance of writer Harkaitz Cano, discusses his work in progress, La Caja de Pandora (“Pandora's Box”), in which digital video, 3D animations, and interactivity merge in a series of installations about “reality” artificial reproduction, and sexuality. His study searches for the boundaries where belief starts and asks what makes us accept what we see. It also investigates the new relationship between the mind and the body, and its relation to technologies.

LEON 33.5 - Gene Culture: Molecular Metaphor in Visual Art

This paper addresses visual art's relationship to genetics and its attendant metaphorical representation. By diagramming models of the ways in which DNA is visualized and comprehended as a system of signs, parallel conceptions between art history's engagement with abstraction, recontextualization, and duplication is compared to genetic process and laboratory experimentation.