Leonardo
Vol. 35, Issue 4 (2002)

Leonardo is a print journal, published five times a year. Leonardo is edited by Leonardo/the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, and published by the MIT Press.

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THE LEONARDO GALLERY

Peruvian Video/Electronic Art
Curated by JOSÉ-CARLOS MARIÁTEGUI

work by FRANCESCO MARIOTTI, ROGER ATASI, RICARDO VELARDE, IVÁN LOZANO, JOSÉ CARLOS MARTINAT, ANGIE BONINO, IVÁN ESQUIVEL

ARTIST'S ARTICLE

Growing Semi-Living Sculptures: The Tissue Culture & Art Project
by ORON CATTS and IONAT ZURR

ABSTRACT: Tissue engineering promises to replace and repair body organs but has largely been overlooked for artistic purposes. In the last 6 years, the authors have grown tissue sculptures, "semi-living objects," by culturing cells on artificial scaffolds. The goal of this work is to culture and sustain for long periods tissue constructs of varying geometrical complexity and size, and by that process to create a new artistic palette to focus attention on and challenge perceptions regarding the utilization of new biological knowledge.

ARTIST'S NOTE

Drawing with the Hand in Free Space: Creating 3D Shapes with Gesture in a Semi-Immersive Environment
by STEVEN SCHKOLNE

ABSTRACT: This article presents a new medium in which organic surfaces are drawn in 3D space with the hand. Special interface hardware includes a head-tracked stereoscopic display and sensors that track the body and handheld tools, allowing the artist to share the space of the artwork. Additional tools move and deform the shape. This method provides a fluid, unstructured access to three dimensions, ideal for quick, spontaneous ideation and investigation of complex structures.

ARTISTS' STATEMENTS

The Continuous Line in Space and Time
by BRUNO LE BAIL

Spontaneity Displayed through Technology
by JACQUES MANDELBROJT

GENERAL ARTICLE

ABSTRACT: Marrying traditional methods of computer programming with an artistic temperament allows the birth of a new phenomenon: the aesthetic program. The work of the author and his students builds on visual approaches in programming as well as in software modeling, leading toward a gradual evolution from program to model. The need for the aesthetic model is increased with the importance of personalized, individually tailored media, as found with web-based style sheets and the economic movement termed "mass customization." The author and his students have formulated the rube Project methodology around the use of 3D web-based virtual-world model construction. Initial results suggest that these models are artistic, while containing symbolism and concise metaphoric mapping sufficient to be executable on a computer.

EXTENDED ABSTRACT

Applying Galois Lattices to the Interactions of the Virgin and Child in Bellini's Paintings
by ARNAUD SANTOLINI, AGNÈS DANIS, CHARLES TIJUS and SÉBASTIEN POITRENAUD

ABSTRACT: We discuss in our work a method for the semantic description and analysis of figure paintings [1]. Our method consists in the construction of a Galois lattice, which is a hierarchy of categories [2], and in the use of current theories of categorization in cognitive psychology and of mother-child interaction in developmental psychology. We have applied this method to a sample of 98 pictorial representations of the Virgin and Child attributed to Giovanni Bellini (1426--1516) [3].

SPECIAL SECTION: A-LIFE IN ART, DESIGN, EDUTAINMENT, GAMES AND RESEARCH

The Scientific and Philosophical Scope of Artificial Life
by MARK BEDAU

ABSTRACT: The new interdisciplinary science of ALife has had a connection with the arts from its inception. This paper provides an overview of ALife, reviews its key scientific challenges and discusses its philosophical implications. It ends with a few words about the implications of ALife for the arts

Artificial Life and Philosophy
by ALVARO MORENO

ABSTRACT: Artificial Life is developing into a new type of discipline, based on computational construction as its main tool for exploring and producing a science of life "as it could be." In this area of research, the generation of complex virtual systems, in place of the traditional empirical domain, has become the actual object of theory. This entails a profound change in the traditional relationship between ontological, epistemological and methodological levels of analysis, which forces us to reconsider the differences apparently firmly established between science and philosophy. Even if the frontiers between these two kinds of knowledge do not completely disappear, new, dynamic, complex, technologically mediated interactions are being developed between them.

A Kantian Prescription for Artificial Conscious Experience
by SUSAN A.J. STUART AND CHRIS DOBBYN

ABSTRACT: Research in artificial intelligence, artificial life and cognitive science has not yet provided answers to any of the most perplexing questions about the mind, such as the nature of consciousness or of the self; in this article the authors make a suggestion for a new approach. They begin by setting their project in the broader cognitive science context and argue that little recent research adequately addresses the question of what are the necessary requirements for conscious experience to be possible. Kant addresses this question in his transcendental psychology, and although Kant's work is now over 200 years old the authors believe his approach is worthy of re-examination in the current debate about the mind.

SPECIAL SECTION: SIGGRAPH ART AND CULTURE PROGRAM

Art and Culture Papers from N-Space: The SIGGRAPH 2001 Art Gallery
curated by DENA EBER

What Does a Very Large-Scale Conversation Look Like? Artificial Dialectics and the Graphical Summarization of Large Volumes of E-Mail
by WARREN SACK

ABSTRACT: E-mail--based conversations between thousands of people---very large-scale conversations (VLSCs)---now take place in a variety of on-line public spaces such as Usenet newsgroups and large listservs. This article describes the author’s prototype Conversation Map system, which can automatically analyze and graphically summarize thousands of e-mail messages exchanged in VLSCs. Example conversation maps of nine VLSCs are presented. Finally, the sociolinguistic analysis performed by the Conversation Map is discussed as a form of artificial dialectics and the graphical summaries produced by the system are considered as potential common ground between participants in a VLSC. "Free speech" can mean not only face-to-face communication, but also expression embodied in the media of newspapers, books, television, film and so forth. Many of these media constitute public "spaces." With the introduction of each new public space, the theories and practices of "speech" and "conversation" are affected and extended. This article concerns a philosophical study of and artistic-design approach to some of the new, electronic, public spaces of the Internet and the forms of "speech," "conversation" and dialectics practiced in these new spaces.

Schizophrenia and Narrative in Artificial Agents
by PHOEBE SENGERS

ABSTRACT: Artificial-agent technology has become commonplace in technical research from computer graphics to interface design and in popular culture through the Web and computer games. On the one hand, the population of the Web and our PCs with characters who reflect us can be seen as a humanization of a previously purely mechanical interface. On the other hand, the mechanization of subjectivity carries the danger of simply reducing the human to the machine. The author argues that predominant artificial intelligence (AI) approaches to modeling agents are based on an erasure of subjectivity analogous to that which appears when people are subjected to institutionalization. The result is agent behavior that is fragmented, depersonalized, lifeless and incomprehensible. Approaching the problem using a hybrid of critical theory and AI agent technology, the author argues that agent behavior should be narratively understandable; she presents a new agent architecture that structures behavior to be comprehensible as narrative.

Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art
by EDWARD A. SHANKEN

ABSTRACT: Art historians have generally drawn sharp distinctions between conceptual art and art-and-technology. This essay reexamines the interrelationship of these tendencies as they developed in the 1960s, focusing on the art criticism of Jack Burnham and the artists included in the Software exhibition that he curated. The historicization of these practices as distinct artistic categories is examined. By interpreting conceptual art and art-and-technology as reflections and constituents of broad cultural transformations during the information age, the author concludes that the two tendencies share important similarities, and that this common ground offers useful insights into late--20th-century art.

NEW MEDIA DICTIONARY

Part VI: Telematics
by LOUISE POISSANT

COMMENTARIES

LEONARDO REVIEWS

by WILFRED NIELS ARNOLD, CLAIRE BARLIANT, ROY R. BEHRENS, ROBERT COBURN WITH FRAN"OIS ROSE, JULIEN KNEBUSCH, MIKE MOSHER, FRIEDER NAKE, ROBERT PEPPERELL, DAVID TOPPER, MIKHAIL S. ZALIVADNY

LEONARDO/ISAST News