| Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University

Leonardo Book Series

Published by The MIT Press with editor-in-chief Sean Cubitt, the Leonardo Book Series includes books by artists, scientists, researchers and scholars that present innovative discourse on the convergence of art, science and technology. Envisioned as a catalyst for enterprise, research and creative and scholarly experimentation, the series enables diverse intellectual communities to explore common grounds of expertise. Led by editor-in-chief Sean Cubitt, the series provides for the contextualization of contemporary practice, ideas and frameworks represented by creative individuals and teams driving innovations in art, science and technology.


Where to Find Leonardo Books

Books from the MIT Press are available at fine booksellers worldwide. Individuals who wish to order directly from the publisher may do so through the MIT Press website or by calling their toll-free number (800.405.1619). Browse our catalog of titles and click links in the books' descriptions that will take you directly to the MIT Press website. Many Leonardo Book Series books are also available as eBooks that can be purchased and stored on your personal digital bookshelf. Each eBook is available in either PDF or ePub versions, or in both PDF and ePub versions.


Titles in the Series

(listed by publication date)

Living Surfaces

Images, Plants, and Environments of Media

An investigation of aesthetics and visualizations of planetary surfaces from an experimental media theory perspective.

Tactical Publishing

Using Senses, Software, and Archives in the Twenty-First Century

How to level up to the next transformative phase of publishing—with a critical methodology that transcends the dichotomy of paper and digital media production.

After Eating

Metabolizing the Arts

An exploration of food, ingestion, and digestion in the emerging field of the metabolic arts.

Ecstatic Worlds

Media, Utopias, Ecologies

When media translate the world to the world: twentieth-century utopian projects including Edward Steichen's “Family of Man,” Jacques Cousteau's underwater films, and Buckminster Fuller's geoscope.

Biopolitical Screens

Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain

An investigation of the aesthetics and politics of new visual media under twenty-first-century capitalism, from console games to virtual reality to video installation art.

Voidopolis

Shortlisted for the 2023 Lumen Prize, a hybrid digital artistic and literary project in the form of an augmented reality book, which retells Dante's Inferno as if it were set in pandemic-ravaged New York City.

Illusions in Motion

Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles

Tracing the cultural, material, and discursive history of an early manifestation of media culture in the making.

Picture Research

The Work of Intermediation from Pre-Photography to Post-Digitization

An intimate foray into the invisible work that made it possible for pictures to circulate in print and online from the 1830s to the 2010s.

Computational Formalism

Art History and Machine Learning

How the use of machine learning to analyze art images has revived formalism in art history, presenting a golden opportunity for art historians and computer scientists to learn from one another.

Art + DIY Electronics

A systematic theory of DIY electronic culture, drawn from a century of artists who have independently built creative technologies.

The Artwork as a Living System 1992–2022

“More than a cabinet of curiosities, more than a terrarium, more than an aquarium”: a captivating look at thirty years of artistic work by the Austrian-French artist duo Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau.

New Tendencies

Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961–1978)

An account of a major international art movement originating in the former Yugoslavia in the 1960s, which anticipated key aspects of information aesthetics.

Re-collection

Art, New Media, and Social Memory

The first book on the philosophy and aesthetics of digital preservation examines the challenge posed by new media to our long-term social memory.

Design in Motion

Film Experiments at the Bauhaus

The first comprehensive history in English of film at the Bauhaus, exploring practices that experimented with film as an adaptable, elastic “polymedium.”

Northern Sparks

Innovation, Technology Policy, and the Arts in Canada from Expo 67 to the Internet Age

An “episode of light” in Canada sparked by Expo 67 when new art forms, innovative technologies, and novel institutional and policy frameworks emerged together.

Art in the Age of Machine Learning

An examination of machine learning art and its practice in new media art and music.

Book cover image with title and author name. The word "Pixel" is shown in large, colorful bold letters, stylistically pixelated.

A Biography of the Pixel

The pixel as the organizing principle of all pictures, from cave paintings to Toy Story.

Cover of the book Giving Bodies Back to Data by Silvia Casini. Title, subtitle and authors name are printed over a dark blue background. In the foreground is a white table with white sculptural objects on it below three medical imagesof a figure.

Giving Bodies Back to Data

Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology

An examination of the bodily, situated aspects of data-visualization work, looking at visualization practices around the development of MRI technology.

Living Books

Experiments in the Posthumanities

Reimagining the scholarly book as living and collaborative—not as commodified and essentialized, but in all its dynamic materiality.

Tactics of Interfacing by Ksenia Fedorova

Tactics of Interfacing

Encoding Affect in Art and Technology

How digital technologies affect the way we conceive of the self and its relation to the world, considered through the lens of media art practices.

Material Witness by Susan Schluppi

Material Witness

Media, Forensics, Evidence

The evidential role of matter—when media records trace evidence of violence—explored through a series of cases drawn from Kosovo, Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere.

From Fingers to Digits

From Fingers to Digits

An Artificial Aesthetic

Essays on computer art and its relation to more traditional art, by a pioneering practitioner and a philosopher of artificial intelligence.

Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Culture

Virtual Menageries

Animals as Mediators in Network Culture

The close interdependency of animal emissaries and new media from early European colonial encounters with the exotic to today's proliferation of animals in digital networks.

cover image Invisible Colors: The Arts of the Atomic Age

Invisible Colors

The Arts of the Atomic Age

From Leonardo Invisible Colors The Arts of the Atomic Age By Gabrielle Decamous How art makes visible what had been invisible—the effects of radiation, the lives of atomic bomb survivors, and the politics of the atomic age.

Laboratory Lifestyles: The Construction of Scientific Fictions edited by Sandra Kaji-O'Grady, Chris L. Smith and Russell Hughes

Laboratory Lifestyles

The Construction of Scientific Fictions

A generously illustrated examination of the boom in luxurious, resort-style scientific laboratories and how this affects scientists' work.

Weather as Medium by Janine Randerson

Weather as Medium

Toward a Meteorological Art

An exploration of artworks that use weather or atmosphere as the primary medium, creating new coalitions of collective engagement with the climate crisis.

Making Sense

Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment

Why embodied approaches to cognition are better able to address the performative dimensions of art than the dualistic conceptions fundamental to theories of digital computing.

Fred Forest's Utopia

Media Art and Activism

“France’s most famous unknown artist,” the innovative media provocateur Fred Forest, precursor of Eduardo Kac, Jodi, the Yes Men, RT Mark, and the Guerilla Girls.

Ecstatic Worlds

Media, Utopias, Ecologies

When media translate the world to the world: twentieth-century utopian projects including Edward Steichen’s “Family of Man,” Jacques Cousteau’s underwater films, and Buckminster Fuller’s geoscope. Aug 2017

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Voicetracks

Attuning to Voice in Media and the Arts

Seeking a deeper understanding of voice and how ethics and politics have shaped our understandings and apprehensions of voice.

Here/There

Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface

Examining telepresence technologies through the lens of contemporary artistic experiments.

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Machine Art in the Twentieth Century

An investigation of artists’ engagement with technical systems, tracing art historical lineages that connect works of different periods.

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Practicable

From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art

Critical analyses, case studies, and artist interviews examine works of art that are realized with the physical involvement of the viewer.

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Social Media Archeology and Poetics

First person accounts by pioneers in the field, classic essays, and new scholarship document the collaborative and creative practices of early social media.

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New Tendencies

Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961–1978)

An account of a major international art movement originating in the former Yugoslavia in the 1960s, which anticipated key aspects of information aesthetics.

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Screen Ecologies

Art, Media, and the Environment in the Asia-Pacific Region

How new media and visual artists provide alternative ways for understanding and visualizing the entanglements of media and the environment in the Asia-Pacific.

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Pirate Philosophy

For a Digital Posthumanities

How philosophers and theorists can find new models for the creation, publication, and dissemination of knowledge, challenging the received ideas of originality, authorship, and the book.

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Walking and Mapping

Artists as Cartographers

An exploration of walking and mapping as both form and content in art projects using old and new technologies, shoe leather and GPS.

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Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History

Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048

A critical mapping of the multiplicities of Finnish artist and technology pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi—composer of electronic music, experimental filmmaker, inventor, collector, futurologist.

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Control

Digitality as Cultural Logic

An examination of digitality not simply as a technical substrate but also as the logical basis for reshaped concepts of labor, subjectivity and collectivity.

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Hanan al-Cinema

Affections for the Moving Image

An examination of experimental cinema and media art from the Arabic-speaking world that explores filmmakers’ creative and philosophical inventiveness in trying times.

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Rethinking Curating

Art after New Media

Redefining curatorial practice for those working with new kinds of art.

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The Experience Machine

Stan VanDerBeek's Movie-Drome and Expanded Cinema

An argument that the collaborative multimedia projects produced by Stan VanDerBeek in the 1960s and 1970s anticipate contemporary new media and participatory art practices.

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Digital Performance

A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation

An historical roots, key practitioners, and artistic, theoretical, and technological trends in the incorporation of new media into the performing arts.

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The Tone of Our Times

Sound, Sense, Economy, and Ecology

Sound, tone, music, voice, and noise as forms of sonority through which our current economic and ecological crises can be understood.

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The Practice of Light

A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels

An account of Western visual technologies since the Renaissance traces a history of the increasing control of light’s intrinsic excess.

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Biopolitical Screens

Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain

An investigation of the aesthetics and politics of new visual media under twenty-first-century capitalism, from console games to virtual reality to video installation art.

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Re-collection

Art, New Media, and Social Memory

The first book on the philosophy and aesthetics of digital preservation examines the challenge posed by new media to our long-term social memory.

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Relive

Media Art Histories

Leading historians of the media arts define a new materialist media art history, discussing temporality, geography, ephemerality and the future.

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Illusions in Motion

Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles

Tracing the cultural, material, and discursive history of an early manifestation of media culture in the making.

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The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art

The long-awaited new edition of a groundbreaking work on the impact of alternative concepts of space on modern art.

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Hybrid Culture

Japanese Media Arts in Dialogue with the West

An exploration of the tensions between East and West and digital and analog in Japanese new-media art.

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Green Light

Toward an Art of Evolution

How humans’ aesthetic perceptions have shaped other life forms, from racehorses to ornamental plants.

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Synthetics

Aspects of Art and Technology in Australia, 1956–1975

A critical and comprehensive account of the emergence of electronic arts in Australia.

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MediaArtHistories

Leading scholars take a wider view of new media, placing it in the context of art history and acknowledging the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach in new media art studies and practice.

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Tactical Biopolitics

Art, Activism, and Technoscience

Scientists, scholars, and artists consider the political significance of recent advances in the biological sciences.

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Video

The Reflexive Medium

An argument that video is not merely an intermediate stage between analog and digital but a medium in its own right; traces the theoretical genealogy of video and examines the different concepts of video seen in works by Vito Acconci, Ulrike Rosenbach, Steina and Woody Vasulka, and others.

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Enfoldment and Infinity

An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art

Tracing the connections—both visual and philosophical—between new media art and classical Islamic art.

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VOICE

Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media

Perspectives on the voice and technology, from discussions of voice mail and podcasts to reflections on dance and sound poetry.

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The Hidden Sense

Synesthesia in Art and Science

The uncommon sensory perceptions of synesthesia explored through accounts of synesthetes' experiences, the latest scientific research, and suggestions of synesthesia in visual art, music and literature.

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META/DATA

A Digital Poetics

Blending artist theory, personal memoir, satire and fictional narratives, a noted net artist constructs a poetics of net art that parallels his practice.

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Signs of Life

Bio Art and Beyond

The theory and practice of bio art, a new art form that uses the materials and processes of biotechnology, with examples of work by such prominent artists as Eduardo Kac and Marc Quinn.

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New Media Poetics

Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories

The first collection of writings on poetry that is composed, disseminated, and read on computers; essays and artist statements explore visually arresting, aurally charged, and dynamic works that are created by a synergy of human beings and intelligent machines.

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White Heat Cold Logic

British Computer Art 1960–1980

The history of a pioneering era in computer-based art too often neglected by postwar art histories and institutions.

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Aesthetic Computing

Exploring ways to apply the theory and practice of art to computing.

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Closer

Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology

As our computers become closer to our bodies, perspectives from phenomenology and dance can help us understand the wider social uses of digital technologies and design future technologies that expand our social, physical, and emotional exchanges.

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Software Studies

A Lexicon

A cultural field guide to software: artists, computer scientists, designers, cultural theorists, programmers, and others define a new field of study and practice.

Media Ecologies

Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture

"A dirty materialist" ride through the media cultures of pirate radio, photography, the Internet, media art, cultural evolution and surveillance."

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From Technological to Virtual Art

An influential and respected historian of art and technology analyzes the development of immersive, interactive new media art; includes detailed looks at the work of such artists as Nam June Paik, John Maeda, and Jenny Holzer.

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The Global Genome

Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture

Examining the global intersections of biology and informatics and its implications.

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At a Distance

Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet

In this multidisciplinary look at the practice of art that takes place across a distance, theorists and practitioners examine the ways that art, activism, and media fundamentally reconfigured each other in experimental networked projects of the 1970s and 1980s.

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CODE

Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy

How "open source" creative collaboration provides an alternative to commercially driven policies determining intellectual property rights.

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Protocol

How Control Exists after Decentralization

Author Galloway argues that the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom, and that the controlling power lies in the technical protocols that make network connections (and disconnections) possible.

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Windows and Mirrors

Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency

The experience of digital art and how it is relevant to information technology.

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Virtual Art

From Illusion to Immersion

Exploring the foundations of virtual art in an unrecognized history of immersive images.

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Uncanny Networks

Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia

Interviews of artists, critics, and theorists who are intimately involved in building the content, interfaces, and architectures of new media.

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Women, Art, and Technology

A sourcebook of documentation on women artists at the forefront of work at the intersection of art and technology.

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Information Arts

Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology

An introduction to the work and ideas of artists who use—and even influence—science and technology.

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The Language of New Media

A stimulating, eclectic account of new media that finds its origins in old media, particularly the cinema, reviewing a previous edition or volume.

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The Robot in the Garden

Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet

An interdisciplinary collection of essays on telepistemology—the study of knowledge acquired at a distance.

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Technoromanticism

Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real

Technoromanticism pits itself against a hard-headed rationalism, but its most potent antagonists are contemporary pragmatism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, surrealism, and deconstruction—all of which subvert the romantic legacy and provoke new narratives of computing.

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The Digital Dialectic

New Essays on New Media

How our visual and intellectual cultures are changed by the new interaction-based media and technologies.

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Art and Innovation

The Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program

Exploring a radical combination of research, art and new media.

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Immersed in Technology

Art and Virtual Environments

Critical essays and artists' projects that explore issues raised by the creation of virtual environments.

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Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age

From Method to Metaphor

Coyne examines the entire range of contemporary philosophical thinking—including logical positivism, analytic philosophy, pragmatism, phenomenology, critical theory, hermeneutics, and deconstruction—comparing them and showing how they differ in their consequences for design and development issues in electronic communications, computer representation, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and multimedia.