LABS 2006–2013 | Leonardo

Top-Ranked LABS Abstracts 2006–2013

The Leonardo Abstracts Service (LABS) is an evolving, comprehensive database of thesis abstracts (PhD, Master's and MFA) on topics at the intersections between art, science and technology. This English-language database is hosted by Pomona College (Claremont, CA), under the direction of editor-in-chief Sheila Pinkel.

Each year, in addition to being published in the database, a selection of abstracts are chosen by a peer review panel for their special relevance. We are pleased to present below the top-ranked thesis abstracts of 2006–2013, and we congratulate the authors of the theses. To read the full abstracts in the English-language database, visit collections.pomona.edu/labs.

2006

  • “The Implications for Artistic Expressions and Representations of corporeality of the Experimental Techniques of Biomedical Engineering” by Patricia L. Adams (English LABS)
  • “Structural Constellations: Excursus on the drawings of Josef Albers c. 1950–1960” by Anthony Auerbach (English LABS)
  • “Video Activism in the Italian Centri Sociali. A Visual Ethnography” by Alessandra Caporale (Spanish LABS)
  • “Digital Lutherie: Crafting musical computers for new musics, performance and improvisation” by Sergi Jorda (Spanish LABS)
  • “This Might Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century” by Jane Evelyn McGonigal (English LABS)
  • “Aesthetics, Writing, Networked Computers” by Joerg Mueller (English LABS)
  • “Machine Metaphysics: Descartes, the Mechanization of Life, and the Dawn of the Posthuman” by Andres Vaccari (English LABS)

2008

  • “Critical Reflection in a Digital Media Artwork—Playas: Homeland Mirage” by Jack Stenner
  • “The Cinema and its Spectatorship: The Spiritual Dimension of the 'Human Apparatus'” by Martha Blassnigg
  • “Encouraging the Expression of the Unspeakable: Influence and Agency in a Robotic Creature" by Nicholas A. Knouf
  • “An enactive approach to digital musical instrument design” by Newton Armstrong
  • “Towards Autonomous Agents for Live Computer Music: Realtime Machine Listening and Interactive Music Systems” by Nicholas Mark Collins
  • “World Sensorium: The Theory, Practice and Significance of the World Social Olfactory Sculpture” by Gayil Nalls
  • “Processpatching, defining new methods in aRt&D” by Anne Nighton

2009

  • “Reconfiguring Space” by Paul Thomas
  • “Growing Semi-Living Art” by Ionat Zurr
  • “Synthetics: an Archaeology of the Electronic Image in Australia, 1955–1975” by Stephen Jones
  • “Glucose, wireless chat for local communities” by Noah Shibley
  • “Artefacts, Technicity and Humanisation: industrial design and the problem of anoetic technologies” by Stephen Thompson
  • “Creating order in the ceaseless flow: The discursive constitution of the radio spectrum” by Zita Joyce
  • “Out of Order: Explorations in Digital Materiality” by Susan Ballard
  • “Transparency, Cognition and Interactivity: Toward a New Aesthetic for Media Art” by Brigitta Zics
  • “Towards a Species Songbook: Illuminating the Vocalisations of the Australian Pied Butcherbird (Cracticus nigrogularis)” by Hollis Taylor
  • “Becoming Bird: Sound, Image, Movement” by B. Lea Cox
  • “On the Couch—Capturing Audience Experience. A Case Study on Paul Sermon's 'Telematic Vision'” by Rolf Wolfensberger
  • “The Experience of Interactive Art: A Curatorial Study” by Elizabeth Muller

2010

  • “Interactive Art Through Embodiment, and Embodiment Through Interactive Art” by Nathaniel Stern
  • “Fieldwork/Fieldwalking: Art, Sauntering and Science in the Walking Country” by Perdita Phillips
  • “The Ear of the Beholder: Ecology, Embodiment and Complexity in Sound Installation” by Dr. Tom Davis
  • “Mutations of Pastness: Time, Cinema, Ontology” by Jenna Pei-Suin Ng
  • “Perceiving Experience: Accounting for the role of the audience in the construction of pervasive and locative artworks” by Christopher James Fry
  • “New Media Art in Central and Eastern Europe in the 2000s” by Agnieszka Pokrywka
  • “Rhythmic Digitality and the Modulation of Perception” by Eleni Ikoniadou
  • “Expressive Sound Synthesis for Animation” by Cecile Picard-Limpens

2011

  • “How Art Can Make One Critically Aware of the Workings of Media” by Saskia Korsten
  • “The Search for a Third Way of Curating New Media Art: Balancing Content and Context in and out of the Institution” by Sarah Cook
  • “Ambivalent Animal” by Geoffrey Thomas
  • “Interdisciplinary Inquiry through Bio Art and Plant Neurobiology” by Laura Cinti
  • “Mixed Reality Art and the Graphical User Interface” by Ian Gwilt
  • “MINDtouch – Ephemeral Transference: ‘Liveness’ in Networked Performance with Mobile Devices” by Camille Baker
  • “A Practice-informed Critique of Technological Posthumanism and Its Ideologies” by David Cecchetto
  • “Realtime and Accurate Musical Control of Expression in Voice Synthesis” by Nicolas d’Alessandro
  • “Experimental Cinema In the Age of Binary Data: The Digital Alternative to the Celluloid Image” by Robert Daniel Flowers
  • “Unstable Territories of Representation: Architectural Experience and the Behavior of Forms, Spaces and the Collective Dynamic Environment” by Sana Murrani
  • “Network: Agency and Intentionality in Expressive Computational Systems” by Jichen Zhu
  • “Dynamic Systems Aesthetics of Interactive Media in Daivd Rokeby’s The Giver of Names” by Tabitha Minns
  • “Potentials of Datat Sonification in Visual Art: Sonifying the CompArt Database” by Tobias Hildebrandt
  • “Aesthetic Complexity: Practice and Perception in Art & Design” by Guy Birkin
  • “Latent State: A Theoretical and Practical Study of Live Cinema” by Andres Colubri
  • “Metrics and Images In the Theater-Educational System “Technology of Formation” and their application” by Anelia Hristova Grivorova
  • “Genetic Art and Recombinants: Introns, Non-Code and the Proto-Animate Condition” by Andre Brodyk

2012

  • “Situated Networks: In (Re)search of the Public” by T.F. Tierney
  • “Scorescapes: On Sound, Environment and Sconic Consciousness” by Yolande Harris
  • “Music to be Seen" by Michaelidi
  • “Structuring Somnolence: Sleep Science Technology as a Medium for Drawing with the Body at Rest” by Lisa Carrie Goldberg
  • “Time and Space Compression in Cyberspace Art” by Avi Rosen
  • “The Phenomenological Impact of Interface on the Analysis of Digital Music and Sonic Art” by Michael Austin
  • “Poetics of the Interface: Creating Works of Art that Engage in Self-Reflection” by Miguel Santos
  • “Transactional Arts – Art as the Exchange of Values and the Conversion of Capital” by Daniela Alina Plewe
  • “Primate Aesthetics” by Chelsea Lynn Sams
  • “Die Computerkunst Herbert W. Frankes” by Penesta Dika
  • “Quality of Aesthetic Experience and Implicit Modulating Factors” by Wendy Ann Mansilla
  • “Conversation in the Animal and the Machine” by Guilherne Kujawaski
  • “Re-negotiating Social Space: Public Art Installations and Interactive Experience” by Linda Ryan Bengtsson
  • “I Mirabilia, Taking Care of the Emocial Life of Hospitalized Children” by Erika Rossi

2013

  • “Personal Media and Wireless Citites: Towards an Urban Spatial Analysis” by Molly Hankwitz
  • “3D Information Place: Architecture for Vital Place-Making and Information Navigation” by Pei-Hsien Hsu
  • “From Function to Schema to Interaction: The Evolution of Design Language of Artifacts” by Yuelin Liu
  • “Photography as the Aesthetic Determination of Difference” by Daniel Rubinstein
  • “Arresting Beauty: The Perfectionist Impulse of Peale’s Butterflies, Heade’s Hummingbirds, Blaschka’s Flowers, and Sandow’s Body” by Ellery Foutch

Spanish and French Language LABS

Previously LABS also consisted of Spanish LABS and French LABS databases. These are not currently active but are archived at the following locations: