{"title":"On Newton Harrison: An Open Mind and a Bad Attitude","authors":"R. Barnett","doi":"10.1162/leon_a_02379","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02379","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"13 1","pages":"300-301"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82322838","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 provides a reflection on a practice-based computational art project titled Programmoire that explores the presence of computation within the medieval Arabic tradition of magic squares in both its mathematical origins and its magical mutation. The research speculates on an alternative history for technology rooted in the history of magic. Through examining the shared use of symbolic logic and active syntax between coding languages and symbolic magic, the project asks what technology can look like if used as a magical tool and how artistic practice can guide this exploration.
{"title":"Programmoire: Refiguring Witchcraft for a Creative Agency via Computational Art Practice","authors":"Batool Desouky","doi":"10.1162/leon_a_02376","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02376","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper provides a reflection on a practice-based computational art project titled Programmoire that explores the presence of computation within the medieval Arabic tradition of magic squares in both its mathematical origins and its magical mutation. The research speculates on an alternative history for technology rooted in the history of magic. Through examining the shared use of symbolic logic and active syntax between coding languages and symbolic magic, the project asks what technology can look like if used as a magical tool and how artistic practice can guide this exploration.","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"146 1","pages":"244-250"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79954220","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}
quite distinct terms in understanding technology sometimes matters. This is one of the key issues in Endless Intervals, which undoes the entanglement of digital and electronic. Jeffrey West Kirkwood revisits the prehistory of what we now call “the digital” to remind us that the division of a flow to produce a sign did not start somewhere in the mid-twentieth century but has a history that precedes even the controlled use of electricity as an energy source and a resonance that extends beyond technology to how the work of the mind has been understood. In this, the book follows Hugo Munsterberg, a prolific writer and strenuous advocate of public engagement with science who drew a connection between cinematic form and the psyche. More exactly, the way that narrative strategies imported from literature, theater, and film and moving image technologies were used in the cinema developed conventions that seemed to make explicit some ideas of how human cognition worked. Quite what the causal link was between these conventions—if there was one—is not a primary concern of film criticism at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Munsterberg was active. What was important, however, was how a particular theory of human psychology was made apparent in productions for the cinema at the time. Endless Intervals makes a considerable effort to link what it calls early cinema and period psychology with a very well-informed account of the various players and moves in European theories of psychology, in particular the role of instrumental experimental psychology and the struggles at the time in Germany. It is a fascinating and intricately woven story that makes its case within its own terms but is not entirely convincing, in that while it is at pains to use precise language in some areas, in others it is less precise, as, for example, film, cinema, and the cinematographe become interchangeable terms at moments when it matters. Similarly, the invocation of early cinema, which may be a reasonable academic and publishing category, makes no sense in a context that predates the cinema as an institutional form of reception that developed its own modes of production and film form to maximize profits. Cinema is quite distinct from many other affordances of the technology that were also developing as products, including things called topicals, topographics, instrumental film, educational film, surveillance film, and of course narrow-gauge cinematography. Narrow-gauge film became a dominant format for the amateur film-maker and the “home movie” industry, which persists today and vastly exceeds the “footage” of mainstream cinema in the circuits of the estimated 15 billion mobile phones in use in 2021. Moreover, early cinema was a term that did not exist for people like Munsterberg and only took off in the late 1970s when material that was not widely available was released by the archives and ignited new interest in a form of film-making that was unfamiliar and dismissed as p
{"title":"Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick and Ruiz","authors":"Will Luers","doi":"10.1162/leon_r_02395","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02395","url":null,"abstract":"quite distinct terms in understanding technology sometimes matters. This is one of the key issues in Endless Intervals, which undoes the entanglement of digital and electronic. Jeffrey West Kirkwood revisits the prehistory of what we now call “the digital” to remind us that the division of a flow to produce a sign did not start somewhere in the mid-twentieth century but has a history that precedes even the controlled use of electricity as an energy source and a resonance that extends beyond technology to how the work of the mind has been understood. In this, the book follows Hugo Munsterberg, a prolific writer and strenuous advocate of public engagement with science who drew a connection between cinematic form and the psyche. More exactly, the way that narrative strategies imported from literature, theater, and film and moving image technologies were used in the cinema developed conventions that seemed to make explicit some ideas of how human cognition worked. Quite what the causal link was between these conventions—if there was one—is not a primary concern of film criticism at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Munsterberg was active. What was important, however, was how a particular theory of human psychology was made apparent in productions for the cinema at the time. Endless Intervals makes a considerable effort to link what it calls early cinema and period psychology with a very well-informed account of the various players and moves in European theories of psychology, in particular the role of instrumental experimental psychology and the struggles at the time in Germany. It is a fascinating and intricately woven story that makes its case within its own terms but is not entirely convincing, in that while it is at pains to use precise language in some areas, in others it is less precise, as, for example, film, cinema, and the cinematographe become interchangeable terms at moments when it matters. Similarly, the invocation of early cinema, which may be a reasonable academic and publishing category, makes no sense in a context that predates the cinema as an institutional form of reception that developed its own modes of production and film form to maximize profits. Cinema is quite distinct from many other affordances of the technology that were also developing as products, including things called topicals, topographics, instrumental film, educational film, surveillance film, and of course narrow-gauge cinematography. Narrow-gauge film became a dominant format for the amateur film-maker and the “home movie” industry, which persists today and vastly exceeds the “footage” of mainstream cinema in the circuits of the estimated 15 billion mobile phones in use in 2021. Moreover, early cinema was a term that did not exist for people like Munsterberg and only took off in the late 1970s when material that was not widely available was released by the archives and ignited new interest in a form of film-making that was unfamiliar and dismissed as p","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"5 1","pages":"328-330"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75124222","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}
to offer critiques of big business and big science. Rogers is especially interested in whether an artist engaged in credible scientific procedures might still be called an artist, or if a scientist might themselves be considered an artist based on their engagement of the public imagination. In Chapter 6, Rogers discusses her own curatorial project, Art’s Work in the Age of Biotechnology. She explains how her intention was to establish public dialogue with, and participation in, scientific processes and knowledge-making procedures, not to fill a perceived knowledge deficit. It seems clear that Rogers’s ASTS project has stemmed from this kind of curatorial work. As a curator, she forms links between works to create new material assemblages through which knowledge may be produced. Similarly, the vision of art-science that Rogers outlines involves artists re-skilling, speculatively designing, or otherwise imaginatively engaging scientific protocols, to render novel assemblages of materials, people, and technologies that problematize art and science boundary concepts. One area that might be interesting to unpack further is the division of art and science processes into either “material” or “rhetorical” categories. Although Rogers acknowledges that these terms are imperfect, there perhaps remains a risk that, by describing everything in terms of material/ rhetorical agency, her analysis establishes new categories of division, even as she breaks down art/science dualisms. The rhetorical associations of a system cannot be changed without changing the materials assembled therein, and conversely, as the materials networked change, so too do the rhetorical positions through which they speak. That said, I sympathize with Rogers’ position: She is both a theorist aiming for a systematic analysis of art-science and a member of the art-science community. Adopting accessible, albeit imperfect, terms is arguably more impactful as a form of advocacy than would be a purist theoretical project with a correspondingly more limited audience. I think Rogers’s approach is commendable for this practical stance. It is clear how her theories can be applied, and so her work moves beyond the purely critical into the practically useful, which, if the intention is to build more equitable, aesthetically inclusive systems of knowledge, is an essential criterion for success. In this respect, Rogers comes across as sharing much with her case studies, such as the Blaschkas, whose scientific models she describes as “cutting-edge heuristic apparatuses” (p. 222); this definition could equally well be applied to Rogers’s own theoretical project.
{"title":"Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology","authors":"Roberta Buiani","doi":"10.1162/leon_r_02389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02389","url":null,"abstract":"to offer critiques of big business and big science. Rogers is especially interested in whether an artist engaged in credible scientific procedures might still be called an artist, or if a scientist might themselves be considered an artist based on their engagement of the public imagination. In Chapter 6, Rogers discusses her own curatorial project, Art’s Work in the Age of Biotechnology. She explains how her intention was to establish public dialogue with, and participation in, scientific processes and knowledge-making procedures, not to fill a perceived knowledge deficit. It seems clear that Rogers’s ASTS project has stemmed from this kind of curatorial work. As a curator, she forms links between works to create new material assemblages through which knowledge may be produced. Similarly, the vision of art-science that Rogers outlines involves artists re-skilling, speculatively designing, or otherwise imaginatively engaging scientific protocols, to render novel assemblages of materials, people, and technologies that problematize art and science boundary concepts. One area that might be interesting to unpack further is the division of art and science processes into either “material” or “rhetorical” categories. Although Rogers acknowledges that these terms are imperfect, there perhaps remains a risk that, by describing everything in terms of material/ rhetorical agency, her analysis establishes new categories of division, even as she breaks down art/science dualisms. The rhetorical associations of a system cannot be changed without changing the materials assembled therein, and conversely, as the materials networked change, so too do the rhetorical positions through which they speak. That said, I sympathize with Rogers’ position: She is both a theorist aiming for a systematic analysis of art-science and a member of the art-science community. Adopting accessible, albeit imperfect, terms is arguably more impactful as a form of advocacy than would be a purist theoretical project with a correspondingly more limited audience. I think Rogers’s approach is commendable for this practical stance. It is clear how her theories can be applied, and so her work moves beyond the purely critical into the practically useful, which, if the intention is to build more equitable, aesthetically inclusive systems of knowledge, is an essential criterion for success. In this respect, Rogers comes across as sharing much with her case studies, such as the Blaschkas, whose scientific models she describes as “cutting-edge heuristic apparatuses” (p. 222); this definition could equally well be applied to Rogers’s own theoretical project.","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"19 1","pages":"322-324"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76782125","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":"Eco-Art: On the Topography of the Harrisons","authors":"Carinne Knight","doi":"10.1162/leon_a_02382","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02382","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"7 1","pages":"306-307"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82741228","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}
D. Doyle, Richard Glover, Martin Khechara, Sebastian Groes
Abstract During a series of interviews undertaken in Identifying Successful STARTS Methodologies (2019–2021), a research project that analyzed strategies utilized by recent STARTS Prize winners and nominees, a number of the artists and scientists described having needed to build a “third space,” or to meet on “another plane,” in order to communicate and find a common language for art-science collaborations. The project team, from University of Wolverhampton (U.K.), collaborated with Ars Electronica and STARTS on the research and found ways to explore the third space concept in three collaborative art-science projects.
{"title":"Exploring the Third Space in Art-Science: The Identifying Successful STARTS Methodologies Project","authors":"D. Doyle, Richard Glover, Martin Khechara, Sebastian Groes","doi":"10.1162/leon_a_02377","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02377","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract During a series of interviews undertaken in Identifying Successful STARTS Methodologies (2019–2021), a research project that analyzed strategies utilized by recent STARTS Prize winners and nominees, a number of the artists and scientists described having needed to build a “third space,” or to meet on “another plane,” in order to communicate and find a common language for art-science collaborations. The project team, from University of Wolverhampton (U.K.), collaborated with Ars Electronica and STARTS on the research and found ways to explore the third space concept in three collaborative art-science projects.","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"19 1","pages":"257-261"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75171171","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 seeks to strengthen the epistemic case for sci-art by demonstrating how partnerships across paradigms can combine methodologies rooted in multiple knowledge traditions. Drawing on Robin Nelson’s multimodal conceptualization of artistic research and Bruno Latour’s model of science as a circulatory system of heterogeneous human and nonhuman phenomena, the author characterizes sci-art as a form of posthuman praxis, which opens new epistemic positions through transversal forms of inquiry, thereby revealing shared human/nonhuman cultures. Sci-art is thus proposed as a means of drawing together humans and nonhumans into more productive, empathic associations.
{"title":"The Epistemic Case for Sci-Art: Toward a Posthuman Praxis","authors":"Jacob Thompson-Bell","doi":"10.1162/leon_a_02317","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02317","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article seeks to strengthen the epistemic case for sci-art by demonstrating how partnerships across paradigms can combine methodologies rooted in multiple knowledge traditions. Drawing on Robin Nelson’s multimodal conceptualization of artistic research and Bruno Latour’s model of science as a circulatory system of heterogeneous human and nonhuman phenomena, the author characterizes sci-art as a form of posthuman praxis, which opens new epistemic positions through transversal forms of inquiry, thereby revealing shared human/nonhuman cultures. Sci-art is thus proposed as a means of drawing together humans and nonhumans into more productive, empathic associations.","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"19 1","pages":"292-298"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77803328","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}
infrastructures, and discourses, that “define what counts as knowledge” (p. 80). An analysis of these elements can thus reveal how knowledge is produced in and through labs—a method they refer to as the “extended lab model” (p. 11). Their description of this method is followed by detailed analyses of several labs, including Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, the Media Lab at MIT, and the Media Archaeological Fundus at Humboldt University. This brief list illustrates the range of labs under discussion: corporate labs, labs designed for industrial and academic applications, and labs focused on historical preservation. One of the themes repeated throughout the book is that the increasing number of humanities labs is indicative of broader changes within contemporary academic culture, as “shifts between traditional humanities spaces . . . and science labs can be tracked historically, not only as a particular modern form of hybridity with a very intensive transformation witnessed across the past decades, but as a theoretically and thematically insightful way to read modern institutional change” (p. 32). This trend is often interpreted as a sign of the increasing marginalization of the humanities, which has been fueled in part by a desire for corporate investment. The writers note, for example, that there is “an enormous amount of pressure on universities to instrumentalize education” (p. 136) and that “the fetishization of innovation has done substantial damage to the traditional function of the university as memory institution and producer of citizens rather than employees” (p. 212). However, they also argue that labs have an “enormous potential . . . to change our institutional cultures for the better” (p. 136) and that they “can and should lead to new ways of being a scholar, of training new scholars, and of connecting what happens in the academy to the larger world” (p. 112). Another repeated theme, inspired by Feminist Science Studies (FSS), is that laboratory practices are informed by gender and power relations that determine “who is identified as what kind of subject, and how they are identified” (p. 18). Labs thus operate within disciplinary frameworks that extend to bodies as well as technologies, and one of the clearest examples is the fact that women were historically relegated to home economics labs and excluded from conducting research in science labs. Power relations also inform financing, as organizations like the MIT Media Lab will “never be able to remain unaffected by funding that comes from U.S. tech companies with the same deeply ingrained racial and gender demographics” (p. 160). This problem became particularly evident after it was discovered that the lab had accepted funds from sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein—a decision that reflects “a particularly troubling form of ignorance of the social complexities of race, gender, and other issues” (p. 166). Nevertheless, the writers conclude that their “extended lab model”
{"title":"Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects","authors":"Michael Punt","doi":"10.1162/leon_r_02347","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02347","url":null,"abstract":"infrastructures, and discourses, that “define what counts as knowledge” (p. 80). An analysis of these elements can thus reveal how knowledge is produced in and through labs—a method they refer to as the “extended lab model” (p. 11). Their description of this method is followed by detailed analyses of several labs, including Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, the Media Lab at MIT, and the Media Archaeological Fundus at Humboldt University. This brief list illustrates the range of labs under discussion: corporate labs, labs designed for industrial and academic applications, and labs focused on historical preservation. One of the themes repeated throughout the book is that the increasing number of humanities labs is indicative of broader changes within contemporary academic culture, as “shifts between traditional humanities spaces . . . and science labs can be tracked historically, not only as a particular modern form of hybridity with a very intensive transformation witnessed across the past decades, but as a theoretically and thematically insightful way to read modern institutional change” (p. 32). This trend is often interpreted as a sign of the increasing marginalization of the humanities, which has been fueled in part by a desire for corporate investment. The writers note, for example, that there is “an enormous amount of pressure on universities to instrumentalize education” (p. 136) and that “the fetishization of innovation has done substantial damage to the traditional function of the university as memory institution and producer of citizens rather than employees” (p. 212). However, they also argue that labs have an “enormous potential . . . to change our institutional cultures for the better” (p. 136) and that they “can and should lead to new ways of being a scholar, of training new scholars, and of connecting what happens in the academy to the larger world” (p. 112). Another repeated theme, inspired by Feminist Science Studies (FSS), is that laboratory practices are informed by gender and power relations that determine “who is identified as what kind of subject, and how they are identified” (p. 18). Labs thus operate within disciplinary frameworks that extend to bodies as well as technologies, and one of the clearest examples is the fact that women were historically relegated to home economics labs and excluded from conducting research in science labs. Power relations also inform financing, as organizations like the MIT Media Lab will “never be able to remain unaffected by funding that comes from U.S. tech companies with the same deeply ingrained racial and gender demographics” (p. 160). This problem became particularly evident after it was discovered that the lab had accepted funds from sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein—a decision that reflects “a particularly troubling form of ignorance of the social complexities of race, gender, and other issues” (p. 166). Nevertheless, the writers conclude that their “extended lab model”","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"846 1","pages":"213-215"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84843044","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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