Leonardo, Volume 46, Issue 3 | Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University
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Contents

Editorial

Artists' Articles

  • Listening as the Land Talks Back: Ecology, Embodiment and Information in the Science Fictions of echo::system
    Grisha Coleman
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    A series of five large-scale multimedia environments constructed for both live performance and interactive installation, echo::system is a response to our current global environmental crisis. Each echo::system “actionstation” creates an alternative environment to promote both aesthetic and physical reflection on how and where we live. This article pairs a theoretical introduction to the foundations and high-level concepts of echo::system with a concrete description of actionstation.2—the desert. The goal is to examine intersections of art, environmental sciences and technology; information and place; performance; and public engagement through the practical realization of the work.

  • A Personal Art/Science Connection: From the Explicatory to the Evocative
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    The author provides a personal description of how he became an artist and the role of science within his work of the past 25 years. He describes several artworks and their relationship to the science that informs them, addresses how he uses different media toward different ends and traces changes in his representation of certain physical concepts over time, drawing attention to how and why it happened. The emphasis is on his aesthetic development rather than on the conceptual framework for the artwork, which has been covered in previous articles.

Color Plates

Artists' Notes

  • MINDtouch: Embodied Mobile Media Ephemeral Transference
    Camille C. Baker
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    This article reviews discoveries that emerged from the author's MINDtouch media research project, in which a mobile device was repurposed for visual and non-verbal communication through gestural and visual mobile expressivity. The work revealed new insights from emerging mobile media and participatory performance practices. The author contextualizes her media research on mobile video and networked performance alongside relevant discourse on presence and the embodiment of technology. From the research, an intimate, phenomenological and visual form of mobile expression has emerged. This form has reconfigured the communication device from voice and text/SMS only to a visual and synesthetic mode for deeper expression.

  • Biomorphic Presentation of Proteins: Artistic Science or Scientific Art?
    S. Balaji
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    The author's biomorphic presentations of proteins are intended to promote the understanding of protein structure by analogy with living organisms. The understanding of a protein's structure is necessary to the understanding of its function. The analogies discussed in this paper can be used to understand the structure-function relationship; they convey the structural and functional information aesthetically. The biomorphic representation of proteins based on their topology may be used to classify proteins as well as to study their structure-function relationships.

General Articles

  • The Sound of Movement Wearables: Performing UKIYO
    Johannes Birringer, Michèle Danjoux
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    Although interest in wearable/mobile technologies in today's world of social networks, fashion and lifestyle industries is on the rise, the performing arts rarely integrate body-worn technologies into their dramaturgies. After some pioneering efforts in music and audio art, dance and theater practices have slowly begun to benefit from performance design investigating “sounding” garments that transduce the sensuality of movement gestures through the extension of wearable instrument-costumes. Describing their choreographic installation UKIYO (2009-) as an example of sound-motion-design research, the authors highlight integrated methods for creating particularized audiophonic, amplificatory and kinaesonic garments to be worn by dancers, actors and musicians in interactive/responsive environments.

  • Women in Performance, Resistance and Exile during the Yugoslav War 1991–2000
    Vesna Milanovic
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    The author introduces a number of Serbian women artists who performed in Belgrade during the turbulent times of Slobodan Milosevic's authoritarian regime. Raising their voices in protest, these women risked their lives in opposing Milosevic's rule. The author also writes about memories of NATO's bombing of Serbia and Belgrade in 1999 and of her own exile, which became a context for her scholarly writing and performance.

General Notes

  • You Saw the Whole of the Moon: The Role of Imagination in the Perceptual Construction of the Moon
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    The author offers a short history of how our perceptual relationship with the Moon has changed over time. Examples of lunar imaging by Early Renaissance painter Jan Van Eyck, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, 19th-century photographer James Nasmyth and NASA's Ranger and Lunar Orbiter missions of the 1960s reveal ways in which our perception of the Moon has changed. Images of the Moon produced by technology remain far from “complete”—they are akin to fragments, sketches or models, providing information upon which the imagination can build. How we imagine the Moon, the author argues, is symbiotically linked with our representations of it; we only perceive the truly complete, whole Moon in the non-localized zone of our imaginations.

  • Positioning Locative Media: A Critical Urban Intervention
    Thérèse F. Tierney
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    Technologies of space, information and power are integral aspects of cartography that have serious implications for the legibility and accessibility of a city; thus the design of locative media is more than a technical problem. In this paper, i-metro, an interactive installation, is developed in four stages: first, a theoretical discussion of urban representation is linked to historical notions of the commons; second, research methodologies are described; third, the findings are summarized, exposing a critical information inequality; fourth, a public locative media intervention is proposed as a design response.

Technical Article

  • Brunelleschi's Discovery of Perspective's “Rule”
    Malcolm Park
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    Brunelleschi's lost panel painting of the Florence Baptistery, created in the early 15th century, is frequently cited as the first work to accurately use perspective. The system he used is unknown, and the only information about the painting mentions a demonstration by which the painting was viewed through a hole in the panel as a reflected image in a mirror. The author argues here that the image was created in a camera obscura using the panel and a mirror in the same relationship as used in the demonstration. The author also proposes that the process revealed perspective's basic “rule”: Vanishing points for parallel, horizontal lines exist at the eye level.

Special Section of Leonardo Transactions: Arts, Humanities and Complex Networks

  • Network Intelligence for All
    Burak Arıkan
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    Network intelligence today is only available for scientists, engineers, government and business institutions. However today we live an interconnected and complex life more than ever. We should all have access to network intelligence and move beyond its intended goals. Therefore what we need are easy-to-use and accessible tools, having many examples and platforms for collaboration. This way non-experts too could traverse the finest complexity and enjoy the merits of network intelligence.

  • Designing Visualizations For Biological Data
    Miriah Meyer
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    Visualization is now a vital component of the biological discovery process. This article presents visualization design studies as a promising approach for creating effective, visualization tools for biological data.

  • The Flavor Network
    Yong-Yeol Ahn, Sebastian Ahnert, Dietmar Offenhuber
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    The authors investigate regional variations in culinary culture by constructing a flavor network of food ingredients, based on shared flavor compounds, and comparing this network to recipe data. They show that Western and Eastern cuisines differ in their compound sharing patterns. The findings show, in particular, that only Western cuisines support the hypothesis that foods sharing flavor compounds are more likely to taste well together. Using additional data the authors investigate the validity of this hypothesis further and suggest a new, more specific version of the hypothesis, which holds for a particular subset of compounds.

  • Network Science and Literary History
    Hoyt Long, Richard So
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    This paper introduces a method for applying network analysis to the sociological study of literary history. Focusing on “little magazines” and poetry journals in the U.S., Japan, and China, the authors utilize bibliographic records to construct weighted, bipartite graphs of poets and journals linked by publication. Through visual and quantitative analysis of the resulting networks, the authors aim to augment traditional hermeneutics with empirical measures that isolate aspects of the social structures from which literary modernism emerged.

  • Navigation in Complex Networks
    Katharina Anna Zweig
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    The question of how humans learn to navigate in a new environment has mainly been studied in geographically embedded environments. Next to navigation in these concrete networks, people also need to understand and navigate abstract networks like those which connect concepts with each other. With a simple game the author and colleagues analyzed how humans explored an abstract word network and how they learned to navigate it extremely fast after a short period of learning.

  • Historical Relevance Feedback Detection by Text Re-use Networks
    Marco Büchler, Gregory Crane, Gerhard Heyer
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    Text re-use has been in the humanist's interest for centuries. Collecting parallel texts implies giving a certain information, e.g. a moral statement or report on wars and conflicts, a kind of witness. The more independent parallel texts are collected, the more feasible the information is. The contribution reported here is on automatic detection of text re-use and the usage of a text re-use network to derive a Cultural Heritage Aware PageRank technique given ancient text re-uses like quotations, paraphrases, and allusions.

  • Watching How Ideas Spread Over Social Media
    Yu-Ru Lin, David Lazer, Nan Cao
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    Social media, like Twitter, have been widely used for exchanging information, opinions and emotions about events happening across the world. The authors introduce a new visualization tool for tracing the process of information diffusion on social media in real time. The design highlights the social, spatiotemporal processes of diffusion based on a sunflower metaphor whose seeds are often dispersed far away. The design facilitates an understanding of when, where and how a piece of information is dispersed for large-scale events, including campaigns and earthquakes, as a tool witnessing today's information consumption and dispersion in the wild.

  • Modeling Transportation in the Roman World: Implications for World Systems
    Elijah Meeks
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    ORBIS is a geospatial transportation network model of the Roman world, simulating historical travel patterns by modeling the major roads, rivers, and sea routes active during the Roman Empire. With such a model, historians can more accurately examine not only individual route patterns, but also emergent structures of the network as a whole. By defining traditional world systems networks as a particular movement profile for application on a geospatial transportation network, we can begin to see regions of the network using community analysis and analyze those regions for historical patterns.

  • Comparing Art Historical Networks
    Doron Goldfarb, Max Arends, Josef Froschauer, Dieter Merkl
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    This work provides a comparison of link structures present in a common subset of art history related biographic person records/articles from the Getty Union List of Artist Names and English Wikipedia.

Transactions

  • Anachronistic Enactment: Deconstructing Perceptions of Modern Technology
    Simon Lock
  • Sound Sketchbook: Synthetic Synesthesia on a Mobile Platform
    Meehei Kim, Sung Ju Woo, Woon Seung Yeo
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    The authors present Sound Sketchbook, a mobile phone application featuring real-time sound synthesis based on simple yet evocative cross-modal data mappings. While originally designed as a tool for evaluation of audiovisual correspondences, the application is also appreciated as an enjoyable sound toy and has a strong potential as a multimedia education tool for children. The authors introduce the data mapping strategy of Sound Sketchbook with regard to synesthesia, describe new cross-modal interactions implemented on mobile devices, and discuss the effectiveness of the application based on user survey results.

  • “Save YourSelf!!!” — An Externalized Sense of Balance
    Hideyuki Ando, Tomofumi Yoshida, Junji Watanabe
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    Using a galvanic vestibular stimulation interface that can affect the sense of balance, the authors devised an interactive experience that deals with the subject of identity in modern society. The participant wears the interface and walks while holding a bowl of water on which a figurine is floating. Since the figurine is linked to the interface, it serves as an externalized metaphor of the user's sense of balance. This experience provides an opportunity to observe the relationship between the individual self and the outer world with a broader framework.

  • Pseudo Architecture: Holographic Monument
    Andrew Pepper
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    The author discusses an architectural installation incorporating the holographic shadows of water installed in a miniature townscape as part of a collaborative, developmental, group exhibition. The installation concept is outlined and its impact on the ability to stimulate architectural interventions, which would not normally be possible within a full-scale environment, is considered. The influence of a major large-scale holographic installation is outlined and the requirement to suspend belief, within the current exhibition, is discussed.

  • Three Dimensional Visualization of Complex Environmental Data Sets of Variable Resolution
    Brian Burnham
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    Three dimensional visualization of complex, variable resolution data sets is an inherent problem with the increase in data retrieval and processing methods. This problem translates across many disciplines in the sciences and engineering, but also in the arts, new media and social networking. In this paper the authors report on a project to integrate terrestrial and aerial based terrain data with variable degrees of resolution. Future implications of big data set visualization and the development of transdisciplinary approaches that can be used in both the sciences and the arts are discussed.

Leonardo Reviews

  • A Boatload of Wild Irishmen directed by Mac Dara Ó Curraidbin. Scriptwriter: Brian Winston. 84 min. DVD, color. Distributor's website: icarusfilms.com
    Martha Blassnigg, Page Widick
  • Hiroshi Sugimoto: Memories of Origin directed by Yuko Nakamura. 85 min. In English and Japanese. Sales and distribution: WOWOW, Inc., Japan, 2012
  • The Universe in Zero Words: The Story of Mathematics as Told through Equations by Dana MacKenzie. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, U.S.A., 2012. 224 pp., illus. ISBN: 978-0-6911-5282-0; ISBN: 978-1-4008-4168-4
    Phil Dyke
  • The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies edited by Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld. Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K., 2012. 624 pp., illus. Trade. ISBN: 978-01-953-8894-7
    John F. Barber
  • The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918 by Elizabeth Edwards. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, U.S.A., 2012. 344 pp., illus. Trade, paper. ISBN: 978-0-8223-5090-3; ISBN: 978-0-8223-5104-7
    Jan Baetens
  • The Color Revolution by Regina Lee Blaszczyk. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2012. 368 pp., illus. ISBN: 978-0-2620-1777-0
    Roy Behrens
  • The Alphabet and the Algorithm by Mario Carpo. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2011. 184 pp., illus. Paper. ISBN: 978-0-2625-1580-1
    Flutur Troshani
  • The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science edited by Bruce Clark and Manuela Rossini. Routledge, New York, NY, U.S.A., 2012.542 pp. Trade, paper. ISBN: 978-0-415-49525-7; ISBN: 978-0-415-50959-6
    Jonathan Zilberg
  • Science and Conscience: The Life of James Franck by Jost Lemmerich; Ann M. Hentschel, translator. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, U.S.A., 2011. 392 pp., illus. Trade, e-book. ISBN: 978-0-8047-6310-3; ISBN: 978-0-8047-7909-8
    Wilfred Niels Arnold
  • Digital_Humanities by Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2012. 176 pp. Paper. ISBN: 978-0-262-01847-0
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012

Leonardo Network News

Endnote

Title: 

Leonardo, Volume 46, Issue 3

June 2013