Abstract Noise-canceling technologies for smartphone cameras allow individuals to control and customize their self-images. These technologies that are used to automatically eliminate unwanted visual noise, such as excessive grain or lighting issues, skin imperfections, and teeth stains, are now widely used on smartphones to transform a noisy photograph into a “clean” and “ideal” image. In this paper, the author conducts a critical analysis of (1) the increasing popularity of these technologies through their application in smartphone cameras; (2) their active involvement in the construction of users’ ideal self-images; and (3) their contribution to increased instances of visual phobias, obsessions, anxieties, and irritation.
{"title":"Noise-Canceling Technologies for Smartphone Cameras: Self-Image in the Age of Anxiety","authors":"C. Treccani","doi":"10.1162/leon_a_02406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02406","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Noise-canceling technologies for smartphone cameras allow individuals to control and customize their self-images. These technologies that are used to automatically eliminate unwanted visual noise, such as excessive grain or lighting issues, skin imperfections, and teeth stains, are now widely used on smartphones to transform a noisy photograph into a “clean” and “ideal” image. In this paper, the author conducts a critical analysis of (1) the increasing popularity of these technologies through their application in smartphone cameras; (2) their active involvement in the construction of users’ ideal self-images; and (3) their contribution to increased instances of visual phobias, obsessions, anxieties, and irritation.","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"86 1","pages":"383-387"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72912905","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract The neuroscientific and psychological use of fiction films for clinical and academic research is growing. However, artistic research using insights from these fields to advance the filmmaking practice is still in its infancy. Expanding on the author’s previous Leonardo publication proposing the use of scientific hypothesis formation for overcoming filmmaking uncertainty, this artistic research explores the feasibility of integrating scientific findings of abstract and ambiguous image perception to create a novel abstract filmmaking method. This research aims to revive the classical abstract film genre into an implicit cinematic experience.
{"title":"The Prospect of Art-Science Interplay in Filmmaking as Research: From Abstract to Implicit Film","authors":"Mamdooh Afdile","doi":"10.1162/leon_a_02396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02396","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The neuroscientific and psychological use of fiction films for clinical and academic research is growing. However, artistic research using insights from these fields to advance the filmmaking practice is still in its infancy. Expanding on the author’s previous Leonardo publication proposing the use of scientific hypothesis formation for overcoming filmmaking uncertainty, this artistic research explores the feasibility of integrating scientific findings of abstract and ambiguous image perception to create a novel abstract filmmaking method. This research aims to revive the classical abstract film genre into an implicit cinematic experience.","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"42 1","pages":"521-526"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88886598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Despite the first word of its title (“Art”) and the emphasis on the machine in its subtitle (“Computer”), this is not just a book on art and technology. Neither is it just an example of art history in the expanded (social, political, ideological, philosophical) space. Lindsay Caplan’s inspiring study is above all a reflection on the notion of freedom, more particularly on the possible conflict between negative freedom (“freedom from”) and positive freedom (“freedom of ”). It is also a direct dialogue with very contemporary thinkers on freedom, as illustrated for example in the writings by Antonio Negri and other “autonomists.” Yet at the same time, Arte Programmata is also a deeply historical study, in two senses of the word. First, it helps rediscover a halfforgotten and understudied, as well as superficially situated and largely misunderstood, aspect of the Italian “laboratory” during the years of the economic miracle (late 1950s–early 1960s) and the political and social upheaval that followed it. The “Arte Programmata” movement was a collective, and an inevitably changing one, working at the crossroads of art and design, art and technology, and art and social engineering, but also a node in a complex network of cultural, political, and industrial institutions and structures. The Olivetti company was one of the centers of this network (this company, with a strong political-democratic agenda, was a pioneer in the implementation of computers in the office and the home). Caplan’s book offers a detailed, well-balanced, not overinterpreted overview of the works, ideas, activities, projects, exhibitions, installations, manifestos, etc. of Arte Programmata and positions of both the group and its members—including Enzo Mari, Davide Boriani, Giovanni Anceschi, and Manfredo Massironi. In her discussion of the debates on the collective or individual interventions of Arte Programmata, the author rightly prioritizes the importance of the freedom-versus-control debate and clearly demonstrates what was at the heart of the group’s techno-aesthetic program, namely the attempt to escape from the crude dichotomy between techno-utopianism (technology as the power that unleashes and frees human creativity; technology as a springboard to a new society with much room for personal self-fulfillment) and the fear of technology as a dominating and crippling bureaucratic power (technology as a dictatorial tool of disciplinarization; technology as the reduction of the individual to the mere role of consumer in a capitalist society). Caplan’s analysis, based on the careful reconstruction of the group’s major public events in Italy and abroad, is a good example of what one might call an ecumenic avant-garde, which stresses the necessity of form, structure, and planning in the search for a new society and a new subject, liberated from the old forms of both individualism and domination. Arte Programmata is simultaneously revolutionary and pragmatic. It is revolutionary since i
{"title":"Arte Programmata: Freedom, Control, and the Computer in 1960s Italy","authors":"Jan Baetens.","doi":"10.1162/leon_r_02387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02387","url":null,"abstract":"Despite the first word of its title (“Art”) and the emphasis on the machine in its subtitle (“Computer”), this is not just a book on art and technology. Neither is it just an example of art history in the expanded (social, political, ideological, philosophical) space. Lindsay Caplan’s inspiring study is above all a reflection on the notion of freedom, more particularly on the possible conflict between negative freedom (“freedom from”) and positive freedom (“freedom of ”). It is also a direct dialogue with very contemporary thinkers on freedom, as illustrated for example in the writings by Antonio Negri and other “autonomists.” Yet at the same time, Arte Programmata is also a deeply historical study, in two senses of the word. First, it helps rediscover a halfforgotten and understudied, as well as superficially situated and largely misunderstood, aspect of the Italian “laboratory” during the years of the economic miracle (late 1950s–early 1960s) and the political and social upheaval that followed it. The “Arte Programmata” movement was a collective, and an inevitably changing one, working at the crossroads of art and design, art and technology, and art and social engineering, but also a node in a complex network of cultural, political, and industrial institutions and structures. The Olivetti company was one of the centers of this network (this company, with a strong political-democratic agenda, was a pioneer in the implementation of computers in the office and the home). Caplan’s book offers a detailed, well-balanced, not overinterpreted overview of the works, ideas, activities, projects, exhibitions, installations, manifestos, etc. of Arte Programmata and positions of both the group and its members—including Enzo Mari, Davide Boriani, Giovanni Anceschi, and Manfredo Massironi. In her discussion of the debates on the collective or individual interventions of Arte Programmata, the author rightly prioritizes the importance of the freedom-versus-control debate and clearly demonstrates what was at the heart of the group’s techno-aesthetic program, namely the attempt to escape from the crude dichotomy between techno-utopianism (technology as the power that unleashes and frees human creativity; technology as a springboard to a new society with much room for personal self-fulfillment) and the fear of technology as a dominating and crippling bureaucratic power (technology as a dictatorial tool of disciplinarization; technology as the reduction of the individual to the mere role of consumer in a capitalist society). Caplan’s analysis, based on the careful reconstruction of the group’s major public events in Italy and abroad, is a good example of what one might call an ecumenic avant-garde, which stresses the necessity of form, structure, and planning in the search for a new society and a new subject, liberated from the old forms of both individualism and domination. Arte Programmata is simultaneously revolutionary and pragmatic. It is revolutionary since i","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"1 1","pages":"320-321"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82488017","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This article argues that drawing facilitates an intelligence of seeing, a visualcy, that should be as important as literacy and numeracy at all levels of the educational curriculum. The author likens cave drawings c. 40,000 years ago to an “external hard drive,” alleviating biological constraints on brain capacity by preserving shareable information about predators and prey necessary for survival during a period of expanding social networks, ultimately leading to humans becoming the globally dominant species. The author reviews theories of visual perception, fundamental to any pedagogy of drawing; discusses modes of visual “attention,” defining the difference between “focused” and “distributed;” and relates both to intentional communication through drawing, the progenitor of writing.
{"title":"The Drive to Draw: Perceptual Attention and Communicative Intention","authors":"Howard Riley","doi":"10.1162/leon_a_02405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02405","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article argues that drawing facilitates an intelligence of seeing, a visualcy, that should be as important as literacy and numeracy at all levels of the educational curriculum. The author likens cave drawings c. 40,000 years ago to an “external hard drive,” alleviating biological constraints on brain capacity by preserving shareable information about predators and prey necessary for survival during a period of expanding social networks, ultimately leading to humans becoming the globally dominant species. The author reviews theories of visual perception, fundamental to any pedagogy of drawing; discusses modes of visual “attention,” defining the difference between “focused” and “distributed;” and relates both to intentional communication through drawing, the progenitor of writing.","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"21 1","pages":"501-508"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77913060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Johannes Lehmann, Rachel Garber Cole, Nathaniel E. Stern
Abstract This paper builds on research around novelty and utility to argue that the value of arts thinking should be applied in the generation of scientific questions. Arts thinking is often playful, less goal oriented, and can lead to new modes of questioning. Scientific thinking often solves an existing question, serves a purpose in solving the question, and must be predictable. The “problem of the problem” is that asking creative questions is the linchpin of the quality of research across the sciences, just as the best of art “does things” that make us move and feel moved; yet we posit that it is useful to consider that what each teaches and celebrates typically tends more toward either utility or novelty as an entry point. A new theoretical basis is presented in identifying questions primarily based on novelty rather than utility, and a catalogue of methods proposed for creating questions to employ in education, practice, and project planning.
{"title":"Novelty and Utility: How the Arts May Advance Question Creation in Contemporary Research","authors":"Johannes Lehmann, Rachel Garber Cole, Nathaniel E. Stern","doi":"10.1162/leon_a_02400","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02400","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper builds on research around novelty and utility to argue that the value of arts thinking should be applied in the generation of scientific questions. Arts thinking is often playful, less goal oriented, and can lead to new modes of questioning. Scientific thinking often solves an existing question, serves a purpose in solving the question, and must be predictable. The “problem of the problem” is that asking creative questions is the linchpin of the quality of research across the sciences, just as the best of art “does things” that make us move and feel moved; yet we posit that it is useful to consider that what each teaches and celebrates typically tends more toward either utility or novelty as an entry point. A new theoretical basis is presented in identifying questions primarily based on novelty rather than utility, and a catalogue of methods proposed for creating questions to employ in education, practice, and project planning.","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"11 1","pages":"488-495"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87511751","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Today’s artificial intelligence image generation tools create images from datasets. These training sets are typically images sourced from the World Wide Web. However, artists may produce their own datasets from photographs. This essay explores one such process. In it, the artist discusses training a generative adversarial network (GAN) from images of personal memories. These images are shared here not as public artworks, but as personal photographs: snapshots reproduced and newly imagined by a machine. The essay explores the distortion that AI image generation introduces to memory and imagination, connecting ideas of photography to cybernetics to expose new ways of theorizing the image in the current stage of AI. It concludes that a theory of AI imagery may borrow from theories of traditional photography but must examine its distinctions
{"title":"Infinite Barnacle: The AI Image and Imagination in GANs from Personal Snapshots","authors":"E. Salvaggio","doi":"10.1162/leon_a_02404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02404","url":null,"abstract":"Today’s artificial intelligence image generation tools create images from datasets. These training sets are typically images sourced from the World Wide Web. However, artists may produce their own datasets from photographs. This essay explores one such process. In it, the artist discusses training a generative adversarial network (GAN) from images of personal memories. These images are shared here not as public artworks, but as personal photographs: snapshots reproduced and newly imagined by a machine. The essay explores the distortion that AI image generation introduces to memory and imagination, connecting ideas of photography to cybernetics to expose new ways of theorizing the image in the current stage of AI. It concludes that a theory of AI imagery may borrow from theories of traditional photography but must examine its distinctions","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"29 1","pages":"-"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82148248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This paper presents a project in the art-science nexus. SoundRunner is a platform that exploits the potential of electroacoustic music to create an interactive sound- and music-making experience. The project investigates how data on running performance can be harnessed in real time to drive musical creation. A range of psychological indices (and associated analyses) is used to assess the effects of the SoundRunner platform on runners. Driven by health and well-being imperatives, the project served to augment running experience with unique sound and music. The paper discusses implications regarding running performance and the further technological development of SoundRunner.
{"title":"SoundRunner: Out of the Starting Blocks","authors":"D. G. Berezan, C. Karageorghis","doi":"10.1162/leon_a_02399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02399","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper presents a project in the art-science nexus. SoundRunner is a platform that exploits the potential of electroacoustic music to create an interactive sound- and music-making experience. The project investigates how data on running performance can be harnessed in real time to drive musical creation. A range of psychological indices (and associated analyses) is used to assess the effects of the SoundRunner platform on runners. Driven by health and well-being imperatives, the project served to augment running experience with unique sound and music. The paper discusses implications regarding running performance and the further technological development of SoundRunner.","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"2 1","pages":"411-417"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87531505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
war, Italy had turned rapidly into a highly capitalist country, but one with a strong leftist sensibility (hence the quite exceptional stance of the country in the Cold War era) and an important Communist Party—a very “glocalised” one, however, that is, a party that did not blindly follow Moscow’s orders. At the same time, the Italian PC had to make so many compromises that it was soon no longer capable to channel the countercultural and new revolutionary tendencies that emerged in the 60s and further developed in the 70s. Caplan analyzes the position as well as the transformations of Arte Programmata considering this political context, including the way in which the art and technology debate was framed in its relationships to other fields (industry, design, daily life, politics). The book offers, for instance, outstanding new readings of Umberto Eco’s work on the “open work,” the debates on information and cybernetics, and the rapid growth of computer art. This double focus—the internal reflection of freedom versus control in the works and writings themselves, but also in the reactions of the audience and the larger debates that followed; the external comparison with the ideas on freedom versus control in the already very globalized art and science environment—fosters a good understanding of the life and afterlife of Arte Programmata, with for instance a very relevant interpretation of why the group shifted from art to design around 1970 and how this apparent retreat from the art world was the logical prerequisite of a stronger involvement with the political and ideological ambitions of Arte Programmata. Caplan’s book is thus a very welcome contribution to the history of a lesser-known avant-garde and the reflection on the importance of these historical debates for our current thinking on vital notions, such as for instance the “system” as a form of agency and empowerment or as a form of domination. On the one hand, it fills an important historical gap, given that Arte Programmata is quite different from the countercultural 60s as we tend to imagine it, while also underlining the problems of a uniformly structured history that easily tends to become purely global, that is Americanized. On the other hand, it insists on the impossibility of separating art and society—more precisely, art and politics—including politics in the very practical sense of the term, having to do with concrete interventions in the public and individual sphere.
{"title":"Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge","authors":"Jacob Thompson-Bell","doi":"10.1162/leon_r_02388","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02388","url":null,"abstract":"war, Italy had turned rapidly into a highly capitalist country, but one with a strong leftist sensibility (hence the quite exceptional stance of the country in the Cold War era) and an important Communist Party—a very “glocalised” one, however, that is, a party that did not blindly follow Moscow’s orders. At the same time, the Italian PC had to make so many compromises that it was soon no longer capable to channel the countercultural and new revolutionary tendencies that emerged in the 60s and further developed in the 70s. Caplan analyzes the position as well as the transformations of Arte Programmata considering this political context, including the way in which the art and technology debate was framed in its relationships to other fields (industry, design, daily life, politics). The book offers, for instance, outstanding new readings of Umberto Eco’s work on the “open work,” the debates on information and cybernetics, and the rapid growth of computer art. This double focus—the internal reflection of freedom versus control in the works and writings themselves, but also in the reactions of the audience and the larger debates that followed; the external comparison with the ideas on freedom versus control in the already very globalized art and science environment—fosters a good understanding of the life and afterlife of Arte Programmata, with for instance a very relevant interpretation of why the group shifted from art to design around 1970 and how this apparent retreat from the art world was the logical prerequisite of a stronger involvement with the political and ideological ambitions of Arte Programmata. Caplan’s book is thus a very welcome contribution to the history of a lesser-known avant-garde and the reflection on the importance of these historical debates for our current thinking on vital notions, such as for instance the “system” as a form of agency and empowerment or as a form of domination. On the one hand, it fills an important historical gap, given that Arte Programmata is quite different from the countercultural 60s as we tend to imagine it, while also underlining the problems of a uniformly structured history that easily tends to become purely global, that is Americanized. On the other hand, it insists on the impossibility of separating art and society—more precisely, art and politics—including politics in the very practical sense of the term, having to do with concrete interventions in the public and individual sphere.","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"21 1","pages":"321-322"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78149550","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Animal Crisis: A New Critical Theory","authors":"Gregory F. Tague","doi":"10.1162/leon_r_02391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02391","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"49 1","pages":"326-327"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85935947","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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