Leonardo, Volume 39, Issue 3
June 2006
Contents
Editorial
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The Encyclopedia of New Media Arts
After Midnight
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New Media in Seoul After Midnight
A dispatch on the arts, technologies and cultures in the metropolitan community served by the Seoul airport.
Artists' Statements
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Cyberangels: An Aesthetic Peace Plan for the Middle East
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Chasing Science Culture
Artists' Notes
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Artwork Using 3D Computed Tomography: Extending Radiology into the Realm of Visual Art
Using scientific data acquired from state-of-the-art multidetector computed tomography (CT) scanners, the author employs 3D CT as a creative medium to demonstrate the beauty of human anatomy. Utilizing this new technology, the author hopes to achieve a new meeting of art and science, extending radiology into the realm of visual art.
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Toward a New Kind of Image: Photosynthegraphy
The author presents a new way of creating images that taps into new interrogations of images. The link between art and technology lies at the heart of her research. She uses a prototype camera that makes it possible to generate a 3D mesh starting from a single photograph. She presents various photographic creations begun during earlier studies in order to explain how her work leads to the perception of photography as volume-images.
General Note
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From Video Replay to the Relational Circuit to Threeing
This article traces the invention of the relational circuit, which makes possible an art of relationships called Threeing. This process of invention grew out of extensive video replay. Contrapposto made it possible to depict motion in stone. The relational circuit likewise makes possible a formal art of relationships for three people. This art form can be viewed in the light of relational aesthetics, a theory that judges artwork based on how it prompts inter-human activity and engagement with the world.
General Article
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ZENetic Computer: Exploring Japanese Culture
The authors present ZENetic Computer as a means of cultural translation using scientific methods to represent essential aspects of Japanese culture. Using images—deriving from Buddhism and other Asian concepts, sansui (landscape) paintings, poetry and kimonos— that have not heretofore been the focus of computing, the authors project the style of communication developed by Zen schools over hundreds of years into an exotic computing world that users can explore. Through encounters with Zen koans and haiku, the user is constantly and sharply forced to confirm his or her selfawareness for purposes of the story. There is no one right answer to be found anywhere.
Special Section: CAA 2005: Hybridity: Arts, Sciences and Cultural Effects
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Perspectives on Collaborative Research and Education in Media Arts
Digital arts is by nature a hybrid practice, integrating the poetics, aesthetics and conceptual strategies of art with the logical, systematic methods of technological processes from engineering and the sciences. This article reviews the development of interdisciplinary, collaborative arts-engineering research and education at the University of California at Santa Barbara, focusing on the Media Arts Technology graduate program from a visual/spatial arts perspective.
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The Artist and the Scientific Research Environment
The authors reflect on the experiences of collaboration between artists and scientists at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. They outline the measures that enable both media artists and computer scientists to benefit from the collaborations. In particular, if long-term collaborations are to be successful, the collaborators must garner rewards not only in the field of the collaboration but also in their own respective academic or professional fields.
Special Section: ArtScience: The Essential Connection
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Albert Michelson, Painter of Light
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The Helium Stockpile: A Collaboration in Mathematical Folding Sculpture
The Helium Stockpile is a manipulable folding structure of hundreds of wooden blocks, representing the transformation between surface and solid through a foldable one-dimensional chain. The sculpture grew out of an unexpected collaboration between a sculptor and two mathematicians, giving the structure a mathematical basis through which it is guaranteed to be foldable into essentially any three-dimensional shape.
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Extended Memory: Early Calculating Engines and Historical Computer Simulations
When framed within cognitive theory's extended mind hypothesis, Charles Babbage's 19th-century calculating machines illustrate a distinction between accuracy and flexibility. These properties affect how historical data and memory are organized, providing conceptual linkages for mind-machine integration. The distinction between accuracy and flexibility is also apparent in present-day computer simulations that use historical scenarios, such as virtual-reality software designed for the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, history-based video games and other art and entertainment software applications. These contemporary examples share one important feature of extended mind: the incorporation of history or personal memory into a shared memory system.
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Reduction of Physiological Stress Using Fractal Art and Architecture
The author reviews visual perception studies showing that fractal patterns possess an aesthetic quality based on their visual complexity. Specifically, people display an aesthetic preference for patterns with mid-range fractal dimensions, irrespective of the method used to generate them. The author builds upon these studies by presenting preliminary research indicating that mid-range fractals also affect the observer's physiological condition. The potential for incorporating these fractals into art and architecture as a novel approach to reducing stress is also discussed.
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Rembrandt's Portraits: Approach or Avoid?
In 74% of Rembrandt's female portraits, the subject's left cheek faces the viewer. However, this occurs in only 26% of his male portraits. This asymmetry is consistent with viewers' assessment of Rembrandt's left-cheeked male portraits as preferably avoided, which may indicate that aggressive dominance is governed by the contralateral right hemisphere of the brain, while the rating of left-cheeked female faces as preferably approached may indicate sexual attractiveness. Rembrandt's exposed-cheek gender difference suggests that both sexual selection and dominance are governed by the more emotionally oriented right cerebral hemisphere.
Leonardo Reviews
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The Aegina Academy, A Forum for Art and Science: Light/Image/Illusion
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Pop Trickster Fool: Warhol Performs Naivete
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The Situationist International: A User's Guide
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The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture
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Cognitive Science, Literature and the Arts
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Human Factors Methods for Design: Making Systems Human-Centred
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Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
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The Art of Setting Stones and Other Writings from the Japanese Garden
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Art Marketing 101: A Handbook for the Fine Artist
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The Paradoxes of Art: A Phenomenological Investigation
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New Philosophy for New Media
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Eating Architecture
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Artificial Life IX: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems
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Image Retrieval: Theory and Research
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Lara Croft: Cyber Heroine
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Histories of the Future
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Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art
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Symmetry 2000: Parts 1 and 2
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Audio CDs: Gyromancy
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Audio CDs: CMCD: Six Classic Concrete, Electroacoustic and Electronic Works, 1970–1990
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Exhibition Catalogue: The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult
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Festival: Ninth RAI Festival of Ethnographic Film
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Leonardo Reviews On-Line