Editorial

Artists and Scientists: Open and Hidden Connections

by Giorgio Careri

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Artist's Article

From the Kinesphere to the Kinesfield: Three Choreographic Interactive Artworks

by Gretchen Schiller

ABSTRACT: This article describes the characteristics of three of the author's movement-based interactive installation projects: Shifting Ground, trajets and Raumspielpuzzle, completed between 1998 and 2003, and the kinesfield, a term developed by the author in the course of her doctoral research in interactive and choreographic art. The concept of the kinesfield is employed to describe the relational dynamic of movement intereactions that traverse the body and material forms in unbounded space.

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Artist's Note

The Return of Images: Photographic Inquiries into the Interaction of Light

by Edgar Lissel

ABSTRACT: Edgar Lissel has been using the camera obscura for more than 10 years. He converted a transporter into a mobile pinhole camera and transformed living quarters and museum displays into walk-in pinhole cameras. Since 1999, Lissel has been working with bacteria, using their phototropic properties to produce his images. The bacteria move out of the shadow into the light. In the photographic installations. Mnemosyne I and Mnemosyne II, he uses fluorescent color pigments to fix the images. Like a memory, the image is stored and emitted by the pigments.

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General Articles

The Media-Art Exhibition TenYearsAfter_v4.0_OuterSpace

by Soo-Jin Lee and Kwang-Yun Wohn

ABSTRACT: TenYearsAfter is an annual media art exhibition based in Korea, begun in 2003, organized by Kwang-yum Wohn and curator Mira Kim to facilitate collaboration among engineers, scientists, artists and designers. Unlike other major media-art exhibitions, TenYearsAfter has included artworks by mainstream media artists, independent experiments, and products and research results by artists and non-artists alike. The fourth exhibition in this series, TenYearsAfter_v4.0_OuterSpace, organized by the authors, was held in 2006. This article elaborates on the process of organizing this event and contemplates the implications of annual media art events in the Korean media art context.

Landscapes of Feeling, Arenas of Action: Information Visualization as Art Practice

by Tom Corby

ABSTRACT: Discussing his recent artworks alongside those by Abigail Reynolds, Lucy Kimbell and Christian Nold, the author examines emerging phenomena in the digital and wider fine arts whereby information visualiation practices are approached as creative media. By laying bare points of convergence and divergence between artistic and scientific approaches, the article develops a number of arguments that show how the pictures produced by information visualization may be reframed within wider aesthetic and critical frameworks. Thus the author explores how models of image production derived from processes of scientific inquiry expand possibilities for the visual arts to develop new types of hybrid images that consist of data grounded both in material realities and in symbolic and aesthetic elements.

Artistic Research on Life Forms: Exploring the Intersections of Science, Art and Life in the Context of Globalization

by Mojca Puncer

ABSTRACT: Contemporary Art practices are characterized by the transformation of completed or finalized objects into open works, fluid spatial situations, and relations in the social field. Art processes raise the question: Can the complex structure of artworks provide an analogy and methodology that art researchers can use to co-design our culture from anthropological, philosophical, aesthetic and sociopolitical perspectives? This paper addresses this question through an examination of the artistic use of, and critical commentary on, media and available technologies, and of the artistic treatment of life forms found in the work of the younger generation of Slovenian artists (Tratnik, Berlot, Peljhan, Lovsin and others). The strategies these artists employ in their projects significantly strengthen the case for a re-articulation of the aesthetic, the ethical and the political, through a transition in various territories: art, (biotechnological) science, technology, new media and everyday reality.

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General Note

When Is Information Visualization Art? Determining the Critical Criteria

by Andres Ramirez Gaviria

ABSTRACT: This paper initially examines the differences between functional and aesthetic forms of visualization for information visualization. The author then shows such a dual categorization to be ineffective as a critical scheme for evaluating artwork that utilizes comparable visualization techniques. Adopting Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito's classification of artistic production, the author argues for the use of "genre art" and "research art" as more suitable criteria for the analysis and assessment of such artwork.

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Special Section: Nanotechnology, Nanoscale Science and Art

Nanotech, Blur and Tragedy in Recent Artworks by Gerhard Richter

by Kristian Hvidtfelt Nielsen

ABSTRACT: The author considers Gerhard Richter's work on nanotechnology, highlighting how these pieces continue the artist's ontology on photographic blur and, as such, raise questions about truth and reality with respect to the mass media's visual presentation of nanotechnology. The four works discussed include: Erster Blick (2000), and Graphit (2005), the mural Strontium (2004) and the suite of sheets numbered 737 to 754 in the continuous image installation Atlas. Examining these works, the author notes Richter's general skepticism about the benefits of technology, shown through his allusions to war and terrorism, and contrasts Richter's artworks with utopian visions of nanoscience in the mass media.

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Theoretical Perspective

Reconsidering Pictorial Representation by Reconsidering Visual Experience

by Johan Veldeman

ABSTRACT: In one sense, the visual experience of a thing in a depiction is similar to seeing the actual thing. In another sense, the experience is quite different, involving a "twofold" simultaneous awareness of the picture surface and what it depicts. The author argues that the standard ways of explaining depiction in terms of perception fail to properly accommodate the complex twofold nature of pictorial experience. He proposes an alternative account, based on an "enactive" approach to perception.

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Special Section: Leonardo Celebrates Leonardo da Vinci

Resurrecting Leonardo's Great Lady: A Collaboration

by Marilène Oliver and Francis Wells

ABSTRACT: Sculptor Marilène Oliver and cardiothoracic surgeon Francis Wells collaborated to deconstruct Leonardo da Vinci's drawing The Great Lady in order to reconstruct it as a three-dimensional sculpture. Employing lessons learned from contemporary radiology, they simulated cross sections of The Great Lady that were drawn in pen and ink onto a stack of acrylic sheets. Here Oliver and Wells give independent accounts of the project, not only sharing how their relationship with Leonardo's drawing evolved over the course of the project but also exposing the differences in approach by the scientist and the artist to a science-art project.

READ THIS ARTICLE! (you will be re-directed to the MIT Press website)

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Special Section: ArtScience: The Essential Connection

A Bird in the Microcosm: An Environment of Found Objects Constructed to Create Artitrary Preferences in Starlings

by Meredith Root-Bernstein

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From the Leonardo Archive

Introduction

by Lowry Burgess

Sky, Scale and Technology in Art

by Otto Piene with Robert Russett

ABSTRACT: Otto Piene discusses his projects with new media as well as the history and tradition of technological art. Topics range from archaic megalithic structures to large-scale, outdoor contemporary works articulated and enhanced by electronic forms of expression. Piene discusses his concept of 'sky art' and examines his attempts to expand the physical proportions of art and to communicate publicly with a large audience. Other issues raised include the beneficial effects of integrating art and science, the need to reevaluate and update art education and the importance of developing new forms of technological art that will improve communication and more effectively express human concerns.

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Leonardo Reviews

New Reviews by: Jan Baetens, Martha Blassnigg, Rob Harle, Amy Ione, Boris Jardine, Michael R. Mosher and Jonathan Zilberg.

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Transactions

Full Color Video

by Simon Payne

Who's Afraid of Picasso's Tie, or Do You See the Catch in Hypothetical Art?

by Jurij Selan

World of Female Avatars: An Artistic Online Survey on the Female Body in Times of Virtual Reality

by Evelin Stermitz

Inventiing New Modes of Digital Visualisation in Contemporary Art

by Eugenia Fratzeskou

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Leonardo Network News

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Endnote

The Other Side of Digital Art

by Harry Rand