From nisarh at keshvani.com Thu Dec 9 20:02:28 2004 From: nisarh at keshvani.com (nisar keshvani) Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 19:02:28 -0600 Subject: [LEAuthors] Holiday Sale on Leonardo Journals and Books! Message-ID: <200412091902.AA59834398@keshvani.com> Happy Holidays to Friends of Leonardo! Holiday Sale on Leonardo Journals and Books! The MIT Press is having a tremendous sale just in time for all your holiday celebrations. Current and back issues of Leonardo and Leonardo Music Journal as well as Leonardo Book Series titles are available at 40% off via the MIT Press web site for a very limited time. Visit: http://mitpress.mit.edu/websale MIT Press is offering a 40% discount on any order placed through their website now through Sunday, December 12. Your discount should automatically appear in your shopping cart. If it doesn't, simply enter the discount code WEBSALE during checkout. Some conditions and restrictions apply - see the above web page for details. Current Leonardo Book Series Titles - subject to availability Protocol (author, Alex Galloway) Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency (authors, Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala) Women, art and Technology (editor, Judy Malloy) Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia (author, Geert Lovink) Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (author, Oliver Grau) Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science and Technology (author, Stephen Wilson) The Language of New Media (author, Lev Manovich) The Robot in the Garden (edited by Ken Goldberg) Art and Innovation: The Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program (edited by Craig Harris) The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media (edited by Peter Lunenfeld) Technoromanticism (author, Richard Coyne) Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (edited by Mary Anne Moser and Douglas MacLeod) Designing Information Technology for the Postmodern Age (author, Richard Coyne) The Visual Mind: Art and Mathematics (edited by Michele Emmer) Visit http://mitpress.mit.edu/websale and click on the link on that page, which takes you to the MIT Press home page. Search for the above titles under the link "BOOKS" or search for under "JOURNALS" for "Leonardo" and "Leonardo Music Journal" to see which back issues are available. From nhkeshvani at yahoo.com Tue Dec 14 01:25:26 2004 From: nhkeshvani at yahoo.com (nisar keshvani) Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 22:25:26 -0800 (PST) Subject: [LEAuthors] Leonardo Electronic Almanac Vol 12, No 12, December 2004 Message-ID: <20041214062526.63552.qmail@web40914.mail.yahoo.com> In this e-mail: INTRODUCTION EDITORIAL FEATURES LEONARDO REVIEWS LEONARDO JOURNAL 38:1 - FORTHCOMING ISAST NEWS OPPORTUNITY OBITUARY CREDITS --------------------------------- INTRODUCTION In LEA's December issue, guest editor Michael Punt presides over Part II of a special double-issue, based on the theme "From the Extraordinary to the Uncanny: The Unusual and Inexplicable in Art, Science and Technology." Following this theme, the first article, by Peter Anders, explores intriguing parallels in the development of communications technology and spiritualist practices, including stage magic, in the nineteenth century; Josephine Coy discusses her project, *Media Ghosts*, in which images adapted from various news media "seemed to have emerged as if through a fissure between worlds," and describes the process of creation of the works. Len Massey looks into various takes on the supernatural within the alternative media, finding an interesting contrast to the "saturated spin we are fed on a daily basis;" Pia Tikka looks at "Cinema and the Biological Basis of Otherness," discussing her view that interactive cinema can be seen as an "externalization of mind;" and C. S. Unnikrishnan makes a compelling case for the central role of "unobservables" in cosmology and physics, arguing that exploring the nature of such phenomena can even lead to profound spiritual insights. In Leonardo Reviews, introduced by Robert Pepperell, Pia Tikka contributes a review of *Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life*, Sean Cubitt reviews *The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power and Cyberspace* and Amy Ione reviews *Experiments in Form*. We also take a look at the contents and selected abstracts from the first 2005 issue of *Leonardo*, while ISAST News brings us the latest events in the Leonardo/ISAST community. On a final, more somber note, John Milner brings us an obituary of the Russian artist Kirill Sokolov, a long-time supporter and contributor to the *Leonardo* journal. --------------------------------- EDITORIAL FROM THE EXTRAORDINARY TO THE UNCANNY: THE UNUSUAL AND INEXPLICABLE IN ART, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY By Michael Punt E-mail: Mpunt [@] easynet [dot] co [dot] uk This month sees the second part of the LEA special double-issue dealing with the uncanny and extraordinary at the nexus of art, science and technology. With the full compliment of published texts now available to read, it seems appropriate to make some comments by way of an overview as a supplement to last month's introduction. Perhaps the most unexpected response to the call for interest came from Christine Morris and we were delighted to open the first part of this double-issue with her contribution. In all my speculations about other realities, I had not considered the dimension to the debate that her essay on jurisprudence opens up. Her intervention is all the more valuable as it shifted the geographical center of gravity of much that was submitted. In the discussions prior to the published version of her piece, it became clear that not only did we need to extend our realm of interest to include other academic disciplines and practices, but we also needed to understand the significance of the authorial voice of the text in this project. John Barber's focus on (English-language) science-fiction novels amplifies this, as it reflects a literary genre that is a resistance to the repression of alternative world views in mainstream Eurocentric culture. This is a theme also evident in Peter Anders' account of legitimate theater and conjuring's legitimization of the ghostly presence. It offers this experience as the true precursor to new popular technologies such as television and the more esoteric realm of mixed-reality artworks. Where Anders sees parallel worlds as embedded in cultural experience, a more essentialist line is taken in Pia Tikka's essay, in which she argues that interactive cinema is no so much a technology of contingency as a more profound externalization of the fundamental properties of consciousness. >From her point of view, interactive cinema is not a fad or a gimmick but an essential move in our thinking about the human condition. For Len Massey, radio too needs to be factored into this vision of alternative reality as a populist domain. His radical literary style reflects the topic of his study - alternative broadcast radio productions - which, like his prose, stands in opposition to the monoliths of national and international networks that support a global orthodoxy of value. In addition to the different voices of this small selection of authors, selected from over 60 contributions, we also wanted to include the "other" voice of artists and included two artist's statements in the double-issue. Josephine Coy is an artist who, over an extended period, has researched into the practices and beliefs that lie outside Western culture but which are crucial determinants in others. In particular, her most recent study draws on research in Brazil with the União do Vegetal. As she points out in her statement, the prominence of light in experiential phenomena not only foregrounds one of the key concerns of visual artists but also has resonance with many scientific discourses that call upon the poetic and the creative to supplement positivist and rationalist methods of enquiry. Her images provide a parallel commentary to her statement and amplify a version of the real that often evades literary description. Finally, Camille Baker reiterates Coy's own intuition that a key topic in linking creativity in science and art is the study of human consciousness. Baker's piece is an exegesis of an installation that she made as part of an extended period of research. It prompts an enquiry into other forms of communication that have been idealistically described on the edges of technology and, as she suggests, may well find themselves center-stage in the emerging communication culture of teleportation (simulated or otherwise). Putting this LEA special together was a considerable effort for which great thanks are due, first to the submitting authors and all who showed interest and support for the idea, and then to the reviewers. I would especially like to thank Robert Pepperell, David Surman, Martha Blassnigg and Peter Anders, who not only reviewed submissions but also contributed to the development of an intellectual framework that enabled me to organize the two issues. Finally I am also especially grateful to Nisar Keshvani, who, beyond all expectation, took control of the chaos that surrounded both the extraordinary response and my final cut so that it actually became something in the world. In view of the work that everyone put in, it seems churlish not to draw some conclusion to the project as it now stands despite its apparent heterogeneity. If nothing else, I think the double-issue shows the necessity of a network of voices that must come together at any given moment around any given topic if it is to be invested with resonance. The fact that after a very short while the contributing parts become no more than ingredients of the whole is evident in the way that scientific practice itself temporarily lost sight of the spectrum of its own curiosity. Now that this seems to be changing, it heralds a period of rich collaboration as the formerly unthinkable becomes once again part of our daily reality, enriching our creative response to the world(s) around us. At the moment, this new intellectual horizon is most evident in the study of consciousness as many of the contributors have claimed. This is evident not only in the increasing number of conferences and books that choose consciousness as the lead topic, but the way that artists themselves are beginning to heed the call to collaboration with other epistemologies whose dissatisfaction with the idea of a single reality is yielding productive insights. --------------------------------- Features HAUNTINGS: GHOSTS, TECHNOLOGY AND THE OBSERVER'S DOMAIN by Peter Anders, 4416 Andre Street, Midland, MI 48640, U.S.A. E-mail: ptr [@] mindspace [dot] net http://Mindspace.net ABSTRACT This article explores parallels between spiritualist and electronic communications technologies in the nineteenth century, and the manifestation of ghosts or other abstract, remote presences. It notes stage magic to be a technology that, while overtly concerned with material techniques, employs psychological practices inherited from spiritualism. The observer's role in conjuring and the effects of theater distinguish magical practice from its material technologies. Current technologies that merge physical and simulated realities - mixed or augmented reality - would benefit from magicians' insights concerning the observer's role in the creation of magic. KEYWORDS mixed reality, magic, spiritualism, Pepper's Ghost, augmented reality, media technology. _____________________________ INTRODUCTION Digital technology now allows us to merge simulations with physical environments. This conflation, called augmented reality or mixed reality, is the product of techniques involving computers, sensors and displays [1]. In the hands of artists such as Paul Sermon, Thecla Schiphorst or Michael Naimark, this blend of fiction and fact can have an unsettling effect, evoking in some viewers the sense that the simulations haunt the space in which they stand. In this way, mixed reality recalls previous models of overlapping realities in which non-physical entities co-inhabit our world, examples of which we can find in literature, legend and myth: haunted houses, spectral visitation, UFO sightings and divine revelations. Arthur C. Clarke famously observed that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" [2]. Despite this insight, I feel compelled to adjust this statement. For while technology's use may have magical effects, magic itself is the empirical result of such technology upon the observer. The two, while related, are different in kind. Technology is a tool of agency, while magic is in the observer's domain. Here I make no claims beyond noting the observer's role in the effect of magic technologies; nor do I speculate magic to be the result of supernatural forces. My subject is instead the skillful use of technology to transcend quotidian experience, thereby extending observers' consciousness to other possible states. This applies whether the technology is incantations, mushrooms or computers, or whether its agents are conjurors, shamans or priests. In this article, I will identify historical affinities between media technology and magical thinking in the 1800s. A review of these earlier, successful blends of illusion and reality provides a useful model for current techniques such as mixed reality. This analysis implicates conjuror/spiritualists' reliance on their audience's state of receptivity for the effect of their magic. This state may be cultivated by means that appear to have little to do with the illusion itself. Yet, without them, the technology of illusion alone would be insufficient to explain its uncanny effect. I argue in coming pages that the mind of the observer - not the stage or séance table - is where such magic happens. MEDIUMS: SPIRITUAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL The haunting of space is a subject with a long cultural history, yet may itself be viewed in the light of more recent technology. It is said that the specters that occupy haunted spaces come from distant times, places and - when from beyond the grave - states. In literature and legend, such apparitions often bear news from far away, the remote past or the future. The spectral overlay of the remote onto the present, the spectral onto the actual, strikes us as uncanny. Yet, in a mundane sense, haunting resembles communication by electronic media, where remote communicants are co-located with observers as abstracted voices, images or avatars. This observation is borne out by the history of electronic media and its cultural effects. Indeed, the mid-nineteenth century was marked by dialogue and exchange between spiritualist and technological practitioners during the infancy of electronic media. Jeffrey Sconce articulates the discourse and collusion between these practitioners and their use of media technology [3]. He argues that early electronic media had the unprecedented effect of making the remote present, implicating it within the history of occult practices. Parallels in the development of technology and spiritualism are suggested in the coded knocks of table rappers in séances and the intermittent taps of the telegraph, as well as the shared use of terms like "medium" and "channel." The rise of spiritualism in America came at a time that saw a change from romanticism to the determinist materialism brought on by technology. The 1840s saw the first electronic transmission of messages and a technological optimism inspired by the industrial revolution. The enthusiasm for disembodied communication took a popular form that presaged the techno- romanticism of the 1990s [4]. An occult parallel to Samuel Morse's telegraph came with the discovery of the Fox sisters. In 1848, the family of Kate and Margaretta Fox suffered several sleepless nights due to persistent, mysterious knocking sounds. Clapping her hands three times, Kate, the youngest, cried, "Here Mr. Splitfoot. Do as I do." As if in response, the family heard three knocks. In the course of the evening the dialog between family and intruder expanded to include counting, identifying the children's ages and answers to numerous questions [5]. The sensation of the Foxes spread quickly; hundreds of visitors flocked to the Fox house in Hydesville, New York, to see for themselves the sisters' "spiritual telegraphy." The following years saw a swift rise of interest in the occult, for in the popular mind the mysteries of spiritualism seemed no more incredible than contemporary electronic or wireless communication. No one appeared immune as technology's inventors also applied their skills to communicate with the spirit world. Séances, the use of planchettes and Ouija boards became accepted pastimes across the social spectrum, both in the United States and England. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Arthur Conan Doyle and Horace Greeley attended spiritualist events and gatherings. President Abraham Lincoln and his wife hosted séances as well. Capitalizing upon this interest, spiritualists - beginning with members of the Fox family - began to charge admission to their events. Self-appointed mediums and clairvoyants plied their newfou! nd trade in public halls and the homes of the wealthy [6]. These developments provoked controversy with objections raised both by religious leaders threatened by secular necromancy and skeptical observers who suspected humbug behind the spiritualist claims. There are accounts of audience disruptions at spiritualist events and even violent confrontations with spiritualist practitioners. James Steinmeyer, a historian of professional magic, relates the story of the Davenport brothers. An American team that trafficked in spiritual presentations, the brothers were menaced by their British audiences to the point of closing shows early and - hastily - leaving their venues [7]. CONJURING VS. SPIRITUALISM A more disciplined reaction to spiritualism was the emergence of professional magicians in the later 1800s. Indeed many of the conjurors of this and earlier periods exposed the practices of mediums and spiritualist clairvoyants to be contrivances of technique and chicanery. This had the paradoxical effect of sustaining the criticism of mysticism while still feeding the public hunger for the uncanny. The early careers of John Maskelyne, John Cooke and later, Harry Houdini, exposed spiritualist fraud. Simultaneously they developed technologies of illusion that, despite their disclaimers, would mystify their audiences much as spiritualism had before. Conjuring suggests a triumph of technique over content. The hidden technology of illusion became the focus of stage magic rather than assertions of spiritual visitation. By 1888, with the public confession of Margaretta Fox that she and her sister were the source of the ghostly knocking, spiritualism was in full retreat. Despite their differences, the practitioners of spiritualism and professional magic shared a number of traits. In both, the performer embodied an agency that was manifested to an audience in a variety of settings. Both involved a sense of ritual - whether the joining of hands around a table or the conventions of theater. In each case the ritual employed focal objects including crystal balls, candles and planchettes among the spiritualists, and the wands, capes and top hats of magicians. Most important, both disciplines depended upon their audiences to complete the illusions. The imagination of the observer could do more to transform knocks and shadows into ghosts than any technical marvel alone. For the professional magician there was no magic, only technique. Magic was a fabrication by the observer. For this reason, conjurors especially became adept at attention management and developing techniques that played upon audience expectations. This practical understanding of huma! n desires and behavior emerged at a time when similar themes were being explored in science and medicine. While spiritualism drew strength from the phenomena of technology - particularly the disembodied presences of telegraphy - stage magic employed it directly to similar ghostly effect. Many practitioners closely followed technology's development, using it in their presentations and, occasionally, refining the technology itself. George Méliés, director of Paris' Theatre Houdin, is as well-known now for his contribution to modern cinema as for his work as a magician. Such conflation of conjuring and technology in theatrical settings was commonplace by the late 1800s, satisfying both the public curiosity and hunger for spectacle. One of the early contributors to stage technology, Henry Pepper, was a lecturer and director of London's Polytechnic Theatre, which featured magic acts, scientific demonstrations and dramatic plays on the same stage. One of the Polytechnic's most successful shows, a play based on a Charles Dickens Christmas story, featured a startling illusion that was s! oon named after the impresario: Pepper's Ghost. HAUNTING THE POLYTECHNIC The ghost's haunting of the stage in the Dickens show was effected by a large pane of glass angled over the orchestra pit out toward the audience. With judicious lighting the reflected occupants of the pit would appear to hover on the stage beyond the glass. Raising the stage lighting or dimming the pit would make the apparitions appear transparent or cause them to disappear altogether. In the time since its Polytechnic days, the ghost has appeared in countless productions, museum displays and fun-house exhibits. However, even in the 1860s, the technique was already three centuries old. In 1558, natural philosopher Baptista Porta described the illusion in *Natural Magic*, a book translated into English 100 years later. In 1852, French artist Pierre Séguin filed a patent for a small viewing box in which illusionary figurines inhabited a tiny stage. It was produced as a toy but never attained commercial success and Séguin let the patent lapse. Pepper's Ghost was itself a refin! ement of a stage illusion invented by Henry Dircks, a civil engineer from Liverpool. In its original form, called the Dircksian Phantasmagoria, the invention employed a vertical glass that required the entire audience to sit in the balcony. To Dircks' surprise, producers had little interest in rebuilding their theaters for so limited a use. It was owing to Pepper's contribution that the illusion was adapted to conventional theater. A patent was filed on the ghost in 1862 under the names of both Dircks and Pepper, one day after its first visitation at the Polytechnic Theater. While there would at first seem to be little relation between digital mixed reality and a stage contrivance from the Victorian era, Pepper's Ghost survives in beam-splitting devices in holographic and laser research, and in special-effects lenses for cinematography. Even the see-through head-mounted displays favored by augmented reality researchers trace back to the haunting of the Polytechnic. The observer of contemporary mixed- reality illusions, while perhaps more technically sophisticated, is as complicit with the illusion of overlapping realities as were the audiences in Pepper's day. This said, important differences emerge when we compare the Victorian and modern Pepper's Ghosts. The apparitions of the stage required a well-lit actor or object as a content source; the reflection became an intermediate representation of the actor. Although the stage manager intended the ghost to appear autonomous, by concealing the actor in the pit, the ghost was tacitly a medium of communication. In keeping with nineteenth- century telegraphy and spiritualist practices, the ghost's visually remote actors were revealed manifestly through a mysterious agency. Although the Victorian ghost cannot be regarded as a competitor of telegraphy as a mass medium, current mixed reality makes such a comparison possible. Mixed reality of today makes use of both electronics and Pepper's ghost, although it is not yet considered by most to be a telecommunications medium. Research by Hirokazu Kato and Mark Billinghurst suggests that telecommunications media and mixed reality may well merge! [8]. However, more often mixed reality simply merges two and three-dimensional graphics onto actual, live scenes, or situates actual images in simulated environments. If images of people are employed, they are rarely intended for communications beyond an immediate installation or artwork. Research suggests that an update of Pepper's Ghost as a communications medium would be a compelling use of both old and new technologies. MIXED REALITY AND THE OBSERVER'S DOMAIN The physical techniques behind occult and magical practice are surprisingly simple - sound and light effects, sleight of hand, etc. - and cannot alone explain their success. The powerful effects of such practices owe largely to a sophisticated understanding of human attention, expectation and behavior. These are cultivated by the practitioner through language, incantations or patter, or with an appropriate setting, be it a haunted house or a proscenium stage. Physical properties are also important and it is instructive to contrast those of spiritualism and professional magic. Crystal balls, planchettes and tarot cards are exotic and convey the sense of occult mystery. In comparison magicians' props are deliberately banal: playing cards, dice, cups and balls. Even the capes, top hats and formal attire of professional magicians are holdovers from the everyday garb of the nineteenth century. Both props and costume enhance the magical effect, whether by exalting the mysterious a! ctions of the spiritualist or by lulling the magician's audience with the appearance of normalcy. Beyond the physical attributes of spiritualism and stage magic lies the ritual of presentation, one that merges the effects of sense and imagination within the observer's mind. In both cases the audience is carefully seated, the performer is an agent of magic, and deliberate preparations - narratives, invocations and adjustment of props - result in a focal, uncanny event. In this way, the mere tap of a foot or flash of light constitutes proof of a supernatural merging of worlds. Designers of mixed reality and its technology could do well to employ similar techniques in their craft. An understanding of the states of observer consciousness and an ability to induce or affect these states may do more to realize mixed reality than faster processors or high-resolution monitors. The effective technology is not external to the viewer, but resides instead within the domain of the observer's consciousness and mind. CONCLUSIONS In the preceding pages I have related a history of interaction between technological development and occult practices, the triumph of technique over spiritualism with the emergence of Victorian conjuring and the haunting of the stage by mirrored illusions. The success of Pepper's Ghost and its attendant spiritualist milieu owed to an audience that - perhaps reacting to the materialist determinism of the industrial revolution - sought to transcend everyday experience by exposure to the uncanny. I suggest here that the late Victorian era resembles our own: in the wake of the first digital age, artists and technologists have begun to look inward, utilizing their technologies in the study of consciousness and first-person experience. That there is an overlap between material and non- material existence, there can be no doubt. The brain is itself evidence enough. It is left to artists and the designers of technology to manifest this overlap, revealing the ghosts and avatars that ! haunt our minds and culture. REFERENCES AND NOTES 1. See Paul Milgram and Herman Colquhoun Jr., "A Taxonomy of Real and Virtual World Display Integration," in *Mixed Reality: Merging Real and Virtual Worlds*, Eds. Y. Ohta and H. Tamura, New York, NY: Springer-Verlag (1999) pp. 5-27. 2. See Arthur C. Clarke, *Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible*, New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, Inc. (1984) 3. See Jeffrey Sconce, *Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television*, Durham, NC: Duke University Press (2000). 4. See Richard Coyne, *Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real*, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (1999). 5. J. Sconce [3]. 6. James Steinmeyer, *Hiding the Elephant*, New York, NY: Carroll and Graf (2003). 7. J. Steinmeyer [6]. 8. See Mark Billinghurst and Hirokazu Kato, "Collaborative Mixed Reality," in *Mixed Reality: Merging Real and Virtual Worlds*, Eds. Y. Ohta and H. Tamura, New York, NY: Springer- Verlag (1999) 261-280. FURTHER BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES Anders, Peter, *A Procedural Model for the Integration of Physical and Cyberspaces*, doctoral thesis, CAiiA-STAR center, University of Plymouth (2003). Davis, Andrew Jackson, *The Present Age and Inner Life: Ancient and Modern Spirit Mysteries Classified and Explained* (a revised and enlarged sequel to *Spiritual Intercourse*), Rochester, NY: Austin Publishing (1853, reprint 1910). Feiner, S., MacIntyre, B. and Höllerer, T. *Wearing it Out: First Steps toward Mobile Augmented Reality Systems*, in *Mixed reality: Merging Real and Virtual Worlds*, Eds. Y. Ohta, H. Tamura, New York, NY: Springer-Verlag (1999) 363-375. Feiner, Stephen, "Augmented Reality: A New Way of Seeing," in *Scientific American*, April 2002, 48-55. Punt, Michael, *Early Cinema and the Technological Imaginary*, Trowbridge, Wiltshire, U.K.: Cromwell Press (2000). Steinmeyer, James, *The Science behind the Ghost*, Burbank, CA: Hahne (1999). Steinmeyer, James, *Hiding the Elephant*, New York, NY: Carroll and Graf (2003). AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Peter Anders is an architect, educator and information design theorist. He has published widely on the architecture of cyberspace and is the author of *Envisioning Cyberspace* (McGraw Hill), which presents design principles for online spatial environments. Anders received degrees from the University of Michigan (B.S., 1976), Columbia University (M.A., 1982) and the University of Plymouth Planetary Collegium (Ph.D., 2004). He was a principal in an architectural firm in New York City until 1994 when he formed MindSpace.net, an architectural practice specializing in media/information environments. He has received numerous design awards for his work and has taught graduate level design studios and computer-aided design at universities including the New Jersey Institute of Technology, University of Detroit-Mercy and the University of Michigan. His work has been featured in professional journals and he has presented his research on the architecture of cyberspace in several interna! tional venues including The New York Architectural League, Xerox PARC, ISEA, CAiiA, Cyberconf, ACADIA, AEC, ACM- Multimedia, InterSymp, SEGD and the World Future Society. --------------------------------- [EDITOR NOTE: The two following articles are artist's statements, describing specific projects. Images related to the projects can be seen at the LEA web site: http://lea.mit.edu] QUESTIONS OF REALITY: *MEDIA GHOSTS* By Josephine Coy, 64, Upper Cheltenham Place, Montpelier, Bristol, BS6 5HR, U.K. E-mail: josephine [dot] coy [@] btinternet [dot] com http://www.axisartists.org/artistid/2135 ABSTRACT This article is the product of interactions between the author, the digital camera and newsreel television. The uncanny aspect of the process is that some of the images seemed to have emerged as if through a fissure between worlds. The objective was to find some quintessence of being, such as "cyber souls" existing within and beyond the broadcast context. Shifts in the relationship between science and art affect the imaginative resources of the artist and the interactive processes through which a work is created. In this process, the perception of the artist and the viewer will differ, as will their understanding of what constitutes reality. KEYWORDS ghosts, reality, transitions, ephemeral, quintessence, transpersonal _____________________________ Ghost - a semblance: a duplicated image due to additional reception of a delayed similar signal which has covered a longer path.... (from the *Chambers English Dictionary*) *Media Ghosts*, the subject of this article, proceeded from a series of images and texts that related to both the "open work" and the question of "reality." This enquiry took place over a period of time I spent in Brazil. During this time, I experienced altered states of consciousness as a participant in the meetings of the União do Vegetal [1]. Aside from other phenomena, this experience showed me slivers of light, as if through a door about to open. Likewise, through the interactions between myself, the digital camera and newsreel television, the images from *Media Ghosts* seem to me to have emerged as if through a fissure between worlds. Although the original contexts of these images were from within newscasting elements such as politics, race or religion, they are displaced and set apart from connotations of time, place or hierarchy. There is no narrative; they exist in an open state like ephemeral transitions from a transpersonal world, "cyber-souls" navigating. There are images for which I have no explanation as to their strangeness, yet I arrived at all of them out of the motivation to find some quintessence of "being" existing outside the newscasting context. This journey of the image, from the screen through the camera and the computer to further processes, is intrinsically open-ended. Umberto Eco states that the very essence of the open work is the exchange between the form and layers of meaning, suggesting multiple possibilities and interactions, where meanings shift as discovery is made [2]. Similarly, as with *Media Ghosts*, the shifts taking place in the world in relation to science and aesthetic language, such as quantum physics and digital technologies, affect the imaginative resources of the artist and the interactions and processes through which a work is created. In quantum theory, we meet with the claim that we are part of a universal consciousness wherein we as observers are also that which we observe, not forgetting that this concept was preceded on a spiritual plane in eastern religion and philosophy, as expressed in the famous phrase, "Thou art that." The intention behind this work is also relative to these shifts, from which stem the questions "What is reality?" and "What is the truth of a recorded image?", given that the perceptions of bot! h the creator and the viewer will undoubtedly be different. Is it part of a collective memory, of archetypes, of ontological states, of a universal consciousness? Kevin Robins pointed out that ". . . Walter Benjamin believed that another nature spoke to the camera than to the eye: other in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gave way to a space informed by the unconscious. He described it as the optical unconscious . . ." [3]. *Media Ghosts* presents a reality that, although not "virtually" designed, is Other and has evolved through cyberspace. REFERENCES AND NOTES 1. União do Vegetal is a Brazil-based religious society that makes use of a hallucinogenic tea known as Ayahuasca or Hoasca in its ceremonies to elicit states of heightened awareness and concentration. See http://www.udv.org.br/english/index.html . 2. Umberto Eco, *The Open Work* (trans. A. Cancogni), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1989). 3. Kevin Robins, "The Virtual Unconscious in Postphotography," in T. Druckery, ed., *Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation*, New York, NY: Aperture (1996). AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Josephine Coy is a visual artist currently researching at the College of Fine Art, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. Across the past 20 years, Coy's work has reflected her preoccupations with light, energy and the immaterial, through a range of processes involving figurative, abstract and written forms. Her present work, using digital photography, has returned to the figurative and relates in part to a fascination with the dynamics of quantum physics. Her work has been exhibited widely in the U.K and Brazil, including *Transmigrations from an Angel's Rearwing Mirror* at the gallery of the University of Brasilia with the support of the British Council. --------------------------------- SPOOKIE COOKIES By Len Massey, Drawing Studio, Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU, United Kingdom E-mail: len [dot] massey [@] rca [dot] ac [dot] uk ABSTRACT The author has a look at a spooky part of the alternative media and finds fragments of a counterbalance to the saturated spin we are fed on a daily basis. Meanwhile, the ghosts mount up. KEYWORDS media, aura, paranormal, weird, wonderful, strange, reality, independent, Resonance FM, radio _____________________________ Virtual voodoo steaming live streams, vibrations, evaporations from before the days of ice. Where the astronomic and the astrologic collide, where the unexpected hangs out with the absurd. The Pioneer Radio Network is both symptom and construct of our times, operating like an agency not dissimilar to a travel agency, where one can visit and interact with various realities. There are other similarities too. Like the tales of exotic dishes eaten in the half-built hotels that scar some of the most beautiful bits of the planet and now bear more of a likeness to factory farms on the coast. Where those more "privileged" workers and their families go to get the illusion of pampered recovery and discovery. This enables them to psyche themselves up for yet another year of doffing their caps to the system, a system that delivers banality on a global scale. A system that at its best provides a temporary means to an end whilst at the same time committing the painful act of evolutionary ! suicide. Although, rather than hearing about Mashi Cousa Bil Laban (stuffed courgettes with a hot yogurt sauce, a Syrian and Lebanese specialty), you are more likely to be waited on by the guy who knows who killed JFK, get the cattle mutilations with the Silurian fish sauce and have napkins made from recycled CIA documents. So what does The Pioneer Radio Network offer? Through a retro aesthetic, late fifties/early sixties, image of a radio set, there is a live 24-7 feed of Internet radio shows. There is a large dial, similar aesthetic to the radio, very Bakelite. Here, there is a sense of fun and strangeness. The user is able to dial up the station listings to see and get an overview of what weirdness is on tap. But wait! What is going on? As I write this article, I am sitting at home in Wales. I have an iMac, graphite-colored, the Pioneer Radio homepage is on the screen, I sit in front of it writing, using a pen on a pad of plain white paper. A very spooky image has occupied my consciousness. My iMac has a happy friendly 1950s aesthetic, the curvy iMac shape, the two speakers, the CD port slot and the "minds eye" of the screen. On this screen is an image of this "Bakelite" radio. Just for a moment, I had a vision of holding an object between two parallel mirrors and instead of the expected stream of reflected images disappearing into what seems like infinity, the reflections were disappearing further and further backwards and forwards in time with every bifurcation. This is wonderful; I can feel the Pioneer affect and I haven't even turned the dial yet. This energy, the potential in the aura of this interface, is what is missing in art, which has become a series of banal variations on whatever theme the art m! arket wishes to decorate the corporate and state walls with. So what is here? This is independent media. And yes, there are a few distinctly cheesy aromas wafting around, but this is the independent media and there is also fresh air on the airwaves and coming through the Internet, so we can put up with the occasional whiff. Give me this slight cheesy smell any day rather than the sewage and narcotic mixture that we get fed on a daily basis from the regular media, which has its own agenda of supporting the status- quo. Yes even our dear own BBC, although they have a few redeeming aspects (they beat the American press in reporting Bush's non-democratic election fraud/victory), is feeding us a very thin gruel. The independent alternative media rocks in comparison. So what content do we get? Pioneer Radio, Paranormal and light entertainment radio. Well, yup, I can go along with the paranormal bit, it got to me before I started listening! Light entertainment? I am not sure I understand their terms of reference, or is this subversion. Is this a way of getting this weird and wonderful stuff past the authorities, a sort of double bluff? Or is this the CIA and their masters (no, I don't mean the U.S. government) involved in a triple bluff to enable the streaming of misinformation to and through what is left of the remains of counterculture? I thought there were no more alternatives, that we were all puppets of corporate and state capitalism. The globalist scheme of things. You know, the plan with the underlying agenda to terraform Mars because planet Earth got wrecked in their fascist vision of domination and that their offspring have to survive because they made a deal with the Greys, or was it the Angels? That they were going to bore us to death with culture and the media. Then vamoose to a blooming Mars while what's lef! t of us down here drown in our own shit (the pollution, both physical and psychic) whilst watching *Friends* and other soaps and waiting on Stephen Spielberg's new films of Tintin. Hey, say this is for real. This paranormal and light entertainment Internet radio delivers. So turn the dial to "Links" and we are presented with: Pioneer Radio (paranormal and light entertainment radio), Ghost Tracker Radio, Wakeup USA, Crumbs from the Cosmic Cookie, Ghostly Talk internet talk radio, Cyberstomp, Wparanormal.com, Hypno Place, The Zanny Show, Get Resmerized, The Headroom, Ground Zero, The Space Show, www.davidoats.com, The Martian Revelation, Contact Talk Radio, BUFO Paranormal and UFO Radio, Angel of The Night Paranormal Show, Earth and Sky, A Closer Look, Hieronimus and Company, Be Connected: The Technology Radio Show, Radio Free Mars past and future broadcasts, Jerry Pippins Paranormal Zone On - Demand and, lastly, Davlink.com. The weird, the wonderful and the strange. Again we must remind ourselves of our current cultural context. We are living through the time when the president of the U.S.A. and his team hear that a political opponent, Hillary Clinton in this case, is visiting Afghanistan and the press will be reporting this. So what does he do? He grabs hold of the biggest plastic turkey around and heads off to the front line enabling him to manufacture a photo opportunity that is both timed and designed to knock Hillary Clinton out of media range. What is delivered is the brave cowboy risking his life at the front to present the troops with a monster turkey! Shazzam, it works! In days gone by, he would have been taken to the medical wing of the White House before things got this outta hand. But this is the 2000s and most of us are under the influence of the media and the media is controlled by the few, the very few; and we have been manipulated for so long that our systems of calibration are n! o longer functioning. We are also being bombarded by so much of it that on top of the everyday pressures and demands of work, family commitments have to take priority just so we can get the kids fed and the bills paid, keep a roof over our heads and stay out of jail. we are saturated by the stuff and just can't cope with the sheer volume, we don't stand a chance. We are living in a global state where ace manipulators have damn near made reality virtual. Whilst some of us have been exploring and trying to get to grips with immersion in virtual reality, the world is being commodified and sold back to us as Reality Virtualized. As I look at Ghost Tracker Radio, Get Resmerized, Crumbs From The Cosmic Cookie, BUFO, and Angel Of The Night, with a worried smile on my face I have another vision, this time of a giant plastic turkey as president of the U.S.A., the world's biggest superpower, with a teddy bear sitting beside it; another photo opportunity. Just in time for the 9 o'clock news on mainstream broadcast media and the next day for the press. I can see folks in the U.K. and U.S.A. chatting about the "special relationship" at coffee/tea break. Give me the strangeness of the independent media any day. Sure it has its share of nuts but there is also a stratum of passionate, driven people delivering intelligent interesting and imaginative content. After decades of thinking that there were no alternatives anymore, I can see a tiny glimmer of light - independent media - and just by clicking on to it with my mouse, it roars. I discovered Pioneer Radio only recently; for over a year, I have been a keen listener to Resonance FM, London's only independent broadcast radio station. They only broadcast in the London area but can facilitate live Internet streaming for around 200 listeners as well. Listening to this station is astonishing; the content is entertaining and interesting and the overall vibe is fresh air. I like this station so much that when an opportunity came up to broadcast some of the Esemplastic Tuesday free drawing and free improvisation classes Ben Watson (music critic and biographer of Frank Zappa and Derek Bailey) and I run at the RCA, I jumped at the chance. However my favorite program on Resonance FM is Rob Simone's *The Headroom* - this blew me away from the first time I listened in. The program is two hours long and consists of one or two in-depth interviews with some of the most "interesting people on the planet." The Rob Simone interview method is unusual, as he rarely argues! with his guests, which means they do not have to spend time defending themselves and their ideas/stories, and are allowed to speak. To cut a long story short, *The Headroom* can now be found on the Pioneer Radio network, as well as Resonance FM, where it gets a couple of airings a week. That alone is enough for me to give Pioneer Radio a listen; I urge you to listen. Maybe there is still time. Maybe it's not too late; granted, the odds seem stacked against us, and I mean every living thing on the planet. Maybe I am wrong, just listening to too much independent media. Maybe there is a giant plastic turkey, which cheated its way to victory in the last U.S. presidential elections, in the White House with its plastic drumstick on the nuclear trigger, whilst having a special relationship with a British Teddy Bear. RELATED LINKS Pioneer Radio: http://pioneer.rolo.net Ghost Tracker Radio: http://www.ghosttracker.com Wakeup USA: http://www.stardustent.com/wakeupusa.htm Crumbs from the Cosmic Cookie: http://www.11l-rni.com/schedule.html AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Len Massey is an artist and experimental musician and has been involved with various performance groups since the late 1970s. His particular area of interest is in the dark art of electrography and the suppressed histories and technologies of Nikola Tesla and other original thinkers. He is currently refining his system of electrographic imaging, which he has been researching into for the past 12 years, with the aim of making full-body electrographs. As a founding member of the performance group FEAR, he performs regularly. He exhibits widely and his films have been shown worldwide. He is Tutor in Drawing at the Royal College of Art, where he runs the college-wide drawing program. --------------------------------- CINEMA AND THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF OTHERNESS By Pia Tikka, researcher, Elomedia, University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Hämeentie 135 C, FIN- 00560 Helsinki, Finland E-mail: pia [dot] tikka [@] uiah [dot] fi ABSTRACT This article introduces a novel perspective to interactive cinema as an externalization of mind. It assumes a reciprocal connection between the neural level of mind's structures and the phenomenal level of mind's products. The author wishes to relate this to recent cognitive neuroscience, which suggests that the mirror-neuron system forms a physiological basis for the recognition of "otherness". It discusses some interpretations of the human mirror-neuron system as models for self-referential but socially contextualized representations. The discussion is connected to the idea that mental projection or simulation forms the conceptual basis for authoring any interactive media art. KEYWORDS interactive cinema, narrative, emotions, embodied mind, intersubjectivity, mirror neurons, simulation, cognitive ecology _____________________________ NARRATIVE EMBODIED This article introduces a novel perspective on interactive cinema as an externalization of mind. It suggests a reciprocal connection between the neural level of mind's structures and the phenomenal level of mind's products. The idea is inspired by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's [1] movie-in-the-brains metaphor for neural processing behind bodily experience and thinking. I have adopted the hypotheses that neural-based embodied-spatial metaphors form the mediating domain between individual human minds, and that recognizing, or mirroring the other within this intersubjective playground, in turn, is the prerequisite of narrative. The mirror metaphor, often associated with cinema, is a useful tool for the analysis of the intersubjective communication aspect of cinema. This assumes that the basis for authoring interactive media art is the capability to simulate another person's embodied and emotive states. Narrative cognition is largely about simulation [2], where emotionally guided imitation of intentions and actions of the other merges into continuous recognition/judgment dynamics and emerges as interpretation. In the intersubjective context, narrative is seen as a fundamental component of the shared emotive-cognitive environment, while metaphors are the building blocks without which emotional understanding and social interaction would be impossible. As to narrative, it is considered as an epiphenomenon of socio- emotional interaction, and assumed to always deal with "the other" and "otherness." The other, here, refers to the phenomenological roots of a subject's awareness of, as well as will to understand the intentions and acts of co-living things, while otherness relates to the external world inhabited by the reflecting subject, the others and non-living objects. Maurice Merleau-Ponty appears to write about the very same phenomenon, stating that at the moment of eye contact, "I re-enact the alien existence in a sort of reflection" [3]. Here I promote the reading of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception together with the neurophenomenological approach first introduced by Francisco Varela [4]. Understanding and creating any narrative, in my view, establishes an intersubjective common ground, which I refer to here as the horizontal connection. This in turn is crossed by the vertical connection, ranging from the neural micro-level to the phenomenal macro-level of human experience. I consider this "matrix" of human conceptual understanding as the broad-scale conceptual isomorphism. It allows relative structural analogues between understanding phenomena in different disciplines, such as socio-emotional behavior, neurobiological dynamic systems and creative processes, as products of mind. Following this direction, the phenomenon of interactive cinema can be seen to motivate two directions of scrutiny - towards internal, horizontal and external, vertical structures of emotive-cognitive self in the act of artistic production. The biological and socio-emotional aspects converge in Damasio's assumption of two fundamental levels of self [5]. The core self is a non-cognitive subliminal entity in a dynamic of continuous re-creation, interacting with the environment and recognized in feeling. The autobiographic self, which is based on the core self, is related to identity, personality, past and future experiences, needs and goals, conceptual and cultural contexts, socio-emotional interaction with others - and is recognized in the subjective point of view. RECYCLING EMOTION DYNAMICS - ECOLOGY OF NARRATIVES I introduce here the approach to dynamic emotion ecologies in cinema. By ecology, I mean the holistic exchange system between an organism and the environment, in which all perceptual and conceptual phenomena of being-in-the-world are continuously modified and recycled. I explicitly adapt the ecological interaction circuit system, as formulated, for instance, by Kaipainen [6], in turn inspired by Neisser's perceptual cycle [7] and the enactive subject-environment interaction theory [8]. With the concept of "dynamic," I will defend the holistic totality of the experience, where the foundation of cognition rests upon an ecology of emotions. According to Damasio [9], what happens in the juxtaposition of different cinematic images or camera movements exemplifies that movies are the most accurate external representation of the continuous wordless narrative in the mind. The "movie-in-the- brain" is a continuously re-created neurobiological process. The images occur in the early sensory cortices as topographically organized neural representations, but they are controlled by sensory receptors oriented to the brain's outside, or by the dispositional neural patterns constituting the "memory" representations inside the brain [10]. Further, the emotive- cognitive representations of the moving image become initiated by the subject's unconscious and conscious goal-oriented motivation (e.g. pain-pleasure) that generates sensorimotor repetition patterns. This, in turn encourages conceptual generalization, which can be categorized at the phenomenal level as genre, style and other moving-image conventions. These narratives see! m to emerge as by-products of Damasian brain machinery of emotion [11], where embodied perceptual images of the temporal, spatial and emotional mind's structures are formed. Leaning on this view, emotions are thus seen as the very foundation of all imagination, perception and execution of any cognitive act. The goods of exchange in the dynamic emotion ecologies are concepts, thoughts and experiences. These primitive narratives characterized by emotionally interpreted and perceived meaningful gestures, movements, shapes and sounds, are recycled in everyday life. Departing from the embodied mind approach of Lakoff and Johnson [12], narrative can be seen to build on such metaphoric relations and causalities that rise from the sensorimotor orientation towards the environment. Relying on Lakoff and Johnson's cognitive unconscious [13], I assume that it is mainly unconscious orientation and only partly conscious reasoning that structures creative production and, more generally, cognition itself. According to Lakoff and Johnson, there are three levels of embodiment of concepts: the neural level, phenomenological conscious experience and the cognitive unconscious [14]. Applying Lakoff and Johnson's metaphor theory to my approach to cinematic narrative allows the juxtaposition of two modes of interest. This requires first a practical instrument for analyzing, categorizing and managing media data in order to generate emotional meaningful narrative and second, a conceptual instrument for reading from these meaningful structures of narrative to the embodied structures of understanding moving image. This reciprocal interdependence between structures (i.e. authorship or imagination) and products (i.e. narrative space, or cinematic expression) of the mind assumes a direct link between the neural level and the phenomenal level of action, behavior and language, mediated by the cognitive unconscious. Here I raise the issue, "To what extent can embodied narratives in each individual's mind be shared?" This is the point where I want to celebrate the new evidence for neural mirroring systems in the human brain that can be seen as the physiological basis for interpreting the emotional and intentional states of "otherness." THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF "OTHERNESS" Advanced neuro-imaging (e.g. fMRI) allows this access to the time and event related recordings of neural activation patterns in the individual human brain. It also allows estimation of the extent to which a number of human brains can share with each other. Further, it may be hypothesized that if brains are found to share a significant amount, this in turn could sustain philosophical assumptions about the human brain that would enable experience as a biologically determined shared space. Neurophysiological evidence also suggests the tendency of human beings to react in similar way in the same kinds of emotional contexts, such as moments of film action (e.g. hand movements, close-ups of emotional facial expressions, abrupt loud sounds). Hasson et al. [15] have shown that intersubject synchronization of different human brains occurred when viewing real-life- contextualized audiovisual narrative (e.g. the film *The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly*, 1966). The active imitation process at the neural level, which may serve social learning and intersubjective communication, has been widely accepted since the discovery of the neuronal network called MNS (mirror neuron systems) [16] [17]. Neuroimaging experiments with monkeys [18] and humans [19] show that the brain areas involved within the MNS become equally activated when a subject observes someone executing an act, when the subject actually executes the act, or when one only imagines the same act being executed [20]. According to Damasio, dispositional neural patterns re- construct past images based on the body-state-mapping in the body-sensing brain regions [21]. This could relate to the MNS re- executing previously performed sensorimotor patterns. Thus MNS may provide a motor-action based key to the Pandora's box of human memory, as well as for the imagination. Rizzolatti and Arbib [22] seek to converge the evolution of motor-controlled hand movements and the evolution of language, e.g. grasping a tool and grasping a thought. Here, in my view, the metaphor theory of Lakoff and Johnson [23] intertwines with the research done on the biological roots of intersubjective concepts and communication (e.g. film as visual language). Because humans inhabit apparently similar socio-psychological environments, the continuous goal-oriented mapping of the emerging complex intentionality-relations can be assumed to be intersubjective by nature. The reading of others' minds by their facial expressions and bodily actions is supported by the mutually recognizable contextualized situations. Merleau-Ponty recycles the Husserlian idea of intentionality on the conscious level of experience: "If the being is conscious, he must be nothing but a network of intentions [24]." With support from the neuroimaging evidence, Thomas Metzinger and Vittorio Gallese extend the socio-functional architecture of the phenomenological world to the neural level, assuming mirror neurons as "a fundamental and mostly unconscious representational structure capable of building a shared action ontology" [25]. I accept Metzinger and Gallese's definition of embodied simulation, which, though involving pre-rational mental self- representational processes, is the core element of an "automatic, unconscious and pre-reflexive control functional mechanism" [26]. According to them, the MNS has a central microfunctional role in the brain's representational dynamics; it functions as an unconscious precursor of what can be represented on the macrofunctional phenomenal level "as a goal, an acting self or an individual first-person perspective" [27]. Gallese's neurophenomenological inquiries suggest a shared manifold of intersubjectivity [28]. In addition to external macro-spaces like "law and constitution," "healthcare system" or "market-square," there could also exist an intersubjective but internal common micro-space in each of us that integrates the universally genetic and the culturally learned. Thus, the human MNS could be seen to instantiate "supramodal emotional and sensitive shared spaces" [29]. CONCLUSION In this article, I have described narrative and, furthermore, specifically cinematic narrative from an angle that differs from conventional views: namely, narrative as a biological phenomenon. I have made an attempt to relate cinema to recent cognitive neuroscience, which suggests that the mirror-neuron system forms a physiological basis for the recognition of "otherness." I have discussed some interpretations of the human mirror- neuron system as models for self-referential but socially contextualized representations and, vice versa, I have suggested that complex structures of our minds can be scrutinized by the way we shape and share our understanding of dynamic narrative art [30], currently extending into domains of complex spaces, e.g. interactivity, human-computer relations, virtual reality, and nanotechnology. Thus, this article encourages novel interpretations of familiar phenomena and invites multidisciplinary studies of interactive media art to discuss what I define as dynamic emotion ecologies. My framework for the broad-scale conceptual isomorphism allows the suggestion that phenomenological level mind-models like Merleau-Ponty's intersubjective field reflect emotive-cognitive narratives which, in turn, are based on neural level sensorimotor orientation towards the world and the others inhabiting it. Here, the intersubjective field is interpreted as a conceptual frame to design, construct and control narrative structures, consisting of the experiences of emotions, physical forces and spatial dimensions, within the dynamic emotion ecology of cinema. REFERENCES AND NOTES 1. Antonio Damasio, *Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain*, New York, NY: Harcourt, Inc. (2003) p. 207. 2. I adopt here the view of Gallese and Goldman (1998), which suggests that mind-reading involves both "pretend" and natural "non-pretend" states of simulation routine, thus allowing the narrative cognition of mind. This is an interpretation of the "simulation theory" (Davies and Stone 1995); other people's mental states are detected by matching their states with one's own resonant states. 3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, *Phenomenology of Perception*, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (1945/1962) p. 352. 4. Francesco Varela, "Neurophenomenology: A Methodological remedy to the hard problem," in *Journal of Consciousness Studies* No. 3 (1996) 330-350. 5. A. Damasio, *Tapahtumisen tunne*, Finnish translation from *The Feeling of What Happens*, by Kimmo Pietiläinen, Helsinki: Terra Cognita (1999/2000) p. 162. 6. M. Kaipainen, "Prospects for Ecomusicology: Inner and Outer Loops of the Musical Mind-Environment System" in P. Pylkkänen, P. Pylkkö, A. Hautamäki (eds.), *Brain, Mind and Physics*, Amsterdam: IOS Press (1996). 7. U. Neisser, *Cognition and Reality: Principles and Implications of Cognitive Psychology*, W. H. Freeman (1976). 8. F. Varela, E. Thompson and E. Rosch, *Embodied mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience*, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (1991). 9. Damasio [5] p.173. 10. A. Damasio, *Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain*, New York, NY: Harper Collins (1994) 98, 102. 11. Damasio [1] p.54. 12. G. Lakoff, M. Johnson, *Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought*, New York, NY: Basic Books (1999). 13. Lakoff, Johnson [12] 9. 14. Lakoff, Johnson [12] 102-103. 15. Hasson, Nir, Levy, Fuhrmann, and Malach, "Intersubjective Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision" in *Science*, Vol. 303 (2004) 1634-1640. 16. S. Avikainen, "Cortical Mechanisms of Action Observation, Imitation and Social Perception in Healthy and Autistic Subjects," academic dissertation in Brain Research Unit Low Temperature Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology (8 Nov., 2003) 1, 16, 20; Iacoboni, Woods, Brass, Bekkering, Mazziotta and Rizzolatti, "Cortical Mechanisms of Human Imitation" in *Science* 286, pp. 2526-2528 (1999); Nishitani and Hari, "Temporal Dynamics of Cortical Representation for Action" in *Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A.* 97(2), (2000) 913-918. 17. Due to my focus on the mirror phenomenon in cinema, I refer here only to limited selection of the MNS research. The mirror neuron concept is introduced by Gallese, Rizzolatti et al.; their work is based on evidence of the neuronal activation occurring in act execution and observation in monkeys' F5 region, discovered by diPellegrino et al. (1992). See [18]. 18. diPellegrino, Fadiga, Fogassi, Gallese and Rizzolatti, "Understanding Motor Events: A Neurophysiological Study," in Experimental Brain Research 91, (1992) 176-80; Gallese et al in *Brain* 119 (1996) 593-609; Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Gallese and Fogassi, "Premotor Cortex and the Recognition of Motor Actions," in *Cognitive Brain Research* 3 (1996a) 131-141. 19. See Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Matelli, Bettinardi, Paulesu, Perani and Fazio, "Localization of Grasp Representations in Humans by PET: 1. Observation Versus Execution," in *Experimental Brain Research* 111 (1996) 246-252. 20. G. Rizzolatti and M. A. Arbib, "Language within Our Grasp," in *Trends in Neurosciences*, 21 (1998) 188-94. 21. Damasio [10] 102, 111. 22. Rizzolatti and Arbib [20]. 23. Lakoff and Johnson [12]. 24. Merleau-Ponty [3] 121. 25. T. Metzinger and V. Gallese, "The Emergence of a Shared Action Ontology: Building Blocks for a Theory," in *Consciousness and Cognition*, 12 (2003) 549-571. 26. Metzinger and Gallese [25] 555-6. 27. Metzinger and Gallese [25] 557. 28. V. Gallese, "The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis of Intersubjectivity," in *Psychopathology* 36, (2003) 171-180. 29. Gallese [28] 177. 30. See also P. Tikka, "Cinema (interativo) como modelo para a mente" [(Interactive) Cinema as a Model of Mind], in K. Maciel, A. Parente, (eds.), *Redes sensoriais: arte, ciência, tecnologia*, Rio de Janeiro: Contra Capa Livraria (2003) 45-50; P. Tikka, "(Interactive) Cinema as a Model of Mind," in Maureen Thomas (ed.), *Digital Creativity*, Taylor and Francis Ltd (March 2004) 15(1): 14-17(4). AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Pia Tikka is a researcher in the Research Unit of Audiovisual media - Elomedia - in the University of Art and Design Helsinki. Her background is in film, cinematography and graphic design. She has directed the full-length feature films *Daughters of Yemanjá* (Brazil-Finland, 1996) and *Sand Bride* (Finland, 1998) and worked in a range of feature-film productions, including films by director Mika Kaurismäki, since 1989. Currently she is in post-production of her interactive film project *Obsession,* which puts into effect her practice-based research "From Framing Image into Framing Narrative Space - Cinema as Interactive Media from the Point of View of a Dynamic Mind." --------------------------------- UNIVERSE FROM BEYOND: THE ROLE OF UNOBSERVABLES IN SCIENCE [1] By C. S. Unnikrishnan, Gravitation Group, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Homi Bhabha Road, Mumbai (Bombay) 400 005, India E-mail: unni [@] tifr [dot] res [dot] in Website: http://www.tifr.res.in ABSTRACT This article explores the role of unobservables in the accurate understanding of the physical world and some of the conceptual problems associated with dealing with them. The study of these unobservables is essential to intelligible description, but they often defy an ontologically and spiritually satisfying understanding of the world. Revelations of their true nature can be a source of spiritual experience within scientific endeavor. Precise observations in cosmology have suggested startling implications for the dynamics and future of the universe. Most of the matter in the universe is unseen, perhaps even unobservable, and most likely very different from "our kind." The present study of dynamics seems to imply repulsive gravity and to eventually run away to emptiness, but there are indications of inseparable physical links as well. The unobservable of quantum mechanics is even more severe in its implications for notions of causality, continuity and even rational understanding of reality. It suggests the existence of a reality that is "beyond." In the following article, I discuss the nature of these unobservables and some of their implications to our worldview. KEYWORDS Cosmology, universe, dark energy, unobservables, quantum mechanics, wave-function, non-locality, spiritual quest _____________________________ In this brief presentation, I will try to highlight two main themes and then illustrate them with examples. This is an entry- level exploration into possibilities of spiritual experience within the process of rational scientific enquiry. I will point out that such a possibility exists, while exploring the boundaries and beyond. My first point is about an inherent "beyondness" in scientific enquiry. My basic thesis is that observables, and what is considered measurable reality, are described in physical theories in terms of certain *unobservables,* the objective reality of which is debatable or indefinite. This seems to be an inevitable structure in all our physical theories. These unobservables then define a boundary and "what is beyond." This is the main theme of this article. My second point is one that connects the first theme to what could be called spiritual experience in the process of scientific enquiry. The uncertain objective reality of unobservables creates an open territory, the exploration of which can lead to a deep personal experience akin to spiritual experiences, if and when a new reality emerges. Revelation is a source of spiritual experience. Thus, pure scientific enquiry naturally contains a domain that is beyond, which can be a source of spiritual experience, all within the process of rational scientific enquiry itself. While I am not rejecting other sources of spiritual experiences, I am asserting that spiritual experiences - by which I mean a deep awareness or realization in the process of cognition that is personal as well as unifying - can be and actually is part of scientific enquiry. To give an indication of what could be called a spiritual experience during aware observation of the external objective world, I recall a description of such an experience by Sri Ramakrishna [2] - his watching a flock of white birds flying across the sky, with thick dark monsoon clouds in the background, led to a transcendental state. The important aspects to be noted in this case are the aloneness that precedes the vision of harmony and the spiritual experience that follows, signifying union of internal and external worlds. Such an experience can transcend and transform. I will illustrate these points with two examples, both involving unobservables that presently occupy center stage in modern physics. Some of the familiar examples of unobservables in our physical theories are potential, phase, vacuum, etc.; essential concepts for the construction of our most successful physical theories and indeed the primary elements of these theories. Yet, the observables - the tangible reality - are always the difference or change in these quantities. If we go deeper, we see that *even space and time are unobservables* and the observables are really relational quantities. COSMOLOGY: A NEW UNIVERSE DRIVEN BY UNOBSERVABLE DARK ENERGY My first example is from cosmology, which is a highly evolved discipline. The standard model of cosmology describes an evolving and expanding universe - the Big Bang universe. Let me assure you that even a cursory contemplation on the main features of this standard universe and the observed cosmos is an emotionally and spiritually enriching experience. But let us examine the consequences of some new observations. Estimation of the amount of matter or, equivalently, the energy in the universe, is an old problem. It is an important issue, since the fate of the universe crucially depends on its matter content. If the density of matter exceeds a particular value, called the critical density, then the universe will re-collapse. (This concept is similar to the concept of the escape velocity familiar with regard to a projectile shot from the earth - if the velocity is lower than a certain critical value, the projectile will eventually fall back). It is important to recognize that this special value of density signifies that the total energy in the universe - the sum of the positive energy of motion and matter and the negative energy of gravitational binding - is zero, as perhaps it should be, if everything started from nothingness. All observations show that the matter that constitutes us and our environment and all that is luminous - made of electrons, protons, neutrons and light - is but hardly three percent of the critical density. Why is this a problem? Because there are other dependable observations that can measure even nonluminous and unseen matter using their gravitational properties, and these observations indicate that, in fact, the density of matter in the universe is close to the critical density. Then what does the 97 percent of the (nonluminous) matter in the universe consist of? What are its properties? We do not know yet. The present inference is that about 30 percent of this - provisionally called the dark matter - is in a form that can clump gravitationally and aid in the formation of large-scale structures consisting of clusters of galaxies. The rest of the unseen matter seems to be really strange. One important observation that looks at very distant supernovae and measures their spe! ed of recession as well as their distance seems to show that the universe is speeding up as it expands. To understand the strange import of this observation, imagine watching a stone that is thrown up, and seeing it speeding up as it rises up! This can happen only if there is repulsive gravity, but we have no experimental evidence in the whole history of physics for repulsive gravity. Yet, we are faced with a situation in cosmology that needs a form of matter that can generate repulsive gravity. The inferred properties of this dominant form of matter are so close to that of vacuum, *it could only be the vacuum itself* - an unobservable! The quantum vacuum in physics is not just emptiness. It is an unobservable containing an infinite amount of energy. An absurd fact, but this is usually ignored because it is considered an unobservable. (The observable quantities are differences in energies of two configurations of this vacuum and such quantities are finite. But, when the dynamics of the universe are considered, every bit of energy contributes and the concept of a quantum vacuum with infinite or even large energy density becomes discordant.) Most recent observations seem to support the view that 65 percent of all matter in the universe is "dark energy" - energy that is as strange and smooth as the quantum vacuum, which can provide effective gravitational repulsion [3]. So, sophisticated observations have led us to forms of matter that are almost mystical, and certainly the most mysterious we have ever come across. Truly a form of matter that is "beyond." Not only does this dark energy dominate; it will eventu! ally become the only form of matter in the universe because of the strange property that it does not diminish as the universe expands! This is Copernican principle at its extreme. In the original form, the Copernican view said that Man and Earth had no privileged position in the solar system. The generalized Copernican principle applied to the universe asserted that even the solar system was just one of the infinite equivalent positions in the universe. Now it turns out that even the matter that we are made of is only an insignificant fraction of all matter. This worldview implies a strange alienation. Most of the universe is "not our kind." But on contemplation, we also realize that no form of matter is isolated in this universe. This is a form of Mach's principle, which was originally derived from rejecting a very important unobservable - the notion of absolute space. Each one of us is influenced by all the rest of the matter in this universe. Every moving molecule in our body has to overcome inertia - a most fundamental property of matter - which is nothing but the integrated influence of the rest of the universe. It is startling to realize that most of this influence originates in matter that is not in us. This generates a feeling of aloneness. But we also realize our inseparable physical link and extension that goes over the entire universe, and this is the source of the spiritual experience I mentioned. All this also points to the preciousness of the matter we are made of: it is rare. We, our environment, our cosmic neighborhood and so on may not be unique, but certainly rare. Our integrated worldview should not ignore this, and in fact should incorporate this realization not only in our science, as we are forced to, but also in our philosophy and ethics. QUANTUM PHYSICS AND BEYOND: BEYOND QUANTUM MECHANICS The next example I take up is related to an unobservable that has created many debates, speculations and even philosophies: the wave function in quantum mechanics. As far as we know, no objective reality can be ascribed to the wave function. Yet, all observational results are supposed to be potentially contained within it. One of the basic issues involved is that of a nonlocal influence. One can talk about and experiment with situations where there are two particles described together by one wave function and no objective property (definite state) can be ascribed to either particle *separately*. Such a state is called an entangled state. Making an observation on just one of the particles gives some result and therefore a definite property for that particle. Then the other particle simultaneously, spontaneously and nonlocally assumes a definite property, however far this second particle is from the first! This is what standard quantum theory implies. This of course violates t! he basic notion of locality inspired by special relativity (in Einstein's words, "on one supposition we should, in my opinion, absolutely hold fast: the real factual situation of the system S2 is independent of what is done with the system S1, which is spatially separated from the former"). Quantum nonlocality has been a much misused subject, though there is no single experiment that shows that there is indeed some nonlocal influence. (All experiments measure a correlation between two particles, and the conclusion of nonlocality is derived merely because nobody had been able to ascribe the observed correlations to some *a priori* cause before the particles separated). In fact, various hard problems facing science and other disciplines in fields ranging from cosmology to consciousness studies have been linked to quantum nonlocality, and there are any number of speculations asserting that the clue to solving those problems are in quantum nonlocality. Hence quantum nonlocality is one o! f the most important issues to be addressed and understood. Its understanding is just beyond standard quantum theory, though it arises in the theory. This is the situation in our most successful theory, all arising from having to deal with a mysterious unobservable. This problem and its tension with the spirit of relativity are perhaps the most discussed fundamental issues in physics, including the famous discussion by Einstein and his collaborators Podolsky and Rosen (EPR) [4]. Personally, this situation created an intense emotional problem within the process of rational enquiry for me, mainly due to the clash of quantum nonlocality with everything else one knows about the physical world. I have ventured into probing the consequences of the unobservables in quantum theory, especially the process of the realization of an observable result from the unobservable. The emerging conclusion was a source of deep internal transition for me, as the image of the external world transformed; a transition that showed clearly the harmony between quantum phenomena and the ideas of relativity. It is possible to show that there is in fact! no nonlocal influence and no nonlocal collapse of the wave function. What was thought to be the nonlocal influence resulted from certain conceptual flaws inherent in the standard way of looking at the problem. This may seem surprising to most quantum physicists. Yet, the proof is simple [5]. The physical idea of the solution to the puzzle is that the quantum particles can have a prior phase relation (a fixed relation in a wave property instead of a relation between properties characteristic of particles). This is determined at their source before they part, and they can behave in a correlated manner at arbitrarily large distance without nonlocal effects. A simple argument shows that there is no nonlocality and therefore the standard quantum theory is inconsistent and incomplete, as it stands. It is not the final theory of the microscopic world. With the vanishing of quantum nonlocality, all speculations about its magical use for solving various problems also vanish. (I should ! stress that this conclusion does not affect any possible link between quantum coherence and other unsolved problems. What is removed is the superluminal aspect in quantum phenomena). This proof goes just one step ahead of the EPR argument and an argument by Karl Popper [6], and establishes a fundamental truth about the quantum world. Finally, one may ask the question of whether quantum phenomena could be understood without their inherent indeterminism. This was one of the puzzling features of the quantum theory and the wave function description from the very beginning of modern quantum theory. In the standard approach, the cause-effect uniqueness is broken, in the sense that the same initial cause (quantum state) can give rise to a multitude of final results, all occurring at random. I have a tentative proposal that again is related to the properties of the unobservable wave function. It is not clear whether this program will succeed. The idea is that a particular quantum state that is normally considered as "the same state" in each of its preparations has an inherent random aspect that makes it randomly different each time it is prepared. This randomness is in its initial phase and, by its very nature, this initial phase is an unobservable. Thus, when we say that the same quantum state leads to different outcomes, we are ignoring its initial phase, a random quantity. If we include this random phase in the description, it is conceivable, but by no means definite, that the uniqueness of the cause- effect relation is restored in quantum mechanics. Randomness in cause leads to randomness in effect. I am trying to extend the solution of the problem of nonlocality - the realization that if the particles have a prior-phase relation they can behave in a correlated manner at arbitrarily large distance without nonlocal effects - to behavior of individual particles. Of course, even if this is feasible it only means that Einstein's God does not play dice, but for us it is still a dice game since we can never observe and use the initial phase for our deterministic predictions because only phase difference and not phase itself is an observable. Yet, such a change in quantum theory can lead to a tremendous change in our worldview and philosophy, since the indeterminism in quantum theory h! as profoundly affected philosophies earlier. Again we see how rational critical enquiry within the domain of science itself can be a potential source of personal as well as collective realizations akin to spiritual experience. What is "beyond" could very well become "within" in the natural and slow expansion of science. Rational enquiry is perhaps the ultimate spiritual quest. REFERENCES AND NOTES 1. This article is reprinted with permission from *Science and Beyond* (eds. S. Menon, B. V. Sreekantan, A. Sinha, P. Clayton and R. Narasimha), Bangalore, India: National Institute of Advanced Studies (2004). 2. Sri Ramakrishna was a nineteenth-century mystic and spiritual teacher who inspired the Ramakrishna Mission order of monks. 3. For a non-technical introduction to this view, see R. R. Caldwell and P. J. Steinhardt, "Quintessence," in *Physics World*, Nov. 2000. 4. A. Einstein, B. Podolsky and N. Rosen, "Can The Quantum Mechanical Description of Reality Be Considered Complete?," in *Physical Review* 47 (1935) 777-780. 5. See C. S. Unnikrishnan, "Is the Quantum Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Complete? Proposed Resolution of the EPR Puzzle," in *Foundations of Physics*, 15 (2002) 1-25; C. S. Unnikrishnan, "Proof of Absence of Spooky Action at a Distance in Quantum Correlations," in *Pramana Journal of Physics*, 59 (2002) 295-302. 6. K. R. Popper, *Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics* (Routledge, 1992). AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY C. S. Unnikrishnan is presently Associate Professor of Physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai (Bombay). He also holds visiting positions at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore, Centre for Philosophy and Foundations of Science, New Delhi, and Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris. Unnikrishnan was born in Kalady in Kerala, the southern coastal state of India. After schooling and undergraduate education in Kerala, he completed a M.Sc (Physics) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and joined TIFR as a research student in 1984. His main research interest has been experimental and theoretical studies of foundational aspects of gravity, quantum mechanics and the quantum vacuum. He is also deeply interested in the study of unobservables in physical theories. Apart from conducting precision measurements using torsion balances to study the equivalence principle, new long range forces and Casimir effect, he has also contributed to expe! riments on laser-cooling of atoms, and Bose-Einstein condensation of metastable helium. There are also several results pertaining to phenomenology of the gravitational interaction. He has also contributed several articles on aspects of philosophical and metaphysical aspects of physical theories, spirituality in scientific endeavor and foundations of physics. His major original scientific contributions in theoretical studies are clarifications on the issue on quantum nonlocality and a new consistent theory of relativity called Cosmic Relativity. Unnikrishnan also has a serious interest in filmmaking and music. He is familiar with Indian classical music of the northern and southern styles and plays the bamboo flute and guitar. He has been involved in filmmaking as an actor, assistant director and scriptwriter, and has worked with Indian directors Tapan Sinha (*Wheel Chair*) Shaji Karun (*Vanaprastham - The Last Dance*). He has also been a regular columnist and satirist, writing in his mother-tongue, Malayalam, for the Bombay-based newspaper *Kalakaumudi*. Further details of publications and research can be found at the website of the Tata Institute, www.tifr.res.in, in the department of high energy physics. --------------------------------- LEONARDO REVIEWS The Leonardo Reviews section this month holds another strong and varied selection of scholarly reviews, covering a variety of media and topics. Following last month's piece on the symposia at Ars Electronica by Martha Blassnigg, Maia Engeli supplies a substantial and authoritative piece focusing on the exhibited works. Elsewhere, we are offered reviews by Stefaan van Ryssen on the scientific history of the bicycle in *Bicycling Science* and the problems of mechanically capturing stereoscopic vision in *The Geometry of Multiple Images*, while Amy Ione discusses a new work on the mid-twentieth century struggle with form in *Beyond Geometry*. Architecture is represented both in Andrea Dahlberg's piece on the *Typologies of Industrial Buildings* and Rob Harle's critical assessment of *Ideas that Shaped Buildings*. We include here three reviews of central significance to the Leonardo community: Pia Tikka's review of *Metacreation: Art and Artificial Life*, by Michael Whitelaw; Sean Cubitt's review of *The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power and Cyberspace*; and finally, Amy Ione's review of *Experiments in Form*. All of these, in one way or another, touch on the complexities of culture and the social dimensions of technology. However, please be sure to look up the other material on-line, including a look at *Japanese Anime* by John Barber. All these can be read on-line at http://leonardoreviews.mit.edu Robert Pepperell Associate Editor Leonardo Reviews --------------------------------- METACREATION: ART AND ARTIFICIAL LIFE by Mitchell Whitelaw, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004, 296 pp., illus. 34 b/w. Trade, $32.95, ISBN: 0-262-23234-0. Reviewed by Pia Tikka, Researcher in University of Art and Design, Hämeentie 135 C, 00560 Helsinki, Finland E-mail: Pia [dot] Tikka [@] uiah [dot] fi Mitchell Whitelaw has provided a fresh and easy-to-approach overview on artificial life, or a-life, as an interdisciplinary meeting point for both scientists and artists. Whitelaw creates a smoothly unfolding path from the early a-life art experiments in the 1980s to very recent ones, which mounts to a clear understanding of the short history of a-life art practice. The few carefully selected a-life artworks help the unfamiliar reader to focus on the essence instead of excess, while an additional list of related links allows convenient online viewing of the artworks in more detail. Whitelaw develops background for critical discussion on how both artists and scientists share the a-life paradigm. A-life artists, in order to create the artificial systems that mimic or manifest the properties of living systems, adopt biological and technical developments produced within the scientific research field. They thus also tend to adopt the overruling conceptual and theoretical views of contemporary natural science. The artists seem to assume, unquestioned, the life-creating and life- preserving processes such as evolution, genetic mutations and reproduction. In addition, a-life artists use the same conceptual tools as scientists, such as computational genetic algorithms, complex fitness landscapes, swarm intelligence, agent-based systems, the Game of Life and cellular automata. Instead of offering a detailed biotechnical textbook of these tools, Whitelaw here leads the reader towards a deeper understanding of the philosophical and artistic goals of the artworks. The underlying tone of the book ponders how a-life art as cultural practice should formulate its critical and creative approach to questions such as What is the definition of life, or artificiality? A-life art, he writes, typically manipulates available technology with "misapplication and adaptation, rewiring and hacking, pseudofunctionality and accident" (p. 5). Whitelaw describes four categories of a-life art: the pioneering one is "Breeders," consisting of works which utilize artificial evolution, mutations and interbreeding for generating aesthetic images and forms (phenotypes) from simple computational algorithms (genotypes); in works characterized as artificial ecosystems, or "Cybernatures," macro-level life-like patterns emerge, when artificial entities interact with real-world phenomena' "Hardware" introduces robotic a-life art, where emergence manifests itself in adaptive affect-like behavior of embodied autonomous agencies; and "Abstract Machines" of a-life art app! ly the analogues of, for example, cellular automata, in order to provoke dynamic modular interaction, self-organization and other biomorphic phenomena. In the latter part of the book, Whitelaw discusses a-life artists' apparently uncritical acceptance of the dominating epistemological science paradigm (pp. 193-204). He presents some critical approaches, e.g. Shanken, Penny, Hayles and Helmreich, revealing a-life science's inherent circularity. A-life art is also grounded in cultural feedback loops that unquestioningly harness predetermined structures of the overruling cultural norms. The criticism posits that in order to create fresh perspectives, a-life artists need to be aware of the narrative structures of the social and cultural production of scientific meaning and the eventual implications of scientific knowledge (p. 196). The book's highlight is Whitelaw's analyses on the phenomenon of "emergence," as a-life always seems to and is expected to deliver something more than the sum of computational parts. According to Whitelaw, the idea of emergence was introduced in the nineteenth century and was cultivated as an alternative "to both mechanistic and vitalistic conceptions of life" (p. 210) in the first half of the twentieth century. The discourse faded away until it peaked again in the 1980s and 1990s, along with developments in complex systems and a-life science. Practically all a-life artists use the notion of emergence in order to describe the life-like processes of their work and for interpreting the appearance of life-like behavior from non-life. As Whitelaw notes, the notion of emergence often appeals as "a form of anti-explanation, a vague answer blocking off further investigation" (p. 208). Thus, this is the point where the goals of a-life artists and scientists depart. As unexpected lif! e-like behaviors emerge spontaneously from micro-scale interactions, the artist willingly becomes an amazed witness of this auto creation emerging from her own creative, but often constrained, input. Whitelaw is convinced that in this artistic process of creating conditions for a-life, which he calls metacreation, the dominant driving force is the rewarding phenomenon of emergence. Whitelaw's personal voice is strongly present throughout the book, adding up to a very enjoyable reading experience. --------------------------------- THE DIGITAL SUBLIME: MYTH, POWER AND CYBERSPACE by Vincent Mosco, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004, 232 pp. Trade, $27.95, ISBN: 0-262-13439-X. Reviewed by Sean Cubitt, Arts and Social Sciences, University of Waikato, New Zealand E-mail: seanc [@] waikato [dot] ac [dot] nz In his previous book, Vincent Mosco made the most significant intervention in research on the political economy of the media in the last decade. Drawing on the geographical analyses of scholars Loe, Sassen and Castells and on Giddens' sociology, Mosco singles out co-modification, spatialization and structuration as the critical processes of the contemporary telecom and media regimes. Not content with an innovative analysis, Mosco proposed a synthesis of political economy with critical cultural studies, which is at the center of the new book published in 2004. There appears to be something special about the Canadians; perhaps the geography that leaves them at once subsumed into the North American media market and marginalized within it. Innis, Smythe, McLuhan and Grant, Theall, the Krokers, Berland, Marchessault, Straw, Attalah and Raboy and younger scholars like Laura Marx and Acland have consistently brought together disparate streams of philosophical and empirical research to propagate their own rich hybrids. A mature figure in this constellation, Mosco has extended his analyses of cash and exchange into the turbulent domain of futurological rhetoric in *The Digital Sublime*. The core of the book is the rhetoric of "endings," especially the end of space, the end of ideology and the end of history. Indeed, in a typically astute and witty trope, Mosco reviews the titles of every book received by the Harvard Library between 1998 and 2002. Over the millennium, over 100 books announced the end of everything from change to imagination and baseball to modern medicine. Francis Fukuyama's *End of History*, like Frances Cairncross' *Death of Distance*, imagined the world reconfigured around the loss of something crucial: the sense of destiny or the differences that geography makes. Mosco's quest is to read through the avatars of digital radicalism, to spot the myths they build and to offer critiques that bring their flights of fancy back towards the sweat and strife of the real world. Not that Mosco is without an interest in the ways that cultures change. For this reader, the richest and deepest vein he taps comes in the final chapter. Like many books written in North America in the early years of the twenty-first century, the long shadow of the Twin Towers looms over these pages. The difference is that Mosco has researched the World Trade Center. Built regardless of the thriving light industries of Radio Alley that used to be there, the Rockefeller dynasty, not only bankers but long-time governors of New York State, set about building not just skyscrapers but also a global center for the trade in financial services. The WTC was to be the hub of a new New York; one grounded not in the mix of docks and advertising, culture and commerce, industry and services, but one fit for the neo- liberal triumph of finance capital. Corrupt from the start (the fireproofing sub-contractor was found bobbing in concrete boots at the bottom of the Hudson), the ambitious, ug! ly buildings never made commercial sense, which is why City of New York offices occupied floor after floor. The architectural equivalent of the dot.com crash, the WTC was symbolic, all right, but not of the community that formed in its ruins. The point of the detailed history of the real estate that crashed and burned in 2001 is that myths have the peculiar capability of becoming realities. Alvin Toffler's Progress and Freedom Foundation may be dotty, but it has sponsors to burn. Al Gore's information superhighway still inspires politicians years after he and it have proved their redundancy. Legends of the end of atoms, hard energy, geography and history are all absurd, as the hurricanes produced by global warming battering Florida and the Caribbean in 2004 should surely prove. What we do has physical consequences; and even Amazon has to use FedEx to deliver the goods to its one-click shoppers. But the myths of cyberspace, absurd as Mosco shows them to be, are myths because they satisfy other cravings than rational ones. Perhaps only economists still believe in rationality. Here at least is one who knows that perfectly well-informed consumers making rational choices is a really stupid description of the world. --------------------------------- BEYOND GEOMETRY: EXPERIMENTS IN FORM, 1940s-1970s Lynn Zelevansky, Ed., The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004, 232 pp., illus., 130 col. Trade, $49.95, ISBN: 0-262-24047-5. Reviewed by Amy Ione, The Diatrope Institute, Santa Rosa, CA 95406-0813 E-mail: ione [@] diatrope [dot] com As we enter the twenty-first century, it is strange to think that the highly experimental work of the mid-twentieth century is now historical. Many of the projects remind us of the distance between our accelerated, wired lives and the quite animated, perceptually exciting work of the last century. Yet, what is often lost when we look at this history is how much of it formed the art world we know. *Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s-1970s* ably points this concept out, demonstrating that we can discern more similarities throughout the globe in the twentieth century than is often thought to be the case. Showcasing the work of artists on three continents, this book (actually a catalogue for an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Art Museum exhibition of the same name) abundantly demonstrates how artists in Europe, South America and the United States explored comparable forms that grew up, despite their minimal awareness of similar aesthetic developments elsewhere. Integrating 200 works by 139 artists, the survey's geographic and stylistic reach is impressive. No doubt, all readers will discover treasures tucked in these pages that were previously unknown to them, while also delighting in this book's ability to convey the worldwide connectivity that was emerging in the second half of the twentieth century. Without a doubt, one of the stronger points of the book is the way the research translates the regional trends of the mid-1940s into an environment that was setting the stage for the international art world of the 1960s to take form. In effect, the local communities gave w! ay to a global vision, due, in part, to inexpensive air travel, the proliferation of copying technologies and the growing ease of linking with others through long distance telecommunication devices. Authored by six writers (Lynn Zelevansky, Ines Katzenstein, Valerie Hillings, Miklós Peternák, Peter Frank and Brandon LaBelle), each section of this book is filled with an abundance of examples. These range from European and Latin American concrete art, Argentine Arte Madi, Brazilian neo-concretism, kinetic and op art, minimalism and various forms of post- minimalism, including systematic forms of process and conceptual art. Topical themes delineate the book's scope and offer a sense of the survey: "The Forties and Fifties," as the name suggests, introduces influential modes of abstraction employed during the first decade and a half after World War II. "The Object and the Body" examines the move from two to three dimensions. "Light and Movement" is not confined to projects made with light; it also extends to perceptual aspects of kinetic and op art. "Repetition and Seriality" is an examination of projects that eliminated the need for traditional composition. "The Object Red! efined" examines works that undermined the traditional art object and constituted a breaking down of barriers that was commensurate with the social mores of the late sixties and seventies. Finally, "The Problem of Painting" reminds us of the perennial question of whether painting is dead. Although the authors of the six chapters are guilty of some repetition from essay to essay, this overlap also serves to underscore the degree to which the visions included in *Beyond Geometry* defy classification. Indeed, since many of the artists and, by extension, a great deal of the research are outside of the boilerplate chronology, the repetitive portions aid the organizational structure in the effort to present basic themes. These, in turn, allow us to more easily place the recent art history of Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in relation to that of the West. The range of artists is equally impressive. Included are (among others) Josef Albers, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Max Bill, Lucio Fontana, Eva Hesse, On Kawara, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Helio Oiticica, Blinky Palermo, Bridget Riley, Jesus Rafael Soto, Frank Stella, Jean Tinguely and Victor Vasarely. Among the noteworthy contributions are the sections integrating significant artists. For example, I was particularly taken with Max Bill's influence and compositions. No doubt, others were as well, for Bill's name comes up often throughout the book. Born in Switzerland in 1908, he trained at the Bauhaus with Josef Albers before adopting theories of concrete art associated with the Dutch modernist Theo van Doesburg. These theories were based on mathematics, which Bill believed "enable[d] certain problems to be solved without compromise, in a world that is full of compromises and failed speculations." One who was influenced by his work was the self-taught French painter François Morel! let, who encountered Bill's work in 1951 on a visit to Brazil. Despite all its positive attributes, serious readers should note that this book falls short as a research book. For example, when Peternák compares François Morellet's *Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares Using the Odd and Even Numbers of a Telephone Directory*, 1960 with a Béla Julesz's *Random Dot Stereogram* (RDS), he demonstrates that he does not know the difference between Julesz's RDS and the autostereogram, which was invented in 1979 by Christopher Tyler. There are also perceptual limitations that speak more to the failure of translating the varieties of art into a book than a failure on the part of anyone involved in the project. Finally, this survey repeatedly brings to mind the value in engaging with the artistic imagination in real time and on its own terms. Many of the small images are hard to decipher, due to the book's organization. Caption details accentuate this problem. They are inconsistent throughout, often not including information about the size or med! ium of the depicted work. This casual treatment left me thinking that this book is not a publication that reaches out to grab us. From the text, it is clear that many of the works are free-standing and it is unfortunate that the production team did not include full descriptive information for each reproduction. This approach would have aided us as we try to envisage what the art might actually look like. More to the point, since many of the motifs at first glance appear as if they could be paintings, sculptures, installations or hybrids, I would have liked to see a more reader-sensitive layout, particularly since many of us cannot visit the exhibition in person. As a first step, however, *Beyond Geometry* does an excellent job in expanding our knowledge of minimalism and various forms of post-minimalism. This expansive and comprehensive survey reminds us that the rebellion against the mathematical purity of earlier geometric modernism and what many saw as the emotional excesses of abstract expressionism was not a uniform expression. All in all, the different authors successfully place the work discussed in the context of art history and the aesthetic and social issues of the time. Still, the limitations within this book's format and design remind the reader that a catalogue can add to an exhibition, but in order to appreciate the words, a first-hand exposure to the works is unbeatable. --------------------------------- LEONARDO, VOL. 38, NO. 1 (JANUARY 2005) - TABLE OF CONTENTS AND SELECTED ABSTRACTS EDITORIAL Irina Aristarkhova: The Tyranny of the Possible AFTER MIDNIGHT Meredith Hoy: Digital Homelessness and *L'Espace Internet* ARTISTS' STATEMENTS Jennifer Henderson: *Portrait of the Artist in Red Ink* Achim Mohné: *Fireflies*: An Energy-Autarchic Land Media Sculpture Steven J. Oscherwitz: Art/Technoscience Engages Cancer Research EXTENDED ABSTRACT Bill Witherspoon: Art as Technology: Oregon Desert Sri Yantra ARTISTS' ARTICLES Dennis L. Dollens: A System of Digital-Botanic Architecture Georg Hadju: Quintet.Net: An Environment for Composing and Performing Music on the Internet Andrea Polli: *Atmospherics/Weather Works*: A Spatialized Meteorological Data Sonification Project ARTIST'S NOTE Julian Voss-Andreae: Protein Sculptures: Life's Building Blocks Inspire Art GENERAL ARTICLES Michel Bret, Marie-Hélène Tramus and Alain Berthoz: Interacting with an Intelligent Dancing Figure: Artistic Experiments at the Crossroads between Art and Cognitive Science > Derek Hodgson: Graphic Primitives and the Embedded Figure in 20th-Century Art: Insights from Neuroscience, Ethology and Perception > HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Sergei Zorin: Musical Color-Painting: In Memory of Yu. A. Pravdyuk > LEONARDO REVIEWS LEONARDO NETWORK NEWS ---------------- LEONARDO 38:1 - ABSTRACTS --------------------------------- A SYSTEM OF DIGITAL-BOTANIC ARCHITECTURE by Dennis L. Dollens Looking to historical precedents in Louis Sullivan's *System of Architectural Ornament* (1924) and to botanic inspiration derived from The TumbleTruss Project, the author aims to explain how visual biomimetics and digital production can present ways to conceive, visualize, generate, draw and model physical forms from natural elements such as shells, seeds, plants, rocks, etc. In particular, the author explains how designs "grown" in plant- generating software can be deployed in other software and built as stereolithography (STL) models to illustrate a new system of architectural and sculptural design and production. --------------------------------- QUINTET.NET: AN ENVIRONMENT FOR COMPOSING AND PERFORMING MUSIC ON THE INTERNET by Georg Hadju Quintet.net is a real-time interactive environment for intermedial composition and performance on local networks as well as the Internet. Since its premiere in 2000, the environment has been used in several large projects connecting players in Europe and the U.S.A., a Munich biennale opera project among them. Quintet.net implements, in a virtual environment, the metaphor of five performers under the control of a conductor, thus dealing with important aspects of symbolic, aural and visual communication among the participants and the network audience. A composition development kit has been added to the environment (which consists of Client, Server, Listener, Conductor and Viewer) to facilitate the development of pieces that take full advantage of the wide continuum between composition and improvisation. --------------------------------- *ATMOSPHERICS/WEATHER WORKS*: A SPATIALIZED METEOROLOGICAL DATA SONIFICATION PROJECT by Andrea Polli *Atmospherics/Weather Works* is a performance, installation and distributed software project for the sonification of storms and other meteorological events, generated directly from data produced by a highly detailed and physically accurate simulation of the weather. --------------------------------- PROTEIN SCULPTURES: LIFE'S BUILDING BLOCKS INSPIRE ART by Julian Voss-Andreae The author takes a literal look at the foundation of our physical existence by creating sculptures of proteins, the universal parts of the machinery of life. For him, it is less important to copy a molecule accurately in all its details than to find a guiding principle and follow it to see whether it yields artistically interesting results. The main idea underlying these sculptures is the analogy between the technique of mitered cuts and protein folding. The sculptures offer a sensual experience of a world that is usually accessible only through the intellect. --------------------------------- INTERACTING WITH AN INTELLIGENT DANCING FIGURE: ARTISTIC EXPERIMENTS AT THE CROSSROADS BETWEEN ART AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE by Michel Bret, Marie-Hélène Tramus and Alain Berthoz The authors (a neurophysiologist and two computer artists) give an account of a collaboration that took place within the framework of a study cum artistic experiment on virtual interactive figures at the boundary of art and cognitive science. This study, called "'Intelligent' Interactivity (Connectionism, Evolutionary Science and Artificial Life) in Digital Arts in Relation with the Physiology of the Perception of Action and Movement," was supported by the Cognitique 2000 Program on Art and Cognition, an initiative of the French Ministry of Research. --------------------------------- GRAPHIC PRIMITIVES AND THE EMBEDDED FIGURE IN 20TH-CENTURY ART: INSIGHTS FROM NEUROSCIENCE, ETHOLOGY AND PERCEPTION by Derek Hodgson Recent investigations into both cognitive science and the functional derivation of the visual brain as well as evolutionary dynamics have led to new and exciting ways of interpreting art. Abstract art has often been regarded as beyond the purview of such interpretations because of the very fact that it is abstract. However, as a visually guided activity, abstraction is eminently suited to an analysis from this perspective. This essay will demonstrate how such an approach can reap rich rewards in the understanding of why and how art came to progress from an earlier representational phase to one of abstraction by examining some of the 20th century's most influential trends. --------------------------------- MUSICAL COLOR-PAINTING: IN MEMORY OF YU. A. PRAVDYUK by Sergei Zorin On 17 May, 2002 the master of the art form known as musical color-painting, Yury Pravdyuk, passed away in Kharkov, Ukraine. Pravdyuk was the inventor of an ingeniously simple instrument for color-painters and the author of approximately 150 inimitable color-dynamic compositions to accompany the music of composers of different eras and peoples. How the idea of musical color-painting was born and Pravdyuk's creative path is the subject of the present article by one who had been a close assistant of Pravdyuk since 1965. --------------------------------- ISAST NEWS LEONARDO WELCOMES CHRISTIAN SIMM TO THE LEONARDO/ISAST GOVERNING BOARD Leonardo is very pleased to welcome Christian Simm to the Leonardo/ISAST governing board of directors. Christian Simm is currently the executive director of swissnex, a newly established exchange platform to foster cooperation and partnerships between Switzerland and western North America in science and technology, education and entrepreneurship, art and innovation . In December 1997, Christian opened the Swiss Science and Technology Office in San Francisco for Western U.S.A. and Western Canada, which fosters high-level transatlantic exchanges in R&D, education and innovation. Thanks to extensive partnerships with the private and public sectors, he managed to develop the one-man operation into a larger team, to develop SwissTalents, the network of highly skilled professionals living outside Switzerland, to establish a sophisticated information exchange platform and to organize series of highly successful business networking events, among others. The Swiss magazine Bilan listed him in the Who's Who of the Swiss Internet economy. Christian Simm is the author of numerous articles in newspapers and magazines and a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences. Prior to his current position, he was Director of CAST, the public-private partnership acting as Industrial Liaison Office for EPFL in Lausanne (Switzerland), kicked-off various Swiss participations in European innovation and technology initiatives, co-founded a company active in process management and was Research Group Leader at Hydro-Québec in Montréal (Canada). Christian holds a PhD in physics and various management degrees from IMD and the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Christian can be contacted at: ¨ christian [dot] simm [@] swissnex [dot] org. --------------------------------- REFRESH! - FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE HISTORIES OF MEDIA ART, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 28 September - 1 October, 2005 Banff New Media Institute, Canada Institutional Summit: 2-3 Oct, 2005 at Banff Recognizing the increasing significance of media art for our culture, this Conference on the Histories of Media Art will discuss for the first time the history of media art within the interdisciplinary and intercultural contexts of the histories of art. Leonardo/ISAST, the Database for Virtual Art, Banff New Media Institute and UNESCO DigiArts are collaborating to produce the first international art history conference covering art and new media, art and technology, art-science interaction and the history of media as pertinent to contemporary art. After photography, film, video and the little-known media art history of the 1960s-1980s, today media artists are active in a wide range of digital areas (including interactive, genetic and telematic art). Even in robotics and nanotechnology, artists design and conduct experiments. This dynamic process has triggered intense discussion about images in the disciplines of art history, media studies and neighboring cultural disciplines. The Media Art History Project offers a basis for attempting an evolutionary history of the audiovisual media, from the laterna magica to the panorama, phantasmagoria, film and the virtual art of recent decades. It is an evolution with breaks and detours; however, all its stages are distinguished by a close relationship between art, science and technology. Refresh! will discuss questions of historiography, methodology and the role of institutions of media art. The conference will contain key debates about the function of inventions, artistic practice in collaborative networks, the prominent role of sound during the last decades and will emphasize the importance of intercultural and pop culture themes in the histories of media art. Readings of new media art histories vary richly depending on cultural contexts. This event calls upon scholarship from a strongly international perspective. Therefore Refresh! will represent and address the wide array of disciplines involved in the emerging field of media art. Besides art history, these include the histories of sciences and technologies, film, sound, media, visual and theater studies, architecture and visual psychology, just to name a few. Although the popularity of media art exhibited at exhibitions and art festivals is growing among the public and increasingly influences theory debates, with few exceptions museums and galleries have neglected to systematically collect this present- day art, to preserve it and to demand appropriate conservatory measures. Thus, several decades of international media art is in danger of being lost to the history of collecting and to academic disciplines such as art history. This gap will have far- reaching consequences; therefore, the conference will also discuss the documentation, collection, archiving and preservation of media art. What kind of international networks must be created to advance appropriate policies for collection and conservation? What kind of new technologies do we need to optimize research efforts and information exchange? For further information about the forthcoming conference and the long-term LEONARDO Media Art History Project, please email to join: banffleoarthistconfinfo-subscribe [@] yahoogroups [dot] com --------------------------------- SFAI - CALL FOR HIGH-DEFINITION TV ARTIST IN RESIDENCE The San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) and Rearden Studios are seeking submissions from qualified applicants for the High Definition Storytelling Artist-in-Residency at the SFAI Ars Nova XXI High Definition Research Lab. The chosen artist will create an 8-10 minute time- based narrative, documentary or experimental form to be screened at SFAI in October 2005. In addition, the artist in residence will teach a 2-week seminar at SFAI and a 4-day Masters Workshop at BAVC. Deadline for receipt of entries: January 15, 2005 The Artist-in-Residence program will provide an extended creative experience for one mid/late career artist per year. As a resident, s/he will receive extensive access to the equipment and services needed to complete a new media piece. The resident artist will also teach less experienced and aspiring media artists. More information: http://www.sfai.edu/news/news.aspx?id=1090&source=home&returnURL= %2f --------------------------------- OPPORTUNITY LEA Special Issue: MultiMedia Performance Guest Editors: Annette Barbier, Craig Harris and Marla Schweppe mmedia [@] astn [dot] net http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e- journals/LEA/LEA2004/authors.htm#mmedia The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (ISSN No: 1071-4391) is inviting papers and artworks that showcase MultiMedia Performance. This category includes works which span a range of practices, which challenge the way performance has heretofore been defined and examines the ways in which new technologies have opened up the meaning and practice of performance. We expect that performance includes a live component, be it on line, in an interactive installation, or on stage. LEA encourages international artists / academics / researchers / students to submit their proposals for consideration. We particularly encourage young authors and contributors from outside North America and Europe to send proposals for articles/gallery/artists statements (if applicable). Expressions of interest and outline should include: - A brief description of proposed text (300 words) - A brief author biography - Any related URLs - Contact details In the subject heading of the email message, please use "Name of Artist/Project Title: LEA MultiMedia Performance - Date Submitted". Please cut and paste all text into body of email (without attachments). Deadline for expressions of interest: 10 December 2004 Deadline for proposals: 15 February 2005 Please send proposals or queries to: Annette Barbier, Craig Harris and Marla Schweppe mmedia [@] astn [dot] net and Nisar Keshvani LEA Editor-in-Chief lea [@] mitpress [dot] mit [dot] edu http://lea.mit.edu --------------------------------- Leonardo Abstracts Service - Call for Submissions As part of the Leonardo Educators Initiative, the Leonardo Abstracts Service (LABS) is pleased to announce its first cycle of shortlisted peer reviewed abstracts. Scholars published in the first cycle in the Leonardo Electronic Almanac October 2004 are: * Peter Anders: A Procedural Model for the Integration of Physical and Cyberspaces in Architecture Thesis Supervisors: Roy Ascott, Michael Phillips, Michael Punt * Principles of Metadesign: Processes and Levels of Co-Creation in the New Design Space by Elisa Giaccardi Thesis Supervisor: Roy Ascott * Fatima Lasay: Phase Space Portraits of the Nuestra Señora delos Dolores of Baclayon Thesis Supervisor: Santiago Albano Pilar * Maureen A. Nappi: Language, Memory and Volition: Toward an Aesthetics of Computer Arts Thesis Supervisors: Benjamin Binstock and Judith R. Weissman LABS is seeking PhD, Masters and MFA thesis abstracts for its next publication cycle. Authors of theses interested in having their thesis abstract considered for publication should fill out the Thesis Abstract Submittal form at http://leonardolabs.pomona.edu Deadline for submission is: 15 November 2004 What is LABS? LABS is a comprehensive database of Ph.D., Masters and MFA thesis abstracts in the emerging intersection between art, science and technology. Individuals receiving advanced degrees in the arts (visual, sound, performance, text), computer sciences, the sciences and/or technology, which in some way investigate philosophical, historical, or critical applications of science or technology to the arts, are invited to submit an abstract of their thesis for publication consideration in this database. The LABS project does not seek to duplicate existing thesis databases but rather to give visibility to interdisciplinary work that is often hard to retrieve from existing databases. The abstracts are available online at Pomona College, Claremont, California, so that interested persons can access them at no cost. The English language peer review panel for 2004/2005 are Pau Alsina, Jody Berland, Sean Cubitt, Frieder Nake, Sheila Pinkel and Stephen Petersen. What is the Leonardo International Academic Community? The Leonardo International Academic Community is a mailing list to encourage discussion and exchange of ideas (to join email: lea [@] mitpress [dot] mit [dot] edu with a brief introduction) amongst leaders and thinkers in academia. Academics also receive the Leonardo International Faculty Alerts - announcing job and other opportunities in the field. --------------------------------- OBITUARY KIRILL SOKOLOV: 1930-2004 Obituary by John Milner, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom 27 September 2004 E-mail: john [dot] milner [@] newcastle [dot] ac [dot] uk Anyone meeting artist Kirill Sokolov would remember him. He was an impressive figure, erect in his stance and sometimes fierce in appearance. He did not stand aloof and was frequently outspoken, both in criticism and in praise. His voracious appetite for art made him print, paint, sculpt, write and talk art more or less continuously. He was not formal, but he had about him the confidence of a highly cultured man. He was not impressed by the trappings of status in others and sought little recognition for himself. He frequently wore a boiler-suit marked by vigorous painting activities, but he did so with no intention of attracting attention. It mattered little to him. He had instead a personal authority that arose from his commitment to his art, culture more widely and Russian culture in particular, especially in relation to the West. This simple fact made him an impressive cultural ambassador, not just because his life bridged Eastern and Western Europe, but because he addres! sed grand issues with passion, experience and learning and because he was never embarrassed to be the boiler-suited painter among the ambassadors. He pursued this ambassadorial purpose in many ways, through exhibitions, articles and through artists' groups. Sokolov's confidence was inseparable from his belief in art, his appetite for it and the seriousness of its purpose. His art was often linked to literature or theater in its themes, or it provided illustrations to the books of Goethe, the poet Aleksandr Blok and others, or to the plays of Shakespeare. His art also reflected architectural themes. He was not an artist who believed in creative isolation, though he was fiercely independent. The *Leonardo* journal provided significant opportunities in this respect, with its aim to address issues in art and science across geographical and cultural boundaries. In 1975, Sokolov met Frank J. Malina, the journal's founder, on a visit to Paris. The next year he was a co-editor of *Leonardo*, for which he wrote, edited and commissioned numerous articles addressing issues of spatial perception and depiction and returning again and again to the works of Russian artists often rarely studied or exhibited in Western Europe. The artist Vladimir Favorsky was a good example of this: Sokolov knew the importance of his work, which is still scarcely recognized outside Russia. Favorsky taught at the Vkhutemas, a kind of Russian Bauhaus, an experimental school of art and design in the 1920s, playing a vital role in the formulation of post-Revolutionary art and design. But Favorsky was also a wood-engraver, whose major works were frequently diminutive decorations to books. Sokolov, ! a wood- engraver of great talent himself, knew how important the message of these works could be. Sokolov knew many Russian, British and other artists. From his earliest days as an art student in Moscow he was aware that art has power, that it is a social as well as a personal phenomenon and that it linked him in time and space to his contemporaries in Russia and the West. His marriage to the distinguished scholar of Russian literature, Dr. Avril Pyman, and his time spent in Britain, provided a unique vantage point from which to see Russian art from a distance and to see British art with the fresh eyes of a newcomer. He thrived on this kind of diversity, even when it provoked difficulties. It was a characteristic opportunity for bridge-building, the kind of cultural panorama that has shaped the *Leonardo*. Sokolov was attracted to its attempt to bridge art and science, as he wished to link East and West. He knew, however, where his roots lay. He never wished to be a British artist; he was a Russian artist in Britain. More specifically, he was a Moscow artist. Kirill Konstantinovich Sokolov was born in Moscow in 1930, the son of architect Konstantin Mikhailovich Sokolov and of Irina Konstantinovna Sokolova-Kirshbaum. At the beginning of the war years, he was forced evacuated to Saratov, where he lived with his mother and paternal relations. It was here that he first saw a performance of Goethe's *Faust* at the Samara Opera Theatre. In the hot summer of 1942, the young Sokolov witnessed nightly bombardments as German invaders approached Saratov. On returning to Moscow, he passed examinations to the Moscow School of Art that combined the national curriculum with vocational training. An incidental advantage of this was that it provided access to ration cards in the difficult postwar years. Of much greater importance to Sokolov, however, was the training it gave and the introduction to the world of art. From the art school, he graduated to the graphics department of the celebrated Surikov State Art Institute. Until the end of his life, when his creative work had seen many innovations and enthusiasms come and go, there stood two small Russian landscapes by Sokolov, each with the slightly wistful evocative quality that the painter Isaak Levitan above all was able to impart to Russian landscape themes. These unpretentious and beautiful student works show the importance of Kirill's early training and how much he valued it. They show his awareness of Russian artistic history and conventions and they show a directly expressed affection for his homeland. As his knowledge and skills increased through training and experience, Sokolov began a life-long dialogue with the art of his contemporaries, his Russian roots, with the Stalinist culture of the time and with his growing awareness of the complex relationship of Russian art to the art of other cultures, including contemporary West European art of the 1950s and 1960s and eventually including a growing awareness of the alternative history of Russian twentieth-century art that Western European and American art historians called the art of the Russian Avant-garde. Sokolov learned a great deal from a close study of the artists who had emerged from the Knave of Diamonds exhibition society of the pre-Revolutionary years, painters including Kuznetsov, Konchalovsky and Falk, artists only now being rediscovered in Western Europe. Their works reflected the professionalism that appeared as irreplaceable for a painter as it was for a musician in postwar Russia! . This professionalism, training and skill can be seen clearly in the precision of Sokolov's early wood- engravings, including his two illustrations for Goethe's *Faust* made in 1962 and in the painterly facture of his early independent paintings. The War was over by the time Sokolov entered the Surikov Institute. After Stalin's death in 1953, the political thaw slowly began, which permitted Russian artists to glimpse more often the art of non-communist Western Europe and America. Under Nikita Khrushchev, cultural exchanges became more feasible. It was in these years that Sokolov began to exhibit. He won recognition at the International Exhibition of the World Festival of Youth in Moscow in 1957, his graduation year from the Surikov Institute. He was increasingly involved in making wood-engraved illustrations for periodicals and books for several publishing houses, including *Znanie* (Knowledge), *Prosveshchenie* (Education), *Detskaya Entsiklopediya* (Children's Encyclopedia), *Semya I shkola* (Family and School) and *Kulturno-prosvetitel'naya rabota* (Cultural and Educational Work). Much of his best work was published by *Sovetskii Pisatel* (Soviet Writer) and by Politizdat (Political Publishing). He was eventually ! to illustrate more than 50 books. In his wood-engravings especially, Sokolov already had a link with England, as it was the late eighteenth-century artist Thomas Bewick of Northumberland who first perfected the techniques that Favorsky and subsequently Sokolov adopted and developed with such skill and ambition. However, a more personal encounter turned his life toward England after he met in Russia the young scholar Avril Pyman. When they married in 1963, they had to seek permission from President Khrushchev in person, as this was the first so-called "foreign" wedding in Russia since the repeal of Stalin's marriage laws that forbade it. They set up home in a Moscow flat, feeling it by hand in the darkness initially for want of a light bulb. Through his devotion to his new wife, whom he called Dicky, Kirill Sokolov began a long, difficult and rewarding relationship with British culture. It must have seemed aloof and largely lacking in professional camaraderie, after Moscow. There was little tendency among British artists to argue long and late about the nature and future of culture in Britain. As the dialogue began, Sokolov made linocut illustrations for Shakespeare's *Hamlet* that were exhibited in Moscow and subsequently at Stratford-upon-Avon in the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. In December 1965 Kirill and Dicky had a daughter, christened Irina, after Kirill's mother. Illustrating literary texts encouraged Sokolov to make works that condensed and intensified themes and the actions to which they related, including illustrations to Aleksandr Blok in 1966. The illustrations reveal his investigation of perspective and spatial systems, but their dramatic force reflects his excitement at action, scenery and lighting in the theatre. Tragic themes were frequent features of this work. Stalinism, war, invasion, evacuation, bombardment and the arrest of Kirill's father for deportation to a labor camp provide tragic themes enough in his own life. But as the political thaw appeared to be losing momentum in the 1970s, emigration became a possibility that Kirill and his wife adopted. They left via Brest, Poland, Germany and Holland, arriving in Cornwall, England, in 1973. Kirill began an autobiographical record, not expecting perhaps ever to return to Russia. At first it was difficult to adjust to this new life. The art world in England had no clear structure and Kirill had little English with which to argue his case. It was a harsh encounter, calling for self-reliance and opportunism in a highly competitive and unfamiliar art market. The family moved to the northeast of England. Kirill's mother preferred Russia and returned, periodically sending parcels of delicious mushrooms that she had picked and pickled. Kirill painted, printed and, from 1974, sculpted furiously. Still exhibitions did take place, beginning with pastel illustrations to Blok's *Puppet Booth* shown at Durham University and at the Sunderland Arts Centre in 1975. He wrote *An Analysis of My Work* for *Leonardo* in 1976 and had works exhibited in London, New York, Washington and Norway, an artist with international horizons. On the other hand, the northeast of England took to him, his home was there and that was where he made the majority of his works. He exhibited at Durham University several times and had a retrospective exhibition at Newcastle University's Hatton Gallery in 1995, which was opened by the Soviet Consul. At the Hatton Gallery, he had also been the driving force behind the extensive and rich exhibition Russian Graphic Art in 1979. The interior of his house in Berwick upon Tweed was painted all over, including walls, floors, doors, chairs and tables, in a spectacular tour-de-force that brought dining into close proximity with scenes of Stravinsky's funeral and other exotic and menacing Venetian dramas. After a disastrous fire at the Berwick house, Sokolov began to decorate in a comparable way a house in Durham, supplemented by a great profusion of sculpture, paintings, drawings, prints as well as his collection of folk- art and Russian prints. In addition there is a studio archive there, currently being catalogued. His loss of many works in the Berwick fire may have motivated his prolific return to print-making and it was the difficulties of printing that were to become a great asset in his integration into groups of British artists. As Kirill needed presses for his prints, he joined print-making collectives of various kinds from 1980, especially at Charlotte Press and Northern Print in Newcastle. Here he found supporters, enthusiasts and friends as well as technical equipment for engraving, screen-printing and experimentation. They in turn acquired a force of nature, a different view of art and a model of serious commitment. He became a member of the Association of Graphic Artists of Great Britain in 1980, though his output in paintings and sculpture was growing fast. He made prints and paintings in series: *Berwick* in 1980; the *Psychiatric Hospital* 1981, after the fire; *A House without a Master*, in 1982, which is dedicated to the memory of his mother, who died the previous year; *Alternative Venice* in 1983; *Emigration*, in 1984; and *Case Studies*, after his operation for cancer in 1988. Here personal experience is made accessible to others and becomes a bearer of common experience. There was even a series devoted to Thatcherism in 1984. It was followed by constructions that acknowledged his awareness and appreciation of the lost avant- garde, of whom he learnt partly in Britain. Increasing experimentation in his techniques, he used creosote in printmaking and toilet tissue in collages. He also traveled each year and visits to Greece became a special feature of his later years. He painted there with less fury, depicting liquid light with an unforced, graceful brushwork. But the cultural complexities intrigued him in the contrast of ancient pagan Greece, alongside the Byzantine churches of the early medieval period and the traffic of contemporary life. *Faust* returned with exhibitions at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith and the Faust Museum in Knittlingen, Germany, in 1988. A rewarding feature of the years that followed was an increasing Russian interest in Sokolov's work. He had a retrospective of Ten Years' Work at the House of the Artist in Moscow in 1992 and this exhibition traveled to the State Art Gallery at Perm. He renewed former contacts and gained a welcome recognition. He had bridged the divide and in this way, Sokolov was an international figure, for whom the culture of Britain would never be enough, while there could be no full return to Russia. He looked both ways and the contrast that he saw was a vital force in his art. Further retrospectives were held in Moscow in 1996, at Perm in 1998, Moscow in 2002 and new and old works inspired by Russian Symbolist literature at the Blok Museum in St Petersburg in 2004. His last exhibition was of Faust and newly-gifted paintings and reliefs in Perm As Sokolov's health began to fail, he remained irrepressibly productive. He had never much trusted theorists "who talk in the kitchen but never cook the food." He was a producer of art to the end. At his funeral service in Durham, his family put lights in his study that was just as he had left it. There on his desk were his notes for the next day's work. Themes on the list included Angels and Apocalypse. He is survived by his wife, (Dr.) Avril Pyman (Dicky), his daughter Irina and his son Fyodor, from a previous marriage. --------------------------------- ___________________ | | | | | CREDITS | | | |___________________|Nisar Keshvani: LEA Editor-in-ChiefPatrick Lambelet: LEA Managing EditorMichael Punt: LR Editor-in-ChiefAndre Ho: Web Concept and Design ConsultantRoger Malina: Leonardo Executive EditorStephen Wilson: Chair, Leonardo/ISAST Web CommitteeCraig Harris: Founding EditorEditorial Advisory Board:Irina Aristarkhova, Roy Ascott, Craig Harris, Fatima Lasay,Michael Naimark, Julianne PierceGallery Advisory Board:Mark Amerika, Paul Brown, Choy Kok Kee, Steve Dietz, Kim MachanfAf-LEA Corresponding Editors:Lee Weng Choy, Ricardo Dal Farra, Elga Ferreira, Young Hae-Chang, Fatima Lasay, Jose-Carlos Mariategui, Marcus Neustetter, Elaine Ng, Marc Voge ________________________________________________________________ _________________ | LEA | | PUBLISHING | | INFORMATION | |_________________|Editorial Address:Leonardo Electronic Almanac407A, #24-17Fernvale RoadSingapore 791407E-mail: lea [@] mitpress [dot] mit [dot] edu________________________________________________________________Copyright (2004), Leonardo, the International Society for theArts, Sciences and TechnologyAll Rights Reserved.Leonardo Electronic Almanac is published by:The MIT Press Journals, Five Cambridge Center,Cambridge, MA 02142U.S.A.Re-posting of the content of this journal is prohibited withoutpermission of Leonardo/ISAST, except for the posting of news andevents listings which have been independently received.Leonardo/ISAST and the MIT Press give institutions permission tooffer access to LEA within the organization through suchresources as restricted local gopher and mosaic services. 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URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/leaauthors/attachments/20041213/8300a675/attachment.htm From leoalmanac at yahoo.com Thu Dec 23 06:55:46 2004 From: leoalmanac at yahoo.com (nisar keshvani) Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 03:55:46 -0800 (PST) Subject: [LEAuthors] 2004 Seasons Greetings from the Leonardo Electronic Almanac Message-ID: <20041223115546.42529.qmail@web52503.mail.yahoo.com> If you are unable to see this page, please visit: http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/ecard/ The Leonardo Electronic Almanac wishes its editorial board, peer reviewers, authors and readers a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. January (Part I – Groove, Pit and Wave: Recording, Transmission and Music – Nicolas Collins) Performance Space Meets Cyberspace, examines initiatives throughout the post–industrial world supporting advanced networks – Michael Bussiere • The Gallbladder Sonata is an improvisation combining sound, narrative text, Internet and live performance – Marlena Corcoran • Mediating (through) Imagination introduces two Web-based multimedia projects and live laptop performances – Trace Reddell February (Part II - Groove, Pit and Wave: Recording, Transmission and Music – Nicolas Collins) Recursive Audio Systems discusses the use of feedback systems in their compositional and performance techniques – Christopher Burns and Matthew Burtner • Turn/Stile provides a lively narration of his attempts to update composer Udo Kasemets' work – Tobias C. Van Veen March LEA thanks its peer reviewers whose significant contributions ensure LEA meets the highest academic standards and adds to the existing body of art, science and technology knowledge – Patrick Lambelet April “Metavirtue and Subreality” or “The Involuntary Walker as Virtuous Subject Yet Only Semi-Intelligent Agent” or “Birds or No-Ledge to Stand on”, explores the effects of navigating in immersive environments – David Blair May The *Public News Network* (PNN), a computer-based artwork gives viewers "the power to interrogate corporate broadcast media." – Jack Stenner • Toward the Glass Bead Game, associates small images with ideas that are described in ordinary prose – Joshua Fost • Escuela Rural Andina de Cajamarca, seeks to activate the talents of rural Peru's artisans through the creation of permanent training facilities – Sabine Vess June Art as Technology describes artistic projects with massive geometrical designs made in remote natural settings often seemed to be connected with surprising changes in the environment and its inhabitants – Bill Witherspoon July Translation, Transcodification, Transmission: Erika Tan's Pidgin: Interrupted Transmission, discusses "issues of cultural translation, digital media and notions of difference," using UK-based Erika Tan’s work – Janice Cheddie August (Network Leaps, Bounds and Misses – Fatima Lasay ) • UNESCO’s Program in the Promotion and Support of Digital Art and Electronic Music in Asia and the Pacific is designed to promote creativity in the field of digital arts – Tereza Wagner • Recent New Zealand Electroacoustic Music discusses the role of the Sonic Art CD series in documenting electroacoustic music – Ian Whalley • Latin American Media Art explores the various permutations of globalization – Jose Carlos Mariátegui The Use of Internet for an International Collaborative Project describes an experimental online project between students based in Japan and Malaysia to discuss notions of self, identity, nationality and cross-cultural encounters in today's global telecommunication age – Hasnul Jamal Saidon and Roopesh Sitharan September The Intertextual Thread presents ways of expanding the use of hypertextual and intertextual methods to aid a number of fields, including academic research – Motti Benari, Ziva Ben-Porat, Efrat Biberman, Liza Chudnovsky, Tammy Amiel-Hauzer and Eyal Segal October Art by Telephone: From Static to Mobile Interfaces discusses the evolution of artworks using telephones, focussing on contemporary works using mobile phone technology – Adriana de Souza e Silva November (Part I: "From the Extraordinary to the Uncanny: The Unusual and Inexplicable in Art, Science and Technology" – Michael Punt) • Biosensor And Media Art-Induced Meditation And Telepathy explores embodiment via technology and media art – Camille Baker • Parallel Worlds in Science-Fiction Literature provides an overview of SF works dealing with parallel worlds – John F. Barber • Shape-Shifting through Reality focuses on the cosmology of Australian aborigines and the understanding of ways the universes interact with their daily reality – Christine Morris December (Part II: "From the Extraordinary to the Uncanny: The Unusual and Inexplicable in Art, Science and Technology" – Michael Punt ) • Hauntings explores intriguing parallels in the development of communications technology and spiritualist practices – Peter Anders • Media Ghosts discusses images adapted from various news media – Josephine Coy • Spookie Cookies looks into various takes on the supernatural within the alternative media – Len Massey Cinema and the Biological Basis of Otherness discusses interactive cinema seen as an "externalization of mind” – Pia Tikka • Universe from Beyond makes a compelling case for the central role of "unobservables" in cosmology and physics – C. S. Unnikrishnan In 2005, we continue to work towards better meeting your needs - watch this space for details. Thank you The LEA Editorial and Design team Send editorial ideas, proposals and artist statements: lea at mitpress.mit.edu How to advertise in LEA? http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/isast/placeads.html#LEAads Subscribe to LEA (become an ISAST member and access archives dating back to 1993) http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=4&tid=27&mode=p Copyright© 1993 - 2004: The Leonardo Electronic Almanac is published by Leonardo / International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (ISAST) in association with the MIT Press. All rights reserved. --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/leaauthors/attachments/20041223/03dbc895/attachment.htm