Editorial

Live From Mars

by Eduardo Kac

Leonardo/ISAST News

Body and Soul: Interactions between the Material and the Immaterial in Sculpture

by Liliane Lijn

ABSTRACT: In this article the author discusses her use of light to explore relationships between the material and the immaterial, illustrating the interconnectedness of spiritual and physical phenomena through her work and its range of influences and interests from particle physics to mythology and psychology. She describes the processes involved in the development of her work, taking examples from pieces made at different periods in her career.

Another Day in Paradise and Virtual Concrete: Installation and Telepresence Works

by Victorial Vesna

ABSTRACT: Silicon shapes our realities through implants in our bodies, the chips that drive computer technologies, the concrete we walk and drive on, and the elements of nature we preserve. In this article, the author provides a narrative account of the research involved in building two large-scale installations created during the years 1992--1995. Another Day in Paradise addressed the artificiality of planned communities; Virtual Concrete modified the common perception that there is a dichotomy between the material and the immaterial.

Concerning the Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art and Science

by Mike King

ABSTRACT: A recent proliferation of writings on the spiritual by scientists suggests that this is an appropriate time to reevaluate the spiritual in twentieth-century art. The author looks at three artistic groupings---Wassily Kandinsky and the Bauhaus school, the Abstract Expressionists and the contemporary electronic arts---and traces the influences of various spiritual movements on them. The author then turns to the spiritual in modern science, observing that quantum theory has been the main starting point for many physicists to write about religious ideas. Several issues are examined: whether science at this juncture is more receptive to the spiritual than are the arts; whether art can mediate between science and the spiritual; and whether the spiritual is antecedent to both the arts and science.

Special Section: Art and Biology

Artists' Statements

Teaching "Nature" How To Become Nature: The Woodland Recovery Project

by Tony Bellaver

TransNEUROsite: An Alliance between Artists and Engineers

by Isabelle Chemin and Guido Hubner, Das Synthetische Mischgewebe

Amoebic Lifeforms: Visual Forms of Artificial Life

by Mark Peden

LVMH Science for Art Prize Abstracts

Skin Colors and Patterns in Fish

by Ryozo Fujii

How to Prepare a Cornucopia of New Substances

by Árpád Furka

Unraveling the Mysteries of Flower Development

by Elliot Meyerowitz

DNA Dendrimers

by Thor W. Nilsen

The Artistic and Scientific Collaboration of Blanche Ames Ames and Adelbert Ames II

by Roy R. Behrens

ABSTRACT: During an uninterrupted period from about 1910 through 1913, Blanche Ames Ames (1878--1969), an American artist and women's suffragist, worked closely with her brother, Adelbert Ames II (1880--1955), a lawyer, artist and optical physiologist, in a study of color, perspective and other aspects of pictorial art in the hope of using scientific findings to enhance the realism of their paintings. They made significant progress, but their close relationship ended in 1922 as a result of a disagreement about their joint authorship of a published paper.

Music of Sound and Light: Xenakis's Polytopes

by Maria Anna Harley

ABSTRACT: This article explores the audio-visual installations of Greek composer and architect Iannis Xenakis, focusing on the works he calls "polytopes." The term polytope captures the complexity of the spatial designs and multiple spaces of these unusual light-and-sound works, which have often used thousands of lights and hundreds of loudspeakers. Xenakis's polytopes are examined in their aesthetic and cultural context; the discussion of this original form of avant-garde art includes a survey of its forms, functions and reception.

The Cognitive Line in Russian Avant-Garde Art

by Patricia Railing

ABSTRACT: The painter's artistic tools are color and line---with them, perception and sensation of the world are transformed into objects. These objects reveal a transition from sensation to knowing, from creation to cognition. Kandinsky, Rodchenko and Malevich wrote about the functions of color and line in art---as a grammar of the soul and as rational instruments used to "name" the world. For Malevich, the line was also a sign, the indicator of a cognitive process and a historical marker.

Reviews

Reviews by Rudolf Arnheim, Paul Hertz, Wilfred Niels Arnold István Hargittai, Roger F. Malina,