The authors discuss artwork created by assigning a binary string code with length 11 to each of 211 = 2,048 planar regions formed intersection of 11 rotations of a single simple closed curve over 360/11 degrees. The goal of this process is to create the maximum number of connected regions, exactly one for each of the 2,048 different binary strings with length 11. The difficulty in this process lies in finding a suitable curve.

The authors present an introduction to the new interdisciplinary area of aesthetic computing and proceed to define this area with examples from each of their own disciplines, practices and research.

Ever since 1819, when Theophile Laënnec first put a block of wood to a patient's chest in order to listen to her heartbeat, physicians have used auscultation to help diagnose cardiopulmonary disorders. Here the authors describe a novel diagnostic method based in music technology. Digital music-synthesis software is used to transform the sequence of time intervals between consecutive heartbeats into an electroacoustic soundtrack. The results show promise as a diagnostic tool and also provide the basis of an interesting musical soundscape.

In these experimental notes, the artist reflects on his Net art trilogy, composed of GRAMMATRON, PHON:E:ME and his most recent art project, FILMTEXT, a digital narrative for cross-media platforms. Investigating issues such as digital screenwriting, Net art, digital “thoughtography” and an emergent artificial intelligentsia, the artist theorizes an expanded concept of writing to better explain his project as an evolving, practice-based research initiative, focused primarily on the interface of art, technology and storytelling.

In his book Secret Knowledge, David Hockney proposes that the “optical quality” of Flemish art arose around 1420, because artists such as van Eyck then began to use optical devices for accurate projection of subject images onto the canvas. Although Hockney describes Lotto's Man and Wife as the “Rosetta Stone” of his argument, the author's analysis reveals that its perspective structure is incompatible with the logic of local optical projection.

Computer art and Islamic art, the two largest bodies of aniconic art, share a surprising number of formal properties, two of which are explored here. The common properties of computer art and classical Islamic art can be understood in light of moments in the history of Islamic philosophy. In these two cases, Islamic Neoplatonism and Mu'tazili atomism are shown to parallel, respectively, the logic of relations between one and infinity, and the basic pixel structure, that inform some historical monuments of Islamic art as well as some contemporary works of computer art.