Our Mission: Leonardo/ISAST serves the international arts community by promoting and documenting work at the intersection of the arts, sciences and technology, and by encouraging and stimulating collaboration between artists, scientists and technologists.
Our Vision: Science and Technology dominate our current landscape, emerging with an intensity and velocity never before experienced. This intense intellectual creativity needs to be integrated with the humanizing activity of creating art, to bring balance to how we experience our current existence and imagine our futures. Over the course of history, art has been both an organizing and integrating role with our emotional and intellectual lives. Art serves as a means of presenting, questioning, understanding and creating order out of chaos and change. Imagination often leads the way of discovery in science. Innovation of art, science and technology will allow for new ideas that may be important economically and socially. Leonardo/ISAST serves as the organization that nurtures and fosters this alliance between the arts and sciences, proactively bringing these social networks together leading to greater creativity and social change in both areas.
SPECIAL PROJECTS: CURRENT ACTIVITIES AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Art History Special Project
The Leonardo Art History Project involves collaborative publications, activities
and events, including: (1) The Pioneers and Pathbreakers web site: reliable,
selected, on-line documentation on twentieth-century artists whose works and
ideas are considered seminal in the development of technology-based and science-based
art, (2) The First International Conference on the Histories of Media Art,
Science and Technologies (Sept. 28Oct. 2, 2005): discussions in the context
of the interdisciplinary and intercultural contexts of the histories of art,
(3) Archival, peer-reviewed articles published in the journal Leonardo: memoirs
by pioneering new media artists, texts by art historians and scholars examining
the interaction between the contemporary arts and science, and current developments
within the context of earlier movements, and (4) Course materials for educators:
collected research on early art-and-technology practice and practitioners.
Global Crossings Special Project
The Leonardo Global Crossings Project recognizes the contribution of artists and scholars from culturally diverse communities worldwide, in the following ways: (1) Publication of the work of international artists and scholars, (2) Recognition of the work of these individuals through the Leonardo Awards Program, with the first Global Crossings Award presented in 2005, and (3) Enabling and supporting the participation of such artists and scholars at events and conferences. The Leonardo Global Crossings Project has received funding from the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Education Initiative
As part of its ongoing effort to promote the advancement of scholarship in the field of art/science/technology, Leonardo has developed the Leonardo Education Initiative, which includes: (1) The Leonardo Abstracts Service (LABS), a collection of peer-reviewed theses abstracts in a comprehensive database designed to give visibility to interdisciplinary work and its authors, (2) The Leonardo International Faculty Alerts List, e-mailings of interest to art-and-technology faculty, (3) Readers and course materials designed for use in university-level art and technology curricula, available at low cost to educators and students, (4) On-line archived articles on key topics of historical interest to art-and-technology educators and students, available for free or at low cost to educators and students, (5) Presentation of moderated panel discussions, town hall meetings and student mentorship workshops at the annual College Art Association (CAA) Conferences.
Integrated Publishing Project
Collaboration between Leonardo/ISAST, the San Francisco Art Institute and others will result in a special print-plus-DVD issue of Leonardo linked to the 2006 Pacific Rim New Media Summit, a pre-symposium project of ISEA 2006 (International Symposium of Electronic Arts, San Jose, California, August 2006). Leonardo will coordinate the content and editorial functions, and SFAI students and faculty will design and produce both the print issue and the multimedia DVD, allowing the dissemination of work in a variety of possible formats, including video, sound, interactive work, hypertext, etc. This collaborative project will draw upon the talents and energies of a diverse group of students, educators, artists, researchers and editors to produce a unique showcase of media work from around the Pacific Rim.
Pacific Rim New Media Summit, ISEA 2006
Tied to our Global Crossings project, Leonardo/ISAST is co-sponsoring (along with CADRE Laboratory for New Media, San Jose State University) the 2006 Pacific Rim New Media Summit (PRNMS), a pre-symposium to the ISEA 2006 Conference in San Jose, California. With a purview encompassing all states and nations that border the Pacific Ocean, this trans-disciplinary event will explore and build interpretive bridges between institutional, corporate, social and cultural enterprises, with an emphasis on new media arts programs and initiatives. Goals of the PRNMS summit include the establishment of an ongoing Network of New Media Educational Institutions, including a Pacific Rim Directory; creation of an experimental multimedia issue of Leonardo on DVD featuring work from the Pacific Rim; and creation of strategic alliances between Pacific Rim organizations to promote future collaborations.
Awards Program
As part of Leonardo/ISAST's mission of encouraging the innovative presentation of technology-based arts, Leonardo/ISAST recognizes artists and organizations interested in the use of new media in contemporary artistic expression through cash awards given through the Leonardo Awards Program in the following categories: (1) To authors for excellence in articles published in Leonardo, (2) To artists and scholars from culturally diverse communities worldwide, (3) To new and emerging artists, (4) To eminent artists who, through a lifetime of work, have achieved a synthesis of contemporary art, science and technology, and (5) To organizations and artists' groups that have increased public awareness of art forms involving science and technology.
Leonardo Music Journal
Leonardo Music Journal, published annually by the MIT Press, is devoted to
aesthetic and technical issues in contemporary music and the sonic arts. Currently
under the editorship of Nicolas Collins (School of the Art Inst. of Chicago),
each thematic issue features artists/writers from around the world, representing
a wide range of stylistic viewpoints, and includes an independently curated
audio CD or CD-ROM. Volume 14, "Composers inside Electronics: Music after David Tudor," appeared at the end of 2004. Volume 15, "The Word," will be published in 2005. Volume 16, "The Sounding Object," is
in the very early planning stages and will be published in 2006.
Leonardo Reviews
Leonardo Reviews is the work of an international panel of scholars and professionals invited from a wide range of disciplines to review books, exhibitions, CD-ROMs, web sites and conferences. Collectively they represent an intellectual commitment to engage with the emergent debates and manifestations that are the consequences of the convergence of the arts, science and technology. The project includes a web site where all reviews are posted.; selected reviews are published in the electronic journal Leonardo Electronic Almanac and in the print journal Leonardo