Leonardo Book Series
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)
A Biography of the Pixel
The pixel as the organizing principle of all pictures, from cave paintings to Toy Story.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
A generously illustrated examination of the boom in luxurious, resort-style scientific laboratories and how this affects scientists' work.
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
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.
Machine Art in the Twentieth Century
An investigation of artists’ engagement with technical systems, tracing art historical lineages that connect works of different periods.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Rethinking Curating
Art after New Media
Redefining curatorial practice for those working with new kinds of art.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Relive
Media Art Histories
Leading historians of the media arts define a new materialist media art history, discussing temporality, geography, ephemerality and the future.
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.
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.
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.
Green Light
Toward an Art of Evolution
How humans’ aesthetic perceptions have shaped other life forms, from racehorses to ornamental plants.
Synthetics
Aspects of Art and Technology in Australia, 1956–1975
A critical and comprehensive account of the emergence of electronic arts in Australia.
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.
Tactical Biopolitics
Art, Activism, and Technoscience
Scientists, scholars, and artists consider the political significance of recent advances in the biological sciences.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Aesthetic Computing
Exploring ways to apply the theory and practice of art to computing.
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.
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."
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.
The Global Genome
Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture
Examining the global intersections of biology and informatics and its implications.
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.
CODE
Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy
How "open source" creative collaboration provides an alternative to commercially driven policies determining intellectual property rights.
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.
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.
Virtual Art
From Illusion to Immersion
Exploring the foundations of virtual art in an unrecognized history of immersive images.
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.
Women, Art, and Technology
A sourcebook of documentation on women artists at the forefront of work at the intersection of art and technology.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Digital Dialectic
New Essays on New Media
How our visual and intellectual cultures are changed by the new interaction-based media and technologies.
Art and Innovation
The Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program
Exploring a radical combination of research, art and new media.
Immersed in Technology
Art and Virtual Environments
Critical essays and artists' projects that explore issues raised by the creation of virtual environments.