Leonardo
Vol. 37, Issue 2 (2004)

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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ArtScience: The Essential Connection
by ROBERT ROOT-BERNSTEIN

Special Section: @rt Outsiders Festival
Artists' Statements from selected participants in the Third @rt Outsiders International Digital Art Festival, 18 September--20 October 2002, Paris. Web: http://www.art-outsiders.com.

Introduction: @rt Outsiders Festival: The New Alchemists of Creation
by JEAN-LUC SORET

Quorum Sensing: An Interactive Installation
by CHU-YIN CHEN

You Think, Therefore I Am (Following You) (Tu penses donc je te suis)
by MAGALI DESBAZEILLE and SIEGFRIED CANTO with CHRISTINE BEIGEL

An Aesthetic of Emptiness
by CHRISTOPHE LUXEREAU

BioWall---An Electronic Tissue That Pulsates Like Skin
by DANIEL MANGE and GIANLUCA TEMPESTI

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Artist's Note

15 seconds of fame
by FRANC SOLINA

ABSTRACT: 15 seconds of fame is an interactive installation that every 15 seconds generates a new pop-art portrait of a randomly selected viewer. The installation was inspired by Andy Warhol's ironical statement that "in the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes." The installation detects human faces and crops them from the wide-angle view of people standing before the installation. Pop-art portraits are then generated by applying randomly selected filters to a randomly chosen face from the audience. These portraits are then shown in 15-second intervals on the flat-panel computer monitor, which is framed as a painting.

Franc Solina, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, Tr_a_ka c. 25, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia. E-mail: franc.solina@fri.uni-lj.si.

General Articles

Planetary Technoetics: Art, Technology and Consciousness
by ROY ASCOTT

ABSTRACT: As the planet becomes telematically unified, the self becomes dispersed. The convergence of dry silicon pixels and biologically wet particles is creating a moistmedia substrate for art where digital systems, telematics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology meet. A technoetic aesthetic will not only embrace new media, technology, consciousness research and non-classical science but will also gain new insights from older cultural traditions previously banished from materialist discourse as esoteric or shamanic. As the century progresses, we may find ancient plant technology allied to the emerging moistmedia technologies of our constructed realities and new or rediscovered realms of consciousness contiguous with new domains of the planetary web. In the present post-9/11 crisis, with its competing ideas of reality and morality, collaborative transdisciplinary research is needed if a truly planetary culture is to emerge that is techno-ethical as well as technoetic. Entirely new organisms of communication, learning and creativity must be engendered.

Roy Ascott, Planetary Collegium, School of Computing, Communications and Electronics, University of Plymouth, Drake Circus, Plymouth PL4 8AA, England. E-mail: roy.ascott@btinternet.com.

Intellectual Property: A Chronological Compendium of Intersections between Contemporary Art and Utility Patents
by ROBERT THILL

ABSTRACT: The author presents a group of projects in which the roles of inventor, artist, amateur and institution variously overlap, merge and blur, offering new perspectives on the relationship between contemporary art and patents. Addressing issues of originality, aesthetics, labor, ownership and value, these projects demonstrate a continuous link between art and patents and encourage thoughtful speculation about shared concerns, guiding ideologies and forms.

Robert Thill, 274 Gates Avenue, #7, Brooklyn, NY 11216-1361, U.S.A. E-mail: rst0@juno.com.

Artist's Article

Color Intervals: Applying Concepts of Musical Consonance and Dissonance to Color
by KATHERINE LUBAR

ABSTRACT: Throughout the centuries there have been numerous attempts to correlate elements within the fields of music and visual art. The author compares the 12-tone musical scale to the 12-hued subtractive pigment color wheel commonly used by artists and applies the principles of consonance and dissonance in musical intervals to their counterparts in color "intervals." The main function of this paper is to put forth a paradigm that can be used by artists as a point of departure for their own explorations into the use of color as well as to create a possible method of analyzing works of art to understand why certain color combinations may work well together.

Katherine Lubar, Studio 44, Great Western Studios, Great Western Road, London W9 3NY, U.K. E-mail: katlubar@ntlworld.com.

Statements

T2000
by KOK KEE CHOY

Kandinsky's Color-Form Correspondence and the Bauhaus Colors: An Empirical View
by THOMAS JACOBSEN

Special Section: Artmedia

Selected papers from the international symposium Artmedia VIII: From Aesthetics of Communication to Net Art, co-organized by Fred Forest, Mario Costa and Annick Bureau, Paris, December 2002. Web: http://www.olats.org/projetpart/artmedia/2002eng/mono_index.html.

Guest Editor: Annick Bureaud, Leonardo Editorial Advisor, E-mail: annick@nunc.com.

Introduction: From Aesthetics of Communication to Net Art: The ArtMedia VIII Symposium
by ANNICK BUREAUD

Artistic Practice as Construction and Cultivation of Knowledge Space
by WOLFGANG STRAUSS and MONIKA FLEISCHMANN

ABSTRACT: This article presents the netzspannung.org Internet platform, a media laboratory on the Internet that not only collects high-quality information on digital culture and media production but also interlinks this information, contextualizes it and makes it available on-line as a constantly expanding knowledge space that, like a library, can be explored by the public as an interactive installation and an educational space. In the broadest sense, the aim of this project is to visualize and semantically network information to create "knowledge spaces" that can be explored interactively and in real time and that are accessible to the user through play. Technologies, on-line tools and intuitive interfaces are being developed that support communication between the digital and physical spaces and investigate new forms of knowledge acquisition as "knowledge-based arts."

Wolfgang Strauss, MARS-Exploratory Media Lab, Fraunhofer Institute for Media Communication, Schloss Birlinghoven D-53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany. E-mail: wolfgang.strauss@imk.fhg.de.

Monika Fleischmann, MARS-Exploratory Media Lab, Fraunhofer Institute for Media Communication, Schloss Birlinghoven D-53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany. E-mail: monika.fleischmann@imk.fhg.de. Web: http://imk.fraunhofer.de/mars; http://netzspannung.org.

The SMSMS Project: Collective Intelligence Machines in the Digital City
by MAURIZIO BOLOGNINI

ABSTRACT:The author's SMSMS project, a computer-based interactive installation, is presented, and some implications concerning art and new technologies are discussed. SMSMS derives from a previous work, Computer sigillati, in which 200 machines have been programmed to produce an endless flow of random images and left to work indefinitely without being connected to a monitor. In SMSMS, one of the Computer sigillati programs is employed to create images that are visible and can be modified by the public using cell phones. It is argued that SMSMS could be considered indistinctly as either an exercise in collective intelligence or, in contrast, as a disturbance to the perfectly unpredictable working of the machine. It is concluded that this apparent contradiction, as well as the oppositions between control and randomness, intelligence and chaos, should itself be recognized as one of the most significant themes for artistic research using new technologies.

Maurizio Bolognini, Via Matteotti 25, 25062 Concesio (Bs), Italy. E-mail: m.bolognini@hyperdelphi.net.

Historical Perspective

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the work of Brazilian artist Flávio de Carvalho (1899--1973) from the perspective of contemporary media art, highlighting his practical and theoretical legacy. Initially associated with the Anthropophagy art movement, Carvalho used mass media creatively and incorporated insights from psychology, sociology and anthropology into his art. He realized events that went beyond "performance art," including a pioneering presentation on television in 1957. This article offers a brief overview of Carvalho's trajectory.

Rui Moreira Leite, 3665 Rua da Consolação #81, São Paulo, SP, 01416-001, Brazil. E-mail: miraleite@uol.com.br.

Leonardo Reviews

Reviews by Fred Andersson, Wilfred Niels Arnold, Roy R. Behrens, Sean Cubitt, Dennis Dollens, Allan Graubard, Dene Grigar, Rob Harle, Amy Ione, Michael R. (Mike) Mosher, Robert Pepperell, Stefaan Van Ryssen

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