Leonardo, Volume 36, Issue 5 | Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University
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Contents

Special Section: The Art of Burning Man

  • Introduction: Desert Weirdness Introduces a New Era of Art
    Louis M. Brill
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  • The Outsider Art of Burning Man
    Lady Bee
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    The author describes art installations featured at the annual Burning Man event in Black Rock City, Nevada. Burning Man is community based, collaborative and interactive and attracts a unique community of artists, performers and free spirits. The goal of the event is to remove the artist from the world of commerce and competition, emphasizing instead collaboration, cooperation and shared experience.

  • The Bone Tree
    Dana Albany
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Artists' Statements

Special Section: Global Crossings: The Cultural Roots of Globalization

  • Uncomfortable Proximity: The Tate Invites Mongrel to Hack the Tate's Own Web Site
    Graham Harwood, Matthew Fuller, Ciro Cattuto
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    Uncomfortable Proximity is a critical web hack of the Tate Gallery's web site, created by Graham Harwood, a member of the Mongrel collective. Commissioned by Tate National Programmes, it mirrors the Tate's own web site, but offers new images and ideas, collaged from Harwood's own experiences, his readings of Tate works and publicity materials and his interest in the Tate Britain site. A related critical text by Matthew Fuller provides wider cultural context.

  • The Crying Post Project: A Multi-Part, Multi-Media Artwork to Memorialize Global Sites of Pain
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    The author describes The Crying Post Project, an artwork consisting primarily of wood staffs with solar-powered “cry generators” placed at different sites throughout the globe, at locations of environmental and/or social damage. Its two other components include an interactive 3D web site, which has been created as an alternative, data-rich venue for the project, and a series of digitally created photographic prints designed to capture the artist's emotional response to the sites. The artist also discusses how this artwork has been inspired by his research on the cross-cultural symbolism of trees, the indigenous Australian worldview, mapping theory and the relationship between language extinction and environmental destruction.

Historical Perspective

  • The Dilemma of Media Art: Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA London
    Rainer Usselmann, John Rigby
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    One year after the 1967 Summer of Love and at a time of considerable political unrest throughout the United States and Europe, Cybernetic Serendipity—The Computer and the Arts opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London to much critical and popular acclaim. This paper outlines the conceptual framework of this seminal exhibition and looks at some of the accompanying press reception in order to address a key question: how media art deals with its own historicity and the underlying socioeconomic forces that render it possible. Presented 35 years ago and still paradigmatic for the ever-shifting boundaries between art, technology, commerce and entertainment, Cybernetic Serendipity epitomizes some of the complicated dynamics that delineate the gamut of media art today.

Leonardo Reviews

Title: 

Leonardo, Volume 36, Issue 5

October 2003