Leonardo
Volume 27, Number 4 (1994)
Issue Contents
July/August 1994
Leonardo is a print journal, edited by Leonardo/the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, and published by the MIT Press. Subscriptions and individual issues can be ordered from the MIT Press.
TO ORDER
GATEWAY
Contributors: CHRISTINE CHRISTOS, JURGEN CLAUS, BRENT COLLINS, POSY JACKSON SMITH, CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN, ALLAN SHIELDS, IRINA VANECHKINA
SPECIAL SECTION
Virtual Reality: Venus Return or Vanishing Point
Guest Editor: Kiersta Fricke
Introduction: Venus Return or Vanishing Point
by KIERSTA FRICKE
ABSTRACT
The potential of virtual reality technology to free us from the constraints of time and space appeals to a human longing for transcendence. We want to experience other circumstances without any real threat of danger. We want to be gods, to be able to change shape and form at will. Virtual reality assures us that we can---that we can reach the sun without melting our wings.
Although virtual reality will never be able to fulfill this promise, the artists in this special section of Leonardo are not discouraged. On the contrary, they seem emboldened by the paradox. They have transmuted ideal possibility into individual vision. However, while they are interested in engendering a humanistic view of technology, the sinister aspects of virtual reality are not ignored in their discussions.
I chose "Virtual Reality: Venus Return or Vanishing Point" as a title for this special section in order to express this tension. "Venus Return" is a medical term for blood being pumped back to the heart: an apt metaphor for the view that technology needs to support life-affirming activities. The mythological connotation also intimates a growing acceptance, not yet fully evident in the marketplace, of a more lyrical approach to virtual reality art and entertainment. "Vanishing Point" suggests the darker side of virtual reality: isolation verging on annihilation of the body. The connotation of anxiety is also appropriate, given the term's allusion to the introduction of "perspective" in Western painting and the attendant shift in world view.
Free City and the Art of Memory: The Novel as Artificial Reality
by ERIC DARTON
ABSTRACT
In this article, the author relates artificial reality to the Art of Memory, a rhetorical technique that originated in Greece in the fourth century B.C. involving the creation of a mental schema corresponding to a real or imagined topography. This schema was then impressed with images, phrases or words chosen by the user. The Art of Memory is discussed as an aspect of the author's fable Free City, set in a northern European port in the seventeenth century. Its protagonist uses the Art as both a rhetorical discipline and a survival strategy. The article concludes with comments on the relationship between artificial reality, history and fiction.
Theater Without Actors---Immersion and Response in Installation
by TONI DOVE
ABSTRACT
The author's installations led to her interest in creating immersive narrative spaces, which would surround the viewer and provide a sense of movement through time without relying on linearity. Through discussion of her collaborative work on a virtual reality performance/installation, the author presents her criticisms of the concepts of mapping and choice prevalent in interactive artwork. She discusses her interests in the alternative concepts of immersion and response. The relation of certain myths surrounding virtual reality to social and economic factors is briefly analyzed within the author's cultural context. Her current ideas for creating immersive and responsive environments are outlined.
Huan Shi and Virtual Reality
by NAI-WAI-HSU
ABSTRACT
The author believes that the successful implementation of virtual reality in theater productions precludes the use of the isolating forms of technology usually associated with the genre, such as goggles and headsets. His theater group, Huan Shi, has been working with computers since 1990 to create illusions through real-time digitization and projection. Through descriptions of the company's productions in Taiwan and New York, the author outlines Huan Shi's attempts to foster audience involvement and to use this technology in an integrative rather than a spectacular manner.
The Mutant Gene and Tainted Kool-Aid Sideshow
by M.R. PETIT
ABSTRACT
The author describes the context and background in which she created The Mutant Gene and Tainted Kool-Aid Sideshow, a multisensory piece that incorporates live, multiple-monitor and projected video, animation, and sequenced and instrumental music. Through this work the author explores the boundaries of environmental and psychological states through a journey into a series of multicolored, entropic landscapes.
Choosing Tools for Virtual Environments
by DAN O'SULLIVAN
ABSTRACT
The author describes how virtual reality tools can allow greater access to the imagination and explains how he has chosen his tools for creating virtual environments such as navigable movies and interactive cable television shows. He discusses how his work is moving toward minimizing special effects in order to enlist the cooperation of the user's imagination. He is now making use of less-immersive interactive multimedia to create virtual spaces, rather than relying on more realistic and expensive tools for sensory illusion.
WORDS ON WORKS
Is Anyone There? A Voice-Activated Tour of San Francisco via Its Pay Telephones
by STEPHEN WILSON
Broken Heart (Corazòn Roto)
by ISAAC VICTOR KERLOW
Readings in Organized Chaos
by MAX LANIER and LORA McDONALD
Acid Migration of Culture
by NORA LIGORANO and MARSHALL REESE
Sound and Ceramics
by BART LYNCH
Global Displacement Network
by DANA FRITZ and LARRY GAWEL
Maouja Menhouta (Sculpted Wave)
by AZDINE SEDJAL
Lagoon Project: San Francisco Exploratorium
by LAURIE LUNDQUIST
DOCUMENT
Taste and the Greening of Design: The Role of Design Imagery in a Post-Acquisitive Society
by PETER LLOYD-JONES
ABSTRACT
The author discusses the role of industrial design in the generation of apparently endless expanding demand for goods in "consumer societies." This expansion is seen as situated in the universal socialisation of the possession of consumer goods as embodied surrogates for status. Yet, given inevitable eventual constraints on planetary resources, this expansion must one day be attenuated. Existing approaches to "green" issues in the field of design concentrate on specific technical matters such as the replacement of precious and limited resources by cheaper, more widely available materials, recycling and the like. The author argues that, while these approaches are important, they are only temporary solutions and in the end it is consumer demand itself that must be abridged. It is demand that must be "greened" if stable human ecosystems are to be attained. This can only be done by changing the role of consumer imagery, so that its symbolism---currently expressive of the values of a competitive individualism---is diverted into expressions of social solidarity.
GENERAL ARTICLE
Science Icons: The Visualization of Scientific Truths
by INGRID KALLICK-WAKKER
ABSTRACT
Scientific images satisfy our desire to see and understand complex phenomena. These idealized, attractive artificial objects can stand in for information; however, the creators of these images must balance persuasion with accuracy. Some have considered this balancing act a design problem consequent to the scientific process, yet scientists continue to communicate visually to their peers and the public and to incorporate mental models into their work. The author argues that the nature and limitations of visualization are more than a matter of design. Producers and consumers of visualization must also address the interpretive and communicative power of scientific images in society.
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
The Emotion of Cyberspace: Art and Cyber-Ecology
by OLLIVIER DYENS
ABSTRACT
In this essay, the author will try to examine the emergence of what could be called a "cognitive cyborg" in cyberspace. This cyborg, created by the human/computer cognitive symbiosis, will give rise to new perceptions of the world, new works of art and especially to new emotions.
Art History and the Criticism of Computer-Generated Images
by JAMES ELKINS
ABSTRACT
As the field of computer graphics expands, it tends to be taught in a manner that is increasingly isolated from the history of art. The author shows how computer graphics can reconnect to wider sources of meaning in three arenas: (1) continuous traditions spanning Western painting and contemporary rendering techniques, which result in the sharing of specific meanings and pictorial strategies; (2) linear perspective, which has been put to very different uses in painting and in computer graphics, so that it is possible to speak of a developing tradition of perspectival conventions; and (3) drawing, which, at the computer, may be different in kind from drawing done with a pencil and paper, so that traditional picturemaking and computer-assisted drawings can form a productive, mutually illuminating contrast. The comparisons are used to demonstrate that the history of art is intimately associated with the exploration of computer-assisted imagery, even though it remains largely absent from its pedagogy.
INVITED REVIEW
Synaesthesia: An Account of Coloured Hearing
by JOHN HARRISON and SIMON BARON-COHEN
ABSTRACT
The condition of synaesthesia, in which sensory stimulation in one modality gives rise to sensations experienced in another, has been known to the scientific community for nearly 300 years and yet has remained relatively unexplored. In the first part of the following article, the authors discuss historical accounts of the condition and investigate its impact upon the fields of art, music and literature. Recently, a number of experiments have been conducted that allow for a more objective investigation of the condition. The authors discuss accounts of the nature of the condition with reference to these experiments. They conclude by attempting to characterise synaesthesia and its impact on those individuals who possess this unusual condition.
REVIEWS
Contributors: RUDOLF ARNHEIM, GEOFFREY GAINES, JOHN HORN, ROGER F. MALINA, MICHEL MENDÈs FRANCE, SIMON PENNY, BENJAMIN PIERCE, RICHARD ROSS
ART/SCIENCE FORUM
Design and Entertainment in the Electronic Age
by REBECCA ALLEN, BILL BROWN, KIT GALLOWAY, RUTH E. ISKIN, SHERRIE RABINOWITZ and ALEX SINGER
Farewell Prometheus Readings: Light-Music in the Former Soviet Union
by BULAT M. GALEYEV
ABSTRACTS
Symbiosis of Film and Painting
by JOHANNES DEUTSCH
TimeTunnel
by URSULA KRAFT
The Vorkapitchulator
by SHELDON BROWN
Winke Winke: A Project on the Transmission of Messages
by GERFRIED STOCKER and HORST HORTNER
