Leonardo
Volume 31, Number 1
February/March 1998
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.
Pages 1-2
Editorial: Live From Mars
Eduardo Kac
Page 3
Leonardo/ISAST News
Pages 15-12
Liliane Lijn
Body and Soul: Interactions between the Material and the Immaterial in Sculpture
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.
Pages 13-19
Victorial Vesna
Another Day in Paradise and Virtual Concrete: Installation and Telepresence Works
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.
Pages 21-31
Mike King
Concerning the Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art and Science
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.
Pages 35-45
Special Section: Art and Biology
Art and Biology Artists' Statements
Artists' Statements
Tony Bellaver: Teaching "Nature" How To Become Nature: The Woodland Recovery Project
Isabelle Chemin and Guido Hubner, Das Synthetische Mischgewebe: TransNEUROsite: An Alliance between Artists and Engineers
Mark Peden: Amoebic Lifeforms Visual Forms of Artificial Life
LVMH Science for Art Prize Abstracts
Ryozo Fujii: Skin Colors and Patterns in Fish
Árpád Furka: How to Prepare a Cornucopia of New Substances
Elliot Meyerowitz: Unraveling the Mysteries of Flower Development
Thor W. Nilsen: DNA Dendrimers
Pages 47-54
Roy R. Behrens
The Artistic and Scientific Collaboration of Blanche Ames Ames and Adelbert Ames II
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.
Pages 55-65
Maria Anna Harley
Music of Sound and Light: Xenakis's Polytopes
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.
Pages 67-73
Patricia Railing
The Cognitive Line in Russian Avant-Garde Art
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.
Pages 74-79
Reviews
Rudolf Arnheim, Paul Hertz, Wilfred Niels Arnold István Hargittai, Roger F. Malina,
