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<td><br><br><a name="0"></a>_______________________________________________________________<br>Leonardo Electronic Almanac Volume 13, Number 8, August 2005<br><a href="http://lea.mit.edu/">http://lea.mit.edu</a><br>________________________________________________________________
<br>ISSN #1071-4391<br>____________<br>| |<br>| CONTENTS |<br>|____________|
<p>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p><br>INTRODUCTION<br>------------</p>
<p>EDITORIAL<br>---------</p>
<p>A Colloquium on Art/Science/Spirituality Reconnections Within<br>Emerging Planetary Cultures @ Melilla 2004, by Roger Malina ></p>
<p>A NOTE FROM THE GUEST EDITOR<br>----------------------------</p>
<p>Organizing a Symposium, by Julien Knebush></p>
<p>ABSTRACTS<br>---------</p>
<p>Introductory address by Mohammed Aziz Chafchaouni, Symposium<br>Director ></p>
<p>Foundations for a Culture of Peace and Justice based on<br>Intertradition Cooperation, by Lama Denys ></p>
<p>Approaches of the Planetary Dimension in Media Art, by Julien<br>Knebusch ></p>
<p>Useful Tension Between C.P. Snow's Two Cultures Debate and<br>the Emergence of a Context of Five Cultures in the Planetary<br>Context, by Roger Malina ></p>
<p>Imagination as a Space of Life and of Resistance to<br>Mercantile Logic, by Mohammed Taleb ></p>
<p>Marks and Images of Reality in Media Reasoning, by Hashim<br>Cabrera ></p>
<p>Burdens (and Gifts) of Cinema on Experimental Video - the<br>Idea of Experimentation and Resistance in Cairo, by Samirah Al-<br>Kasim ></p>
<p>Network Projects in Brazil. Gente (online) Que Faz, by Karla<br>Schuch-Brunet ></p>
<p>ME DEA EX: Intertwining Virtual and Real World to Form<br>Immersive/Interactive Theatre, by Neora ></p>
<p>The Interpresence Project, by Arthur Matuck ></p>
<p>GATES - Beyond Net-Art: Real Things Across Cyberspace, by<br>Caterina Davinio ></p>
<p>Mediterranean Maps, by Paolo Atzori and Nicole Leghissa ></p>
<p>Mapping a Thesis in Systems Theory in New Media Art, by Jane<br>Cole Forrester Winne ></p>
<p>A Universal Mother Tongue, by Celestino Soddu and Enrica<br>Colabella > </p>
<p>The Religious Models of Globalism, by Harry Rand ></p>
<p>The Ubiquitous Dot in Cosmic Justice, by Ahmad Mostafa > </p>
<p>La Metafora Andalusi: La Utopia Necesaria, by Emilio Gonzalez<br>Ferrin > </p>
<p>Los conceptos del tiempo y del espacio en el lenguaje de Ibn<br>'Arabi: <br>un enfoque lingüístico, by Leila Khalifa ></p>
<p>Pensamiento lineal y conocimiento: un proceso alquímico, by<br>Francesca Del Carmen Sanchez ></p>
<p><br>BONUS SECTION<br>-------------</p>
<p>An Open Letter to the Melilla Conference Participants, from<br>Chris Alexander > </p>
<p><br>ONE FROM THE VAULT: FROM THE LEA ARCHIVES<br>-----------------------------------------</p>
<p>Cinematic Thresholds - Instrumentality, Time and Memory In<br>The Virtual, by Ed Keller ></p>
<p><br>LEONARDO REVIEWS<br>----------------</p>
<p>Dream Bridges - Traumbrücken, reviewed by Rob Harle ></p>
<p>Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body, reviewed<br>by Rob Harle ></p>
<p>Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition,<br>reviewed by Kathleen Quillian ></p>
<p>The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely,<br>reviewed by Rob Harle ></p>
<p>Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art,<br>reviewed by Alex Rotas<br><br>In Senghor's Shadow: Art, Politics and the Avant-Garde in<br>Senegal, 1960-1995, reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher > </p>
<p><br>ISAST NEWS<br>----------</p>
<p>Lynne Carstarphen Named Coordinating Editor of *Leonardo* ></p>
<p>*Leonardo* Launches Yasmin Discussion List ></p>
<p>Spector and Larson Join Governing Board ></p>
<p>*Leonardo* Book Series Activities ></p>
<p>*Leonardo*/OLATS and Space Study ></p>
<p>*Leonardo* Reaches Out to Educational Community ></p>
<p>*Leonardo* Educators Forum ></p>
<p>The Pacific Rim New Media Summit: A Pre-Symposium to ISEA2006 ></p>
<p>PRNMS Working Group On Container Culture ></p>
<p><br>BYTES<br>-----</p>
<p>CFP - Leonardo Music Journal 16 (2006) ></p>
<p>SCHOOL OF ART INSTITUTE CHICAGO - FACULTY POSITION IN FILM,<br>VIDEO AND NEW MEDIA ></p>
<p>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>INTRODUCTION<br>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>LEA's August issue is the first of a double digest, guest<br>edited by Julien Knebush, which re-lives a Colloquium on<br>Art/Science/Spirituality Reconnections Within Emerging Planetary<br>Cultures. This global event was hosted by the 1st International
<br>Festival of Cultures. It took place in Melilla, Spain from 18-20<br>July 2004, and was co-sponsored by Al Andalus Foundation, UNESCO<br>DIGIARTS, Leonardo/OLATS, Ford Foundation and Rockefeller<br>Foundation.<br><br>In our journey into the past, One From the Vault relives Ed
<br>Keller's *Cinematic Thresholds - Instrumentality, Time and<br>Memory in the Virtual*, which first appeared in LEA in July 1995.</p>
<p>Leonardo Reviews features one of its newer reviewers, Rob<br>Harle, whose prolific output and particular combination of<br>interest in biomedicine and architecture, consciousness and<br>culture, situate him at the core of recent publications in our
<br>field. He reviews two books: *Dream Bridges - Traumbrücken* and<br>*Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body*. Also<br>included is Kathleen Quillian's first review: *Television After<br>TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition*. Although a newcomer as a
<br>reviewer, Kathleen has been a colleague working in the San<br>Francisco office and a great supporter and help.</p>
<p>An inundation of news on *Leonardo* awaits in the ISAST news<br>section, and our ongoing series on *The Pacific Rim New Media<br>Summit: A Pre-Symposium to ISEA2006* features yet another<br>working group, this time on container culture.
</p>
<p>Finally, Bytes features a call for paper for Leonardo Music<br>Journal's next issue. Also, find out more about the availability<br>of a full-time faculty position. </p>
<p>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>EDITORIAL<br>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>A COLLOQUIUM ON ART/SCIENCE/SPIRITUALITY RECONNECTIONS WITHIN<br>EMERGING PLANETARY CULTURES @ MELILLA, SPAIN, JULY 2004</p>
<p>by Roger Malina<br>Astrophysician<br>Editor, Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille, France<br>c/o Leonardo,<br>SFAI, 800 Chestnut Street<br>San Francisco, CA 94133<br>U.S.A.<br>rmalina [@] ssl [dot] berkeley [dot] edu / rmalina [@] alum
<br>[dot] mit [dot] edu<br><a href="http://www.astrsp-mrs.fr/www/mal.html">http://www.astrsp-mrs.fr/www/mal.html</a></p>
<p>Modern cosmology and physics emphasize the interdependence of<br>complex systems on scales from the microscopic to the<br>macroscopic. Contemporary genetics reveal the underlying shared<br>genetic identity not only of all human beings, but the genetic
<br>relatedness of all life on earth. Current scientific discoveries<br>reconnect science to a number of philosophical and spiritual<br>traditions. These reconnections offer the promise of the<br>development of new philosophical and value systems appropriate
<br>to new emerging linked planetary cultures.</p>
<p>This promise must face a number of dangers of globalization<br>including: Accentuation of the inequalities within global<br>development, negative aspects of the digital divide, cultural<br>homogenization, over and unsustainable consumption, hyper-
<br>specialization, local isolation. The technologies of the<br>Information Society offer tools to counterbalance some of these<br>dangers through the potential of global dissemination of<br>information and knowledge, new models for distance learning, the
<br>emergence of a planetary consciousness based on the shared<br>genetic heritage of all human life. But beside these particular<br>dangers how "to be and become" in this world undergoing profound<br>changes? Can we adapt to these changes? How? Artists and
<br>scientists have been at the forefront of the use of these new<br>systems to build life enhancing cultural developments in linked<br>planetary contexts. </p>
<p>This colloquium, with 20 participating artists, scientists and<br>philosophers, was intended to be a listening post, an<br>opportunity for inter-cultural dialogue and a specific step<br>towards magnifying and amplifying emerging new emerging
<br>planetary cultural developments. Speakers presented specific<br>scientific and artistic work, and made visible the<br>cultural/philosophical/religions contexts that set a priori<br>conditions and constraints on the speakers approaches and
<br>specific work.</p>
<p>The choice of the city of Melilla as host was not an accident.<br>Melilla has a millennial history of multi-cultural, multi-<br>lingual synergy and dialogue within the Mediterranean context.<br>The city offered itself as a podium to communicate outcomes of
<br>this first colloquium: To make real the opportunities for the<br>reconnection of art, science and spirituality for the building<br>of new 21st century planetary cultures.</p>
<p>The Colloquium was divided into four different sessions<br>articulated around the more general question of relationships<br>between art, science, technology, and spirituality by<br>creation/reinvention of patterns, symbols and integrated
<br>practices.</p>
<p>In the initial instalment of our two-part digest, we focus on<br>the first two sessions. The other two sessions will be published<br>in the following LEA edition. </p>
<p>BIOGRAPHY</p>
<p>Roger Malina is an astrophysicist at the Laboratoire<br>d'Astrophysique de Marseille CNRS in France and Executive Editor<br>of the Leonardo publications circulated by MIT Press. As a<br>visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Space Science Laboratory, he
<br>is currently a co-investigator for the Supernova Acceleration<br>Probe Consortium that seeks to build a new space observatory to<br>help understand the nature of dark energy and dark matter in the<br>universe. Collaborating amongst the science team for the Galaxy
<br>Evolution Explorer, Malina employs his expertise to help map the<br>sky in the far ultra void to understand the evolution of<br>galaxies.</p>
<p>Malina also serves as Chairman of the Board of Leonardo, The<br>International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, and<br>President of the Observatoire Leonardo des Arts et<br>Technosciences in Paris. He is Co-chair of the International
<br>Advisory Board of the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts, a<br>member of the International Academy of Astronautics, and is<br>currently an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium. He is a member<br>of the International Academy of Astronautics and co-chair of
<br>their Committee on Space Activities and Society. Since 1982 he<br>has served as Executive Editor of the journal Leonardo. He<br>writes on the relationship between the arts, sciences and<br>technology.</p>
<p>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>A NOTE FROM THE GUEST EDITOR<br>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>ORGANIZING A SYMPOSIUM</p>
<p>by Julien Knebusch<br>Assistant Editor <br>Leonardo, France<br>22, rue Caulaincourt<br>75018 Paris<br>France<br>jknebusch [@] noos [dot] fr / julien_knebusch [@] yahoo [dot] fr<br><a href="http://www.olats.org">http://www.olats.org
</a></p>
<p>Organizing this event was much of a challenge, regarding the<br>topic addressed and the location of the symposium. We gathered<br>scholars, scientists, and artists from very different areas and<br>met in a place completely unknown for international dialogue:
<br>Melilla, one of the Spanish cities (enclaves) still existing in<br>Morocco. The city is encircled by a militarized wall,<br>reminiscent of the Israeli wall. Melilla is one of the "doors"<br>to the European Union and astonishing because of the different
<br>cultural groups living within the city (Jews, Spaniards,<br>Moroccans, Tziganes, and Indians). The city created a festival<br>entitled the "5 Cultures" within our symposium.</p>
<p>We discovered this unusual, complex, and politically sensitive<br>context very late, more or less when we arrived there last<br>summer. As organizers, we came from "outside", but worked<br>together with the Director of the Symposium, Aziz Chafchaouni,
<br>who was living in Melilla. It was really a challenge to work<br>with Aziz Chafchaouni in Melilla, Douglas Vakoch in California,<br>Roger Malina in Marseille, Sangeetha Menon in Bangalore (I live<br>in Paris). Together we constituted the organizing committee.
</p>
<p>During the organization of the symposium (which took six<br>months) and the arrival in the City of Melilla (last summer), I<br>always felt in the middle of a situation where it was very<br>difficult to find one's way around. But this precisely made the
<br>whole event very interesting to me. I learned that organizing is<br>always a very delicate issue because of our intervention in a<br>preexisting context of political oppositions, prejudices and<br>given world views. I learned also that there is a true value to
<br>a very "open" definition of a symposium - I was very hesitant at<br>the beginning - because our discussions could take unforeseen<br>directions. Certainly our symposium lacked coherence. But, I<br>will keep a very special feeling of our interactions, which were
<br>very dense and continuous during the three days we spent in<br>Melilla. Today, I feel deeply influenced by the organization of<br>this event. Beside the intellectual interest of the symposium,<br>this event, the arrival in the city, and the various unforeseen
<br>interactions and encounters with the participants constitutes a<br>profound experience for me. I learned that I needed to lose<br>control over the world (predicting what and how something would<br>happen) in order to belong to it.
</p>
<p>BIOGRAPHY</p>
<p>Julien Knebusch was born in Munich (Germany) and now lives in<br>Paris. He obtained a Master's degree in history and politics<br>(Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) and also in<br>cultural management (University Paris-IX-Dauphine). He is
<br>currently project leader at Leonardo/OLATS<br>(<a href="http://www.olats.org">http://www.olats.org</a>) for the editorial program "Fondements<br>Culturels de la Mondialisation" (Cultural Roots of<br>Globalization).
</p>
<p>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>ABSTRACTS<br>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS</p>
<p>by Mohammed Aziz Chafchaouni<br>Symposium Director<br>Al Andalus Foundation<br>Avenida Reyes Catolicos<br>10 3er Iz<br>52 002 Melilla<br>chaf_aziz [@] hotmail [dot] com</p>
<p>As we move into the 21st century, humankind has acquired the<br>tools to embark upon a journey toward a new phase of human<br>capacity, toward a universal and holistic understanding of the<br>universe and ourselves.</p>
<p>The conference brought together some 25 scientists,<br>international philosophers, and artists, in order to establish<br>the bases of a new hybrid dialogue between art, science and<br>spirituality. The colloquium showed the veracity and the
<br>accuracy of the set of themes approached. Indeed, during the<br>last decades, we were accustomed to see emerging binary<br>dialogues among Art/Science, Science/Spirituality, or<br>Art/Spirituality. Multiple international institutions were born
<br>from this intellectual ideal and the effort to establish<br>footbridges between the various fields of knowledge and human<br>experience. </p>
<p>For the first time in the universal history of ideas, and<br>precisely in response to the era of the globalization, a<br>conference emerges which establishes a "multidimensional"<br>dialogue between the three most essential fields of the human
<br>endeavor. </p>
<p>During the last centuries, human culture and knowledge domains<br>have become increasingly atomized and specialized, each<br>specialization requiring years of training. With new methods and<br>tools of visualization and communication, humans can achieve an
<br>intuitive grasp of planetary cultures and scientific<br>information, while evolving away from isolation and fear, and<br>moving toward responsive appreciation and sharing.</p>
<p>While the information necessary to achieve this potential is<br>available through new media and the Internet, there are<br>currently many difficulties in exploring the vast streams of<br>knowledge. Human society is moving deeply into limiting trends
<br>of homogenous culture. This is accentuated by the paradox of the<br>current tendency towards drowning in torrents of data. An<br>alternative is to create a universal methodology based upon the<br>breadth of human experience. This paradigm should arise from a
<br>deep understanding of our common universal heritage, as embedded<br>in the wisdom and knowledge of cultures East and West.</p>
<p>This paradigm will help us filter and organize the ever-<br>expanding cyber universe. In the process, it is possible to<br>utilize the precise data gathered within the scientific domain,<br>as the structural basis for the visualization of information.
<br>This will bring the Buckminster Fuller conception of "doing more<br>with less" into the realm of knowledge acquisition.</p>
<p>Eventually computer users could be navigating through<br>tridimensional animated highways of interactive content<br>organised according to principles of scientific knowledge. In<br>this way, knowledge can be, in a broad sense, made user
<br>friendly, understandable and within reach. Al Andalus Foundation<br>seeks to create new universal tools for Humanity to grasp and<br>experience, in a better and cohesive way, holistic<br>understanding. This conference was conceived to move us closer
<br>to this vision.</p>
<p>_____________________________<br><br>INTRODUCTION TO SESSION 1</p>
<p>The theme of Session 1 was Art/Science/Spirituality relations<br>within planetary cultures and features 14 abstracts. This<br>session dealt with worldwide phenomenon: 1) Creation of a single<br>world which encompasses the planet and 2) of worldwide
<br>dissemination of worlds (2). We have planetary cultures emerging<br>today (culture defined by a worldwide extension). The<br>terminology "planetary culture" has been introduced in order to<br>avoid the more common and difficult concept of "globalisation".
<br>The session aimed to explore art/science/spirituality<br>reconnections within the context of globalization.</p>
<p>_____________________________<br><br>FOUNDATIONS FOR A CULTURE OF PEACE AND JUSTICE BASED ON<br>INTERTRADITION COOPERATION</p>
<p>by Lama Denys<br>Congrégation Dachang Rimay, France<br>Hameau de St Hugon<br>73110 Arvillard<br>France<br>lamadenys[@] rimay [dot] net<br><a href="http://www.karmaling.org">http://www.karmaling.org</a></p>
<p>KEYWORDS</p>
<p>unity, diversity, ethics<br>ABSTRACT</p>
<p>The Teaching of the Buddha (Dharma) is an art of living based<br>on a spiritual science. In its inspiration I would suggest first<br>to make evident the ethical and spiritual common ground of all<br>peace and justice, wholesome, traditions.
</p>
<p>Concerning spirituality, the common ground could be summarized<br>as the absolute (God or Nature) experienced before mental<br>representations, names and forms, or in the "know yourself"<br>injunction.</p>
<p>Concerning ethics, all wholesome traditions share the<br>altruistic, selfless, love and compassion summarized by the<br>Golden Rule.</p>
<p>Awareness of this common and universal ground generates a<br>vision of intertradition unity in diversity. Unity in the<br>fundamental experience, whether ethical or spiritual, and<br>diversity in its expressions and ways of realization.
</p>
<p>This paradigm of ethical and spiritual unity in diversity, as<br>developed in the "Manifesto for ethical and spiritual unity in<br>diversity", is the heart of an education to religious pluralism<br>and cooperation needed for a global harmonization in a culture
<br>of peace and justice.</p>
<p>BIOGRAPHY </p>
<p>Lama Denys is the spiritual heir of Kyabdje Kalou Rinpoche<br>(1904-1989), one of the greatest contemporary Buddhist Tibetan<br>masters. Since 1980 he teaches in various countries and is the<br>spiritual guide of Rimay Sangha International, a network of
<br>Buddhist centers.</p>
<p>For more than 20 years, Lama Denys has been very active in<br>intertradition and transdisciplinary dialogue. He is Honorary<br>President of the European Buddhist Union, a participant of the<br>World Council of Religious Leaders, and a member of the former
<br>International Interreligious Advisory Committee of UNESCO. </p>
<p>He is also co-founder of the United Traditions Network,<br>developing the vision of unity in diversity of all authentic<br>traditions. Inspired by the activity of His Holiness the Dalaï<br>Lama, he supports many initiatives for a culture of peace,
<br>justice and non-violence.</p>
<p>_____________________________<br><br>APPROACHES OF THE PLANETARY DIMENSION IN MEDIA ART</p>
<p>by Julien Knebusch<br>Assistant Editor <br>Leonardo, France<br>22, rue Caulaincourt<br>75018 Paris<br>France<br>jknebusch [@] noos [dot] fr / julien_knebusch [@] yahoo [dot] fr<br><a href="http://www.olats.org">http://www.olats.org
</a></p>
<p>KEYWORDS </p>
<p>phenomenology, planetary dimension, media artists</p>
<p>ABSTRACT</p>
<p>This presentation is about the description of a certain<br>sensitivity, which can be found in contemporary Media Art and<br>further the development of a phenomenology of the global.<br>Contemporary philosophy has considered globalization as an
<br>ontological event or issue (Jean-Luc Nancy and Peter Sloterdijk<br>for example). </p>
<p>We will ask in this presentation how contemporary media<br>artists, from the last 20 years, became aware of globalization,<br>and developed ways of appropriation of this phenomenon. We will<br>outsketch two important approaches of the planetary becoming of
<br>one's/our world: 1) an approach centered on the relationship of<br>the individual to entities/notions as otherness or humanity and<br>2) an approach centered more on the artist's relationship to<br>earth. </p>
<p>Within the first group, the global has been experienced<br>differently a) as an autonomous and creative entity (through<br>networks by Roy Ascott in La Plissure du texte, 1984, for<br>example) b) as a wave coming from an expanding center (the
<br>global is experienced from a peripheral position, for example in<br>the video of Peter Callas Night's High Noon: An Anti-Terrain,<br>1988) and c) a component of locality (the global considered as<br>an extension of the horizon of locality, for example by
<br>Knowbotik Research in Mental immigration).<br><br>Within the second group, artists experimented a planetary<br>dimension through the sensing of geophysical processes by using<br>earth science data in a creative manner. The planetary dimension
<br>has been: a) seen through an extension of human's vision<br>(visualization of planetary processes by Gloria Brown-Simmons in<br>Oceannet, started in 1997); sensed physically (the body of the<br>planet sensed by the human body as illustrated by the Japanese
<br>group Sensorium in Breathing Earth, 1998-2000); sensed<br>physically through one's desire of horizontal extension (for<br>example by Stephan Barron in Traits, 1989).<br><br>These descriptions could help develop a phenomenology of the
<br>Planetary Dimension, which has been initiated in contemporary<br>philosophy (Peter Sloterdijk for example) and sociology (Samuel<br>Bordreuil for example). </p>
<p>BIOGRAPHY</p>
<p>Julien Knebusch was born in Munich (Germany) and now lives in<br>Paris. He obtained a Master's degree in history and politics<br>(Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) and also in<br>cultural management (University Paris-IX-Dauphine). He is
<br>currently project leader at Leonardo/OLATS<br>(<a href="http://www.olats.org">http://www.olats.org</a>) for the editorial program "Fondements<br>Culturels de la Mondialisation" (Cultural Roots of<br>Globalization).
</p>
<p>_____________________________</p>
<p>USEFUL TENSION BETWEEN C.P. SNOW'S TWO CULTURES DEBATE AND THE<br>EMERGENCE OF A CONTEXT OF FIVE CULTURES IN THE PLANETARY CONTEXT</p>
<p>by Roger Malina<br>Astrophysician<br>Editor, Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille, France<br>c/o Leonardo<br>SFAI<br>800 Chestnut Street<br>San Francisco, CA 94133<br>U.S.A.<br>rmalina [@] ssl [dot] berkeley [dot] edu / rmalina [@] alum
<br>[dot] mit [dot] edu<br><a href="http://www.astrsp-mrs.fr/www/mal.html">http://www.astrsp-mrs.fr/www/mal.html</a></p>
<p>KEYWORDS</p>
<p>PLANETARY CONTEXT, DEVELOPMENT, NETWORKS</p>
<p>ABSTRACT</p>
<p>C.P.Snow and his colleagues framed a discussion 40 years ago on<br>the need to reconnect the arts and sciences and to help provide<br>the intellectual coherence to drive planet wide development<br>within the context of global inequities and unequal development.
</p>
<p>However, as the planet has become interconnected, both by the<br>means of transportation and communication, an interesting<br>tension between "holistic" approaches to reconnecting art and<br>science versus "useful differentiation" is appearing as new
<br>planetary cultures emerge. I define the "five cultures" as the<br>"art, design and entertainment culture", "the science and<br>government culture", "the engineering and corporate R and D
<br>culture", "distributed planet wide world views and value<br>systems", and "new regionalisms and the importance of locality<br>and personal situation". </p>
<p>Individuals working within planetary context become used to<br>working in multiple personal situations where projects connect<br>in different ways with the five cultures. Rather than insisting<br>on reunification of dualities, as has been prevalent in western
<br>art-science discourse, I wish to emphasize a network model of<br>entry points into problem solving. I will discuss how as an<br>astrophysicist working also within a number of distributed<br>planetary art communities this tension between "holism" and
<br>"useful differentiation" can be articulated.</p>
<p>BIOGRAPHY</p>
<p><br>Roger Malina is an astrophysicist at the Laboratoire<br>d'Astrophysique de Marseille CNRS in France and Executive Editor<br>of the Leonardo publications circulated by MIT Press. As a<br>visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Space Science Laboratory, he
<br>is currently a co-investigator for the Supernova Acceleration<br>Probe Consortium that seeks to build a new space observatory to<br>help understand the nature of dark energy and dark matter in the<br>universe. Collaborating amongst the science team for the Galaxy
<br>Evolution Explorer, Malina employs his expertise to help map the<br>sky in the far ultra void to understand the evolution of<br>galaxies.</p>
<p>Malina also serves as Chairman of the Board of Leonardo, The<br>International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, and<br>President of the Observatoire Leonardo des Arts et<br>Technosciences in Paris. He is Co-chair of the International
<br>Advisory Board of the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts, a<br>member of the International Academy of Astronautics, and is<br>currently an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium. He is a member<br>of the International Academy of Astronautics and co-chair of
<br>their Committee on Space Activities and Society. Since 1982 he<br>has served as Executive Editor of the journal Leonardo. He<br>writes on the relationship between the arts, sciences and<br>technology.</p>
<p>_____________________________<br><br>IMAGINATION AS A SPACE OF LIFE AND OF RESISTANCE TO MERCANTILE<br>LOGIC </p>
<p>by Mohammed Taleb<br>Philosopher<br>Director Interdisciplinary Arab University (Paris)<br>France</p>
<p>KEYWORDS </p>
<p>neoliberal globalization, cultural standardization</p>
<p>ABSTRACT</p>
<p>The explanation of the philosophical vision introduced by<br>neoliberal globalization is a necessary task, as the latter<br>cannot be reduced to an economic process. The neo-liberalisation<br>of the economic sphere (deregulation, financing) only acquires
<br>its true meaning when it is considered in a wider spectre that<br>some researchers call mercantile objectivation. </p>
<p>This makes us return to the essence, to the very heart of the<br>"capitalist economy" (Immanuel Wallerstein). Objectivation<br>defines the transformation into inert objects of all that exists<br>in the universe, separate and distinguishable: Women, men,
<br>nations and nature. What is happening in present day<br>globalization (which has its roots in colonial expansion in<br>Latin-Indian, America, Africa, Asia and in the Arab world) is<br>the intensification of this nihilistic and mortiferous process.
</p>
<p>Together with economic neoliberation, "Violence of the<br>Imagination" (to take the title of the book of the ex-Guinea<br>Minister of Culture, Animata Traoré as an example) shows the<br>other side of globalization. Cultural biodiversity, linguistic
<br>pluralism, imagination, know-how, and the multiplicity of<br>spiritual horizons, represent obstacles for mercantile<br>objectivation. </p>
<p>This violation, which makes uniform the cultural identities and<br>standardizes historic personages, is seen as a real attack<br>against the anthropological foundation from which the human<br>adventure is initiated in history. We shall never tire of
<br>saying to what extent the human figure that triumphs with<br>globalization is the "unidimensional man" (Herbert Marcuse).<br>This man is disfigured, mutilated and restricted because he is<br>transformed in object. Said another way, it is proclaimed the
<br>triumph of the "homo economicus" (Louis Dumont).</p>
<p>The General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (which is a<br>treaty of the World Trade Organization (WTO) that entered into<br>effect in 1995) is one of the judicial-political instruments of<br>this mercantile objectivation-westernization-globalization. Its
<br>reason for being is to make a contribution to the progressive<br>global disappearance of Culture and Nature from the public<br>arena. </p>
<p>Agnès Bertrand and Laurence Kalafatidès, in "WTO, the Invisible<br>Power", have demonstrated that the WTO and GATT aimed at the<br>privatization of the entrails of the earth. There is, therefore,<br>danger in delay. However, as the words of Holderlin, the
<br>romanticist, say, "Where there is danger there is also<br>salvation".</p>
<p>_____________________________</p>
<p>MARKS AND IMAGES OF REALITY IN MEDIA REASONING </p>
<p>by Hashim Cabrera<br>Painter and writer, Spain <br>Fuen Real Alto<br>Camino de Alisné s/n<br>Almodóvar del Río 14720 <br>Córdoba, Spain<br>hashim [@] webislam [dot] com <br><a href="http://www.webislam.com">http://www.webislam.com
</a></p>
<p>KEYWORDS</p>
<p>imaginary world, tawhid, tracks</p>
<p>ABSTRACT</p>
<p>Art in the media is not a separate art from life nor unaware of<br>science or spirituality. It is more a reasoning that allows the<br>interplay and the meeting and at the same time tends to break<br>the myth, by exhaustion, of the sacred nature of texts and
<br>images. </p>
<p>The procedures and artistic disciplines find an apt field for<br>their spreading and global reproduction. But the mediation<br>becomes in many cases so powerful that the contents turn into a<br>subsidiary and reference material, inside inexhaustible lots of
<br>possibilities. The nature laws and the rules of art join and<br>share the same support.</p>
<p>The recurrence of images underlie between the dream of video<br>and the presence of digital pictures, the building of an endless<br>allegory of history and cultures, and that digital environment<br>is lived as an experience of shapeless melancholy, according to
<br>what Professor Arnheim said in the 70s of the last century.</p>
<p>From the live experience of reality we walk to a relative and<br>consensual reality, that is to say, virtual. We face the<br>dissolution of the subject, the fiction of the I, in a world of<br>images but poor of signs, in a crossroad, like carrier pigeons
<br>that stopped in the air for a while to remember their destiny.</p>
<p>Contrary to what happens when we contemplate the landscape of<br>nature, when we lean out to the digital one we can get away from<br>the effort of retaining it in our memory, because we know that<br>it can be instantaneous and unlimitedly played. The digital
<br>image is kept, protected from oblivion and spoiling, in that<br>same cavern where Plato placed the ideas, in the image world<br>(alam al mithal) where Ibn Arabi discovered his independent and<br>autonomous kind, like a pure spiritual being.
</p>
<p>The mass media change vertiginously and they bind us to a<br>constant learning of new languages. The field where<br>communication happens now is the net, an open structure, which<br>connects individual nodes, as well as others where group tasks
<br>gather.</p>
<p>The key of this new way of knowledge and expression is not so<br>much instrumental as something related to identity. The<br>homogeneity of the net and the autonomy of nodes are placating<br>the appearance of a new form of spontaneous organization that
<br>collides strongly with the traditional, hierarchic and<br>centralized power structures. </p>
<p>We go along from close identities to an open and global<br>identity, from the fragmentary exclusion to the unifying<br>inclusion, from analysis to the integrative experience of the<br>tawhid.</p>
<p>BIOGRAPHY</p>
<p>Hashim Cabrera was born in 1954. He opted to multidiscipline<br>from 1973, and has since dabbled in analysis of forms in the<br>Superior Technical School of Architecture of Seville, philosophy<br>in the Faculty of Letters of Cordoba, Spanish literature in the
<br>Complutense University of Madrid and as a plastic artist and<br>writer.</p>
<p>He has also produced works of investigation and artistic pieces<br>around nature/culture, tradition/modernity, thought/vanguard in<br>collaboration with the University of Cordoba, group of<br>investigation TIEDPAAN. </p>
<p>Hashim is also the publisher and co-founder of the magazine of<br>information and analysis *Verde Islam* and of the web site<br><a href="http://www.webislam.com">www.webislam.com</a></p>
<p>Other projects include the investigation on systems of forms<br>and visual thought with the Museum of contemporary art of<br>Shimewaru, Kyusyu, Japan. He is also a member of the Ras al<br>Hanut Project of Mediterranean intercultural development group,
<br>Euromed. </p>
<p>_____________________________</p>
<p>BURDENS (AND GIFTS) OF CINEMA ON EXPERIMENTAL VIDEO - THE IDEA<br>OF EXPERIMENTATION AND RESISTANCE IN CAIRO </p>
<p>by Samirah Al-Kasim<br>Assistant Professor of Film<br>Department of Performing & Visual Arts <br>American University in Cairo, Egypt<br>113 Kasr el Aini Street<br>P.O. Box 2511<br>Cairo, Egypt 11511<br>salkasim [@] aucegypt [dot] edu
</p>
<p>KEYWORDS </p>
<p>experimental video, discursive formations, in Cairo</p>
<p>ABSTRACT</p>
<p>There are a series of questions surrounding the possibilities<br>and problems of doing experimental video work in Egypt, most of<br>the latter of which are socio-economically and culturally<br>determined. </p>
<p>In this paper I will contextualize the current situation of<br>experimental video-makers in Egypt, for whom there is very<br>little funding and state-sponsorship, and where there is a<br>serious economic recession that impacts the production of art. I
<br>will refer to texts on the post-colonial subject in cinema by<br>Robert Stam and Ellah Shohat; different notions of "the global"<br>and culture by Arjun Appadurai; and the "dehumanization of art"<br>
by Ortega Y Gasset, among other sources, in describing the<br>context of this techno-cultural scene within the larger context<br>of the aims of this colloquium.</p>
<p>I speculate that the reason why there is experimentation<br>happening at all in video, in Egypt, which for simplicity's sake<br>we can consider to be Cairo, while there is very little<br>discussion about aesthetics and practices within the medium, is
<br>on the simplest level due to Cairo's timeless cultural<br>diversity. But there is another reason born of the positive and<br>negative effects of globalization: The proliferation of counter-<br>images from the new Arab satellite channels thrown into the
<br>generally complex mix of poorly-managed development programs and<br>government corruption, with their impact on every strata of<br>social life. </p>
<p>Out of all this springs the artist, who, without my wishing to<br>attribute too great a supernatural power to him/her, is able to<br>more easily confront and possibly transcend borders and lines of<br>law (than the average citizen) and who often belongs to the
<br>middle classes and above. Of further impact is the general<br>milieu of the cinema "crisis" with its effects on independent<br>cinema and video-makers; and the seemingly imminent rupture of<br>the "law of order" if the economic situation worsens and if the
<br>political "balance" shifts from the hegemony of the corrupt<br>national Democratic Party to an Islamic Brotherhood rulership.</p>
<p>But transparent rigidity eventually breeds its own demise -<br>like other moments and experiences where rigid<br>social/cultural/religious and political systems have bred<br>generations of dissident voices (and eyes). Where does the role
<br>of spirit come into this? Artists are using electronic means to<br>engage in their relationships to the city and notions of<br>identity and authority, both of which in this particular<br>situation are fragmented and reconsolidated.
</p>
<p>I speculate that there is spirit enough in these connections,<br>practices and works, to affirm the role of the spirit in<br>artistic production, especially in these times of impending,<br>though perhaps slow-moving, change.
</p>
<p>BIOGRAPHY</p>
<p>Samirah Alkassim is a professor of film studies teaching at the<br>American University in Cairo in the Department of Performing &<br>Visual Arts. She has written about Egyptian cinema (Schirmer<br>Encyclopedia of Film, Thomson & Gale), and Egyptian video art
<br>(*Cracking the Monolith: Film and Video Art in Cairo*, New<br>Cinemas Journal of Contemporary Cinema, UK: Intellect); and<br>recently produced a 35-minute experimental documentary *from<br>here to there* (which takes a boy's imaginary space shuttle as
<br>an allegory for the idea of technology in Cairo). She is<br>currently making a documentary about Palestinian identity in<br>Jordan.<br><br>_____________________________<br><br>NETWORK PROJECTS IN BRAZIL. GENTE (ONLINE) QUE FAZ
</p>
<p>by Karla Schuch-Brunet<br>Photographer, Brazil <br>and Ph.D candidate <br>University Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain), Brazil<br>email [@] karlabrunet [dot] com<br><a href="http://www.karlabrunet.com/cv_english.htm">http://www.karlabrunet.com/cv_english.htm
</a></p>
<p>KEYWORDS </p>
<p>network projects, social issues</p>
<p>ABSTRACT</p>
<p>Faced many times with a lack of knowledge, by foreigners and<br>even Brazilians, about the projects involving technology and<br>social issues in Brazil, I felt the necessity of writing a paper<br>on network projects in the country. It seems that information
<br>from the North hemisphere reaches the South but it does not<br>happen often the other way around. So, the intention here is to<br>show abroad some projects done in Brazil.</p>
<p>The title, *Gente (online) que faz*, comes from short<br>documentary films showed on TV in Brazil called *Gente que faz*<br>(people that do). Every program presented someone, who, on their<br>own initiative, started any sort of project, had success and
<br>helped others generate jobs or community work. </p>
<p>The phrase "Gente que faz" became an idiomatic expression that<br>got popular with the general public. It was accepted and used by<br>everybody to describe someone doing something better. The<br>expression was used many times as an opposition to people that
<br>say. In Brazil, a lot of people say too much (especially those<br>in politics) and do little. "Gente que faz" were people who said<br>little and did much. They were the anonymous heroes of the<br>neighborhoods and villages.
</p>
<p>Here "Gente (online) que faz" are projects on the net by people<br>from different backgrounds; they are getting together to<br>generate different work. They are trying to use the net<br>positively. It is what Jim Walch in *In the Net. An Internet
<br>Guide to Activists* would term 'better use' of technology. Or<br>what Michael Heim in *The Cyberspace Dialectic* would call<br>virtual realism, a middle path between naïve realism and network<br>idealism. </p>
<p>There is a selection of some social and political network<br>projects. It has taken in consideration works that involve<br>collaboration, cooperation and participation above all. I<br>searched how people get together to construct something in the
<br>net. How they come up with simple ideas to solve everyday<br>problems. </p>
<p>The projects are simple, they don't have the intention of<br>'changing the world', they are sometimes rethinking the way we<br>see and use media. Some of these works can be thought as<br>examples of Tactical Media. They are using the media in a
<br>critical and oppositional way. "Recicle 1 Político" can be an<br>example of that, as many others. </p>
<p>"Gente (online) que faz" is about networking, about people<br>working together and contributing to produce something. It is<br>telepresence; it is getting assistance and collaboration of<br>people from other places. It is critical, it is opposition and
<br>it is also about 'making'. These are the ideas that "Re-combo",<br>"Rede viva favela", "LigaNóis", "VivaSP", "Autolabs" among<br>others, are working on.</p>
<p>See a compilation of the projects in <a href="htp://www.networkbr.tk">htp://www.networkbr.tk</a></p>
<p>Rede viva favela<br><a href="http://www.redevivafavela.com.br/">http://www.redevivafavela.com.br/</a></p>
<p>VivaSP<br><a href="http://www.vivasp.com/conteudo.asp?sid=3">http://www.vivasp.com/conteudo.asp?sid=3</a></p>
<p>Re:combo<br><a href="http://www.recombo.art.br/">http://www.recombo.art.br/</a></p>
<p>Rizoma<br><a href="http://www.rizoma.net/hp6.htm">http://www.rizoma.net/hp6.htm</a></p>
<p>Metáfora<br><a href="http://www.projetometafora.org/">http://www.projetometafora.org/</a></p>
<p>LigaNóis<br><a href="http://www.liganois.com.br/">http://www.liganois.com.br/</a></p>
<p>Autolabs<br><a href="http://www.midiatatica.org/autolabs.htm">http://www.midiatatica.org/autolabs.htm</a></p>
<p>CHD - Coletivo de Histórias Digitais<br><a href="http://chd.memelab.org/">http://chd.memelab.org/</a></p>
<p>Ajuda Brasil<br><a href="http://www.ajudabrasil.com.br/">http://www.ajudabrasil.com.br/</a></p>
<p>CMI- Centro de Mídia Independente<br><a href="http://www.brasil.indymedia.org/">http://www.brasil.indymedia.org/</a></p>
<p>BIOGRAPHY</p>
<p>Karla Schuch Brunet was born in Brazil in 1972. She has a<br>degree in Social Communication and another in Language. After<br>university, she got a grant to take her MFA (Master in Fine<br>Arts) in San Francisco, U.S.A
., where she studied and worked in<br>digital imaging for three years. </p>
<p>Back in Brazil she participated in diverse projects involving<br>photography and the Internet. She also worked for a few years<br>doing commercial work on the web. Parallel to that, she<br>exhibited works such as "Aspire, Strive, Attain", "Corpo
<br>Estranho", "Pessoas e Comércio no Centro de São Paulo",<br>"Errante", in San Francisco, São Paulo and Santa Maria. </p>
<p>When in São Paulo she taught multimedia students in<br>Universidade Anhembi Morumbi and ESPM (Escola Superior de<br>Propaganda e Marketing). Now, with another scholarship from the<br>Brazilian government, she lives in Spain where she is writing
<br>her thesis on network projects.</p>
<p>_____________________________</p>
<p>ME DEA EX: INTERTWINING VIRTUAL AND REAL WORLD. TO FORM<br>IMMERSIVE/INTERACTIVE THEATRE </p>
<p>by Neora<br>Cyberculture explorer and VR worlds creator<br>16 Usishkin St<br>Tel-Aviv 62591<br>Israel<br>neoradotcom [@] gmail [dot] com<br><a href="http://www.neora.com">http://www.neora.com</a></p>
<p>KEYWORDS</p>
<p>interactive 3D, theatre, virtual reality</p>
<p>ABSTRACT</p>
<p>The intertwining of science, technology and art results in the<br>experience of the spirit (webster: the intelligent, immaterial<br>and immortal part of man). Thus, inspiration and spirituality,<br>in my approach, define the state of mind, the spirit, achieved
<br>by interlacing the virtual and real worlds, to form some new<br>experience of knowledge and understanding. Such experience may<br>be complex/confusing; hence the way to reach clarity depends on<br>our willingness to abandon or redesign our traditional solid
<br>grounds.</p>
<p>MEDEAEX is an adaptation of the classic Myth of Medea,<br>projected cross-culture wise on:<br>- The Middle-East Reality (Medea = Palestinian, Jason = Israeli<br>officer, Chorus = audience).<br>- The CyberSpace Virtual Reality (Medea is a hacker trying to
<br>debug and redesign the script).</p>
<p>The MEDEAEX universe is a 3D environment that resides on the<br>Internet and is projected during the performance in 360 degrees<br>around the audience. It is a proactive environment, whereas<br>Medea is a live actress (Khaula ElHadj-Dibsi) all the other
<br>characters are pre-programmed bot avatars, and the audience<br>(e.g. the global village) can interact and influence the flow<br>and ambience of the show, using SMS from their cellular phones.</p>
<p>The script is fully hyper-textual, based on the original texts<br>by Euripides, Heiner Muller and Seneca. It is written and<br>performed in English, Hebrew and Arabic, and so is the<br>background music cross-cultural and cross-lingual. The
<br>exposition to each scene is the actual Middle East News (Medea -<br>betrayed, evicted, exiled, and after all sacrifices her children<br>by sending them as suicide bombers to Jerusalem). The chorus<br>lines are performed with text-to-speech mechanism, allowing
<br>online and real time audience to add to their digital singing<br>data bank.</p>
<p>The MEDEAEX project has been performed in Schiller Festival<br>Germany, and Acco Festival in Israel in 2003. The technology and<br>mechanisms are now tested as environment for VR studies programs<br>and interactive storytelling projects, in Shenkar College and
<br>other installations. It is fully documented (including technical<br>notes, images, critics, full script, video) in<br><a href="http://www.medeaex.org">http://www.medeaex.org</a>.</p>
<p>BIOGRAPHY</p>
<p>Neora is the designer and producer of several advanced<br>interfaces for museum sites, academic and commercial web sites.<br>She is the creator of *Ayuni* - telepresence in Nablus, *NYSE*-<br>VR 3D interactive simulation of the trading floor, and of
<br>*Medea_ex* (<a href="http://www.medeaex.org">http://www.medeaex.org</a>) - immersive/interactive<br>theatre play, which was performed in the Schiller Festival in<br>Manheim, Germany and Acco Theatre Festival 2003, Israel. Since
<br>then, she's been experimenting with online worlds for remote<br>learning, and pro-active projected "cave-like installations" for<br>large audiences. Neora teaches cyberculture in Tel-aviv<br>University, and VR in Shenkar College of Engineering & Design.
</p>
<p>Neora is involved with the open source movement in Israel, and<br>is the organizer of the first two hackers conferences in Israel<br>(<a href="http://www.y2hack4.org">http://www.y2hack4.org</a>). In April 2000, Neora was chosen as one
<br>of the 10 most influential people on the Israeli Internet<br>(published in Yediot Aharonot newspaper. The other nine figures<br>were tie/suited distinguished men). She got this title for the<br>insights in her novel, web works, several publications and
<br>teachings - all of which were way ahead of her time.</p>
<p>In the last millenium, Neora was a UNIX programmer and PC<br>support team leader in Dec Ltd and CDC Ltd for several years,<br>and co-founder/co-developer in SGH, a startup in 1994, for multi-<br>user games. She's the author of *Digital Affair*(Hakibutz
<br>Hameuchad Publishing, 1993), journalist, editor and columnist in<br>a few professional magazines and newspapers over the years.<br><br>_____________________________<br><br>THE INTERPRESENCE PROJECT </p>
<p>by Arthur Matuck<br>Professor Ph.D<br>MFA School of Communications and Arts <br>University of São Paulo (USP) <br>São Paulo, SP, CEP 05508-900<br>Brazil<br>arturmatuck [@] terra [dot] com [dot] br</p>
<p>KEYWORDS </p>
<p>telepresence, experience, intercommunication</p>
<p>ABSTRACT </p>
<p>RESEARCH PROJECT FOR TELEACTIVE HUMAN LANGUAGE</p>
<p>Interpresence exercises the language of mediatecture to propose<br>planetary coalescence through cyberspace. It favours worldwide<br>integration allowing for interactive television and the<br>experience of telebrations between distant cities.
</p>
<p>Interpresence is defined as mutually sensed human telepresence.<br>As a project Interpresence merges telecommunication,<br>architecture, design, media arts, performance, television, and<br>programming, with implications for cultural studies,
<br>anthropology, contemporary theory, epistemology and<br>psychoanalysis.</p>
<p>Its curatorial concept purports the telepresential encounter<br>providing for the valorization of the Other through mutual<br>knowledge and co-authored aesthetic propositions.</p>
<p>The envisioned systems would enable local participants to<br>interact with remote audiences, they would see and be seen,<br>listen and be listened, experiencing interpresence.</p>
<p>THE INTERPRESENCE VISION</p>
<p>Interpresence represents an alternative global television. It<br>introduces a political proposition, claiming a right to<br>communicate through technologies that only have to be<br>reconfigured to provide for interpresential experiences.
</p>
<p>The long-term social design involves the gradual creation of a<br>worldwide network of community or university-operated<br>telesystems. Design and implementation will be carried out<br>through web-based property-free interchange triggering
<br>continuous co-evolution.</p>
<p>MEDIATECTURE FOR TELEACTIVITY</p>
<p>Mediatectural projects for terminals should permit diverse<br>modes of long distance interaction. They were conceived for<br>bilateral and multilateral intercommunication. Teleperformance<br>terminals consist of interpresential units integrating
<br>distributed screens with video cameras.</p>
<p>A vertical system allows for conversational interactions, while<br>a horizontal one enables table mode interactions. Multiple-<br>connection terminals provide interaction with many remote<br>locations. Specially conceived audience spaces enable remote
<br>audioviewing of interactions occuring at teleperformance spaces.</p>
<p>MEDIA DESIGN FOR CO-EVOLUTIONARY TELEACTIVITY</p>
<p>An intercreative process will be gradually extended through net-<br>collaboration. Concepts, designs, projects, propositions will be<br>available as released information, as common property, providing<br>for a worldwide collective planning, a linux-like co-
<br>evolutionary development of the project design.</p>
<p>A permanent webpresence would enable long-term quality<br>interaction between participating artists and institutions.<br>Propositions for projects, programs, events and performances<br>will trigger long-distance interconnections.
</p>
<p>Intervisions, teleactions and videologues would result from<br>community and artistic initiatives supported by institutional<br>agreements. Subsequent coordinated planning and networking would<br>entail a diversity of increasingly creative long-distance human
<br>encounters.</p>
<p>Those connections will form an invisible web of creative<br>collaboration, and mutual responsibility providing the human<br>structure needed for the unfolding of quality projects and<br>events. The network should entail the co-creation of scripts,
<br>technology evaluation, co-planning and finally the actualization<br>of teleactivities. </p>
<p>RESEARCH FOR INTERCOMMUNICATION</p>
<p>Research for interpresence will be centered upon alternative<br>intercommunication. Proposals for computer-supported systems<br>enabling understanding between speakers of different languages<br>will be encouraged.</p>
<p>Software and media design can also be articulated to program<br>intertranslations between different sign systems allowing, for<br>instance, tactile stimuli to be remotely sensed as heat<br>formations varying in form and intensity.
</p>
<p>Research can also take a different direction. Specially<br>designed software could morph human traces indicating the<br>possibility of artificiality, not only of realism, in the<br>experience of telepresence.</p>
<p>BIOGRAPHY<br>Artur Matuck has been an assistant professor at the School of<br>Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo since<br>1984. In São Paulo, Brazil, Europe and North America, he has<br>worked as teacher, researcher, writer, visual artist, video
<br>producer, performer and more recently as a designer of teleart<br>events and interactive sites. Since 1977, Mr. Matuck has been<br>delivering conferences and workshops on New Media Arts,<br>Interactive Television, Telecommunication Arts, Performance
<br>project Art, Computer-Generated Writing, and Intellectual<br>Property issues. In 1990, he was awarded a prize in the video-<br>art category from the São Paulo Art Critics Association. At the<br>same year, he completed a comprehensive study on the history of
<br>video art and interactive television which resulted in a<br>doctoral thesis: "The Dialogical Potential of Television".<br>During 1991, as research fellow at Carnegie Mellon University,<br>Pittsburgh, he produced Reflux, a worldwide Telecommunication
<br>Arts, one of the very first artistic experiments to call for<br>collaborative networking activities. In 1995, as post graduate<br>fellow at the University of Florida, he starts experimenting<br>with text-reprocessing programming. Landscript, a web-based tool
<br>for person-computer co-authored textual creation was selected to<br>participate in the 25th edition of the Biennial International of<br>São Paulo, in 2002, in the category of net-art. Artur Matuck is<br>the creator of Semion - an international symbol for released
<br>information, a theoretical and conceptual contribution to the on-<br>going debates on intellectual property rights and information<br>dissemination in the electronic age. His most recent endeavours<br>involves planning videocommunication and web-based multicultural
<br>exchanges between artists, researchers and individuals from<br>different countries and cultures.</p>
<p>_____________________________<br><br>GATES - BEYOND NET-ART: REAL THINGS ACROSS CYBERSPACE</p>
<p>by Caterina Davinio<br>Media Artist, Italy<br>Via Sassi 10<br>23900 LECCO (LC)<br>Italy<br>davinio [@] tin [dot] it<br><a href="http://www.xoomer.virgilio.it/cprezi/caterinadav.html">http://www.xoomer.virgilio.it/cprezi/caterinadav.html
</a><br>KEYWORDS</p>
<p>Communic/Action, network, poetry</p>
<p>ABSTRACT</p>
<p>I have been working with new media in Italy since the early<br>90s, focusing on relationship among word, writing, and new<br>media. </p>
<p>Since 1998 my work appeared in the Internet with collaborative<br>projects: *Karenina.it*, still in course, *Parallel Action -<br>Bunker*, online poetry event done for the 49th Biennale di<br>Venezia, *Paint from Nature*, *Global Poetry*, both created in
<br>2002, and the last project, *GATES Beyond Net-Art*, in 2003,<br>dedicated to Pierre Restany.</p>
<p>In all these projects there is an increasing relationship<br>between one or more *real* events, and a virtual event online<br>made of e-communication. The reality coefficient has grown<br>progressively in these collaborative works, in polemic against
<br>net art as use of software for creating spectacular web pages<br>and net-objects.</p>
<p>In my works net-art is network, performance in network of<br>connected artists, poets, critics, theoreticians. *Gates*, as<br>*Global Poetry* in 2002, is a planetary performance that<br>happened contemporaneously in numerous places of the world, in
<br>collaboration with experimental artists, who were in the spirit<br>of this totally new experimental adventure, something that was<br>never realized before. These artists created a node of the<br>project in their countries, using also exchange and circulation
<br>of materials among the nodes; the circulated materials were<br>poems, digital art, photos and video of real events, but also<br>discourses, theories, critical interventions. Every node was a<br>node of the performance, but also a performance and a meeting in
<br>itself: this means that to everybody in this collaborative<br>action, we asked to involve other persons.</p>
<p>I have been going in this direction of art as communic-action<br>and relationship since my first net project: *<a href="http://Karenina.it">Karenina.it</a> -<br>Poetry in Phatic Function* - the first Italian website dedicated
<br>to experimental poetry - described with a definition by<br>Jakobson, that calls phatic the use of the language that has the<br>finality to maintain open and operative the communication<br>channel between the interlocutors. The idea was to open every
<br>limit between word and visual art, critic, theories of art, and<br>art, by creating a space of meeting among artists. This space<br>was at the beginning virtual, as it was at that time still new<br>to consider a web page a "space" to explore, where to be present
<br>and act. By becoming, during the 90s, this conception normal,<br>acquired, net-art was progressively in the consideration of many<br>artists a run to the up to date software, for creating<br>spectacular websites and pages. For this reason it was important
<br>to clarify the original sense of net art as art in network, with<br>its central aspects of communic-action. *Karenina.it* uses ready<br>made found in the world wide web and some techniques of visual<br>poetry, and Futurism, but also focuses on the matter of an art
<br>piece in the web, that is deeply linguistic, because digital or<br>digitalized, and because made of data transfer. To these aspects<br>of digital art as linguistic art, net-art adds the one of<br>communication and network, typical of the Internet. This is the
<br>idea on which projects such as *Global Poetry* and *GATES* are<br>based on. </p>
<p>The Italian node of GATES was at D'Ars Gallery on 18 December<br>2003. Other nodes were in Chile, Spain, Brazil, United States,<br>United Kingdom, Germany, Lebanon, Turkey, Morocco, Greece,<br>Venezuela, and in other countries. Exploring the concept of
<br>remote presence and action, and continuous passage form real to<br>virtual and vice versa, using the surface between real and<br>virtual as sensible semiotic area, in the context of relational<br>art, e-Fluxus, Situationism. The call was directed to
<br>experimental artists and poets, critics, *e-post-Fluxus-<br>casseurs, post-post duchampists*</p>
<p>BIOGRAPHY </p>
<p>Caterina Davinio, Italian techno-artist and writer, experiments<br>on non-conventional solutions in computer art, net-art, video,<br>digital visual poetry, Internet-performance, video-performance,<br>and also involves herself in computer printings exhibitions,
<br>paintings, and artist's books, using writing and digital<br>techniques. </p>
<p>Among the pioneers of Italian digital art, she is experienced<br>in curatorial and consultant activity in international<br>festivals. Her works have been presented in more than 80<br>exhibitions worldwide; we recall the participation in the Venice
<br>Biennial in 1997, 1999, 2001, in the context of new media art<br>and experimental poetry festivals, and in net and Fluxus events<br>of the 50th Venice Biennial. </p>
<p>Author of the essay *Techno-Poetry and Virtual Realities*<br>(Mantoa, IT, 2002), first Italian book on this topic, and of the<br>novel *Color Color* (Pasian di Prato, UD, IT, 1998), she has<br>published articles, poems, and digital works in international
<br>magazines and journals of the avant-garde. </p>
<p>Since 1998 her work has appeared on the Internet with<br>collaborative net-art/poetry projects and events, among them<br>"<a href="http://Karenina.it">Karenina.it</a>", a point of reference for the avant-garde, *Global
<br>Poetry* (UNESCO, 2002), and *GATES*(2003).</p>
<p>For a more detailed biobibliography:<br><a href="http://space.tin.it/arte/cprezi/caterinadav.html">http://space.tin.it/arte/cprezi/caterinadav.html</a></p>
<p>_____________________________</p>
<p>MEDITERRANEAN MAPS</p>
<p>by Paolo Atzori<br>Communication architect and video-stage designer </p>
<p>and</p>
<p>Nicole Leghissa<br>Filmmaker and director, Italy<br>atzorman [@] tiscali [dot] it</p>
<p>KEYWORDS </p>
<p>contemporary Mediterranean Rim, mapping, networks</p>
<p>ABSTRACT</p>
<p>In this particular historical moment it is fundamental to<br>overcome stereotypes and misunderstandings that characterize the<br>mutual relationship between the Islamic and Western worlds,<br>mainly breaking the reciprocal cultural isolation.
</p>
<p>A consistent way to approach the problem is to create<br>communication and shared knowledge channels between these<br>cultural realities, taking a clear position against the<br>ideological conflict between West and Islam, North and South of
<br>the world, and reaffirming the values of mutual respect and<br>diversities' confrontation.</p>
<p>*Mediterranean Maps* consists of a multicultural and<br>interdisciplinary grouping of scientific and cultural<br>institutions of the South and North of the Mediterranean, aimed<br>to research and give expression to a mutual knowledge space: A
<br>multicultural, hyper-textual and dynamic Atlas of the<br>contemporary Mediterranean rim that could be continuously<br>updated and freely consultable on line.</p>
<p>The group will include artists, scientists and cultural<br>operators, whose mission is to bridge the knowledge gap between<br>North and South of the Mediterranean area. </p>
<p>Each partner will propose a specific research/action plan<br>creating a sub-network in different locations and promote the<br>formation of multimedia teams of young professionals, located in<br>every major area covered by the action.
</p>
<p>During the development of the researches/actions, all<br>individuals and institutions belonging to the different sub-<br>networks will communicate online in a transversal way through<br>the "collaborative platform" specifically designed for this
<br>project to archive different kind of documents: Texts, notes,<br>graphics, pictures, interviews, short video reports, graphics,<br>maps, archive images, sounds, etc. </p>
<p>MAP-MAKING</p>
<p>Until a few years ago, cartography representation has been<br>exclusively static. The project *Mediterranean Maps* envisions a<br>cartographic model that could integrate dynamic processes and<br>automatic sampling by the application of information technology
<br>to the data patterns relative to geographical and cultural<br>representation.</p>
<p>The maps represent a contemporary view of the Mediterranean<br>area visualized by a digital interface that will enable access<br>and supply indications on possible knowledge courses on a<br>digital sea, navigable in linear and transversal ways.
</p>
<p>THE LABORATORY BOAT</p>
<p>A geographical route on the Mediterranean basin will be drawn<br>to represent the physical link among the different researchers<br>and participating countries. Significant ports will represent<br>the local attractors, where specific actions and special public
<br>events will take place at the landing of the boat.</p>
<p>The boat, equipped with advanced communication technologies,<br>will host a crew of multimedia and communication experts,<br>scientists and artists, writer and poets, and will originate the<br>map-making process of the Mediterranean Sea. The journey is an
<br>exploration, a re-discovery of this region.</p>
<p>The travel itself will be a source of data coming from<br>observations of the natural environment, concerning, for<br>example, biology, fluid dynamics, ecology, but also social<br>relationship on a mobile micro-environment. The boat will
<br>perform a transversal data collection, traveling along a course<br>unifying all participating Mediterranean ports. </p>
<p>This lab-boat, besides being a creative and research forge, is<br>a logistic support to install the public telematic stations (or<br>lighthouses) in the ports. These stations will become the<br>material places from where to launch the data on lines and where
<br>to freely join the net global information.</p>
<p>TELEMATIC LIGHTHOUSE</p>
<p>It is a public wireless interzone for global networking<br>communication implemented on a transportable architecture,<br>planned with environmentally conscious design that minimizes<br>sustenance or resource consumption. Its main purpose is to give
<br>shape to the process of communication characteristic of the<br>information age, where communication equals transportation of<br>the mind, establishing dedicated channels of the "MED MAP"<br>network. Its equipment and architecture will be used also for
<br>displaying the public event.<br><br>_____________________________</p>
<p>MAPPING A THESIS IN SYSTEMS THEORY IN NEW MEDIA ART</p>
<p>by Jane Cole Forrester Winne<br>Independent MLS Program<br>University of Maine, Orono, USA<br>Owen Smith Chair<br>Jane_Forrester [@] umit [dot] maine [dot] edu</p>
<p>ABSTRACT</p>
<p>My thesis is in Systems Theory, and this particular<br>presentation displayed through power point, one project in my<br>studies that utilized intuitive and cognitive thought to "map"<br>areas of study in my thesis as mixed media art. The visuals
<br>represent interdisciplinary areas of research covering time and<br>space of self directed inquiry as maps. </p>
<p>Artworks of my own creation, giving 'voice' to the "mapping<br>out" of my thesis, alone or incorporated with images that depict<br>"maps" represented systems of interest in varying degrees.<br>Accompanying this presentation was a book created for the
<br>project to hold text and scans of the full compliment of art<br>works. </p>
<p>The presentation was also a collaborative, incorporating work<br>from two undergraduate students, one concerned with musical<br>sound and one performing spoken word of her own writing. I am<br>concerned with exploring the form of systems to discover
<br>structure, in part, that may reveal patterns that seem to<br>support the life force. I am looking for what are called in some<br>disciplines 'emergent properties', in others, 'evolutionary'<br>traits, and still others protective or conserving strategies in
<br>cultures. </p>
<p>I have a wide topical range, including the Ayurvedic and Iching<br>systems, post modern artists/philosophers (fluxus, and Henri<br>Bergson) Ancient cultures spanning from the British Isles to<br>northern China, India to the Mediterranean. Ecological systems
<br>theory, the Internet, its history, directions, and alternative<br>economies.</p>
<p>_____________________________<br><br>A UNIVERSAL MOTHER TONGUE</p>
<p>by Celestino Soddu and Enrica Colabella<br>Director of Generative Design Lab Chair of annual international<br>Generative Art Conference Coordinator of EC program "Euro-China<br>Exchange: Technology and Culture of Generative Design Approach"
<br>DiAP, Politecnico di Milano University, Italy<br>DIAP, Politecnico di Milano University<br>Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32<br>20133 Milano<br>Italy<br>celestino [dot] soddu [@] polimi [dot] it<br><a href="http://www.celestinosoddu.com">
http://www.celestinosoddu.com</a><br><a href="http://www.generativeart.com">http://www.generativeart.com</a><br><a href="http://www.generativedesign.com">http://www.generativedesign.com</a></p>
<p>KEYWORDS</p>
<p>generative art, codes of harmony, universal language</p>
<p>ABSTRACT</p>
<p>IDENTITY RISES FROM A SOUNDLESS SITE, BECAUSE BIRDS HAVE NO TEARS</p>
<p>A universal language talks as a mother tongue.</p>
<p>Generative Design is the idea realized as a genetic Code of<br>artificial events. </p>
<p>This generative project is a concept-software that works<br>producing three-dimensional unique and unrepeatable scenarios as<br>infinite expressions of an idea that rises from a subjective<br>visionary world. </p>
<p>This approach opens a new era in design: The challenge of a new<br>Natural science of Artificial ware like mirror of human<br>uniqueness. Once more man imitates Nature, as in the act of<br>making Art. This is like a universal language. As DNA in Nature
<br>the genetic code of artificial ware identifies a species of<br>objects. So we can design the idea able of generating infinite<br>variations.</p>
<p>ARS SINE SCIENTIA NIHIL EST</p>
<p>This was an enthusiastically creative operation discovering the<br>cultural approach of Renaissance, able to combine Science and<br>Art. We define a process as a code of Harmony that identifies a<br>representation of our subjective vision of a possible world. The
<br>code of Harmony, like all codes, contains some rules that trace<br>certain forms of behaviors. Therefore it is not only a sequence,<br>a database of events, of forms, but a transforming patterns<br>definition: the performing from what exists into the complexity
<br>of visionary becoming. The design act changes from forming to<br>transforming, because each form is only one of possible parallel<br>results of the same idea.</p>
<p>RUN, LITTLE BOY, FIND THE RIVER IN YOUR MIND</p>
<p>This design challenge started up in 1987 with the realization<br>of Generative Projects of architecture, historical cities,<br>industrial design and visions of Art from Piranesi, Picasso and<br>Van Gogh.</p>
<p>Today these projects are upgraded as extremely complex and<br>directly operative as interfaces with intelligent productive<br>systems.</p>
<p>After 200 years of the industrial era of mass cloned objects,<br>the "unique" object becomes a new answer to the human needs to<br>live in a world where each artificial object can mirror the<br>uniqueness of every person. A mother tongue can generate a
<br>universal code. By working in advanced technological fields such<br>as non-linear dynamic systems, artificial life and artificial<br>intelligence, the Generative Design finds again the notions of a<br>new aesthetic and ethical pleasure of rediscovering the
<br>processes and characters of Nature in an epoch marked by<br>repeated attempts at the cloning of natural beings. </p>
<p>BIOGRAPHY</p>
<p>Celestino Soddu, 1945, registered architect, is tenure<br>Architectural Design professor and director of Generative Design<br>Lab at Politecnico di Milano University, Honorary professor at<br>Xi'an University and Shanghai University, Chair of Generative
<br>Art International Annual Conference. His architectural projects,<br>realized like AI/AL generative tools, can generate endless<br>different 3D models of architectures/environments characterized<br>by the same artificial DNA. His generative design projects are a
<br>useful tool to manage the new intelligent industrial production<br>of each-one-different objects by automatic reprogramming of<br>robots. He has presented his generative works in books,<br>articles, exhibitions and conferences all over the world.
</p>
<p>_____________________________<br><br>THE RELIGIOUS MODELS OF GLOBALISM </p>
<p>by Harry Rand<br>Senior Curator, Cultural History<br>National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution,<br>Washington DC, USA<br>AHB 4100, MRC 616 <br>Smithsonian Institution<br>PO Box 37012<br>Washington DC 20013-7012
<br>U.S.A.<br>RandH [@] nmah [dot] si [dot] edu<br>KEYWORDS <br>globalism, art-science, religion</p>
<p>ABSTRACT</p>
<p>The Church pioneered so many aspects of modern globalism that<br>we should heed the reactions of earlier peoples faced with<br>challenges to their values - challenges every bit as monumental<br>as confrontations with modern globalism. The Church first
<br>understood the potency of: brand name, trademark, distinctive<br>architecture and presentation imposed on indigenous cultures, a<br>franchisor's location analysis and local market demographics for<br>a franchise outlet (the diocesan system), a mixed formula of buy-
<br>in costs that balance local capital with distant management and<br>oversight, the value of uniforms and scripted exchanges with<br>clients, quality control from a centralized headquarters, and<br>profit-sharing; all of this is now associated with commercial
<br>globalization. The Church's aesthetic position aimed to link the<br>planet into a network of identical communities.</p>
<p>The cultural reaction to this system's rise is still producing<br>a dialogue across cultures about the multiple contexts of<br>commercial and religious globalization, which is a discussion of<br>value. </p>
<p>The Church's franchising did not first arise from commercial<br>globalization that overspread national boundaries to create<br>supranational loyalties. The idea of a planetary consciousness<br>and cultural homogenization did not arise from the urge toward a
<br>universal empire of assembled landmasses - Mongol, Roman,<br>British, etc., in which subject peoples were encouraged to<br>maximize productivity. The move toward the omni-pervasive (now<br>found in Islam as a kind of corporate globalism) derived from a
<br>Christian worldview that dared call itself, in its very infancy,<br>"catholic", universal. No Shinto, Jew, Jain, or pagan had ever<br>thought this way. Globalism is cultural not economic.</p>
<p>Before science could arise, one presupposition distinguished it<br>from the technologies found in every high civilization: that the<br>world was governed by a unified field of forces unrelated to the<br>caprices of multiple deities: theology.
</p>
<p>Theology is not universal, although technology is (beginning<br>with language as an amelioration of the environment); the<br>Church's unintentional gift of theology allowed science to<br>arise, to de-throne the Church.
</p>
<p>While theology was a precondition for science, the two have<br>long since ceased to engage in constructive debate as artists<br>and scientists strive to build the life-enhancing cultural<br>developments that link, becoming a planetary context. The
<br>franchising Church continues to diffuse a unified world without<br>warring gods, divine whimsy, or fate; this (inadvertently)<br>uniformitarian hypothesis is the predicate upon which modern<br>physics developed its radical cosmology that must reconcile the
<br>micro to the macroscopic.</p>
<p>The conjoining of "art, science, and spirituality" assumes they<br>are sundered. Contemporary science does not need to "reconnect"<br>to spirituality, as they were never disconnected, despite<br>appearances. The present challenge transcends organized religion
<br>to regain the generative emotions of awe, curiosity, respect,<br>and diligence that initiated and permeate modern egalitarian<br>society. The religious (distinguished from organized religion)<br>never abandoned science, and still promises a planet-wide
<br>ideology resembling classically optimistic and ambitious<br>modernism.</p>
<p>BIOGRAPHY</p>
<p>Trained as an art historian, Harry Rand has explored long-term<br>patterns of human behavior as evidenced in the ways that art,<br>science, folklore, and religion exchange ideas and shape each<br>other. His publications in this pursuit include threescore
<br>museum catalogues, over a dozen books (author or co-author) and<br>over fifty articles or published letters. </p>
<p>_____________________________</p>
<p>INTRODUCTION TO SESSION 2<br><br>In Session 2, the theme was Art/Science/Spirituality relations:<br>The heritage of the Arabian-Spanish world. We feature four<br>abstracts from this session, which looked at the following
<br>questions: How did these cultures consider these relationships?<br>Does the triad make sense in these cultures? How did they<br>integrate these relations?<br>_____________________________<br><br>THE UBIQUITOUS DOT IN COSMIC JUSTICE
</p>
<p>by Ahmad Mostafa<br>Artist, U.K.<br>Fe-Noon Ahmed Moustafa (UK) Ltd<br>5-9 Creekside<br>Deptford<br>London <br>SE8 4SA<br>fenoon [@] btinternet [dot] com<br><a href="http://www.fenoon.com">http://www.fenoon.com</a></p>
<p>KEYWORDS </p>
<p>geometry, Islam, spirituality</p>
<p>ABSTRACT</p>
<p>The motto adopted in 500 BC or thereabouts by the Pythagorean<br>brotherhood, which translates roughly as 'a diagram and a step<br>higher, not a diagram and a penny', tells us that the<br>Pythagoreans viewed geometrical diagrams as embodying truthful
<br>knowledge capable of sustaining man's spiritual nourishment and<br>showing him the way to rectitude. </p>
<p>By the same token the early Muslim scholars believed that<br>geometry is a divine language articulating the coercive laws,<br>which govern all aspects of existence, hence they were motivated<br>to translate most if not all the Pythagorean legacy into Arabic.
<br>It is this legacy, which inspired the Abbasid Wazir Ibn Muqla<br>(866-940 AD/ 272-328 AH) to devise the theory of proportional<br>script, an epoch-making system which made it possible for the<br>Arabic script to assume its rightful role as the prime means of
<br>expression in the visual arts of Islam. Yet there is no detailed<br>study of this topic existing in print so far, and scholarly<br>attempts at developing a full grasp of the principles involved<br>have for a long time remained inconclusive. I have been
<br>extremely fortunate in uncovering the true nature of Ibn Muqla's<br>theory after 14 years of research, which resulted in a doctoral<br>thesis entitled 'The Scientific Foundation of Arabic<br>Lettershapes'. </p>
<p>Since time is too short for an exhaustive and comprehensive<br>analysis of Ibn Muqla's theory my presentation will focus on the<br>square-shaped dot, the basic unit of measurement in Ibn Muqla's<br>system. It firstly requires the nib of the pen to be cut at an
<br>exact angle and conditions the correct manner of holding the<br>pen. Secondly, it determines the surface area and proportions of<br>the individual letter-shapes with respect to each other. Yet the<br>significance of this dot exceeds its role as a measuring device
<br>in both 2- and 3-dimensional space. At a conceptual level, the<br>relationship between dot and letter-shapes in Ibn Muqla's system<br>appears intended to mirror that between unity and multiplicity<br>in divine creation, an image taken up and fully explored in
<br>later Islamic mystical thought.</p>
<p>Indeed, the nature of the dot can be seen as instrumental in<br>explaining further the inner meaning of concepts such as<br>'Justice', 'Infinity', 'Harmony', and 'Oneness', which reside at<br>the confluence of the rational and the spiritual.
</p>
<p>It will thereby be shown that Ibn Muqla's achievement of<br>constructing the Arabic script in accordance with certain<br>geometrical rules makes an implicit statement about the<br>metaphysical nature and function of writing, which came to be of
<br>abiding significance for the entire artistic tradition of Islam.<br>It will thus become evident that Ibn Muqla's theory, once fully<br>understood, has the potential of clarifying the manner in which<br>the Arabic alphabet came to represent what may be identified as
<br>The Structural Morphology in the Artistry of Islam.</p>
<p>BIOGRAPHY</p>
<p>Ahmed Moustafa is an artist and scholar of international repute<br>and a leading authority on Arabic art and design. Born in<br>Alexandria, Egypt, in 1943, he was initially trained as an<br>artist in the neoclassical European tradition. Drawing his
<br>inspiration primarily from Renaissance masters, he subsequently<br>rediscovered his lslamic roots, and his work is now almost<br>exclusively devoted to abstract compositions inspired by texts<br>from the Holy Qur'an.</p>
<p>Ahmed Moustafa gained a BA in Fine Arts with Highest National<br>Distinction in 1966 from the University of Alexandria, where he<br>remained as a lecturer in painting and stage design in the<br>Faculty of Fine Arts until 1973.
</p>
<p>In 1974, he was awarded a scholarship to pursue advanced<br>studies in printmaking at the Central School of Art and Design<br>in London, where he obtained his MA with Distinction in 1978,<br>and where he lectured in Arabic calligraphy from 1980 to 1982.
</p>
<p>In 1989, he was awarded a Ph.D by the Council for National<br>Academic Awards for his work on the Scientific Foundation of<br>Arabic Lettershapes, undertaken at the Central School of Art and<br>Design in collaboration with the British Museum.
<br>This painstaking research over 11 years has illuminated the<br>geometric principles underpinning the visual harmony of all<br>Islamic art and architecture.</p>
<p>Ahmed Moustafa has lived and worked in London since 1974 and<br>directs the "Fe-Noon Ahmed Moustafa - Research Centre for Arab<br>Art and Design", which he established in 1983. He has taught and<br>lectured in many parts of the world, and is currently a visiting
<br>professor at the Prince of Wales' Institute of Architecture,<br>London, the University of Westminster, London, and the Faculty<br>of Fine Arts, University of Alexandria, Egypt.</p>
<p>Ahmed Moustafa is a consultant in Islamic art and design on<br>many private projects throughout the Middle East. These have<br>included tapestries for the Royal Pavilion, King Abdul Aziz<br>Airport in Jeddah, and the Royal Reception at King Khald Airport
<br>in Riyadh. He has also designed several new Arabic typefaces as<br>well as corporate identity programmes and logotypes for numerous<br>organizations.</p><a name="1"></a>
<p>_____________________________<br><br>LA METAFORA ANDALUSI: LA UTOPIA NECESARIA </p>
<p>by Emilio Gonzalez Ferrin<br>Professor of Islamic Sociology, University of Seville, Spain <br>KEYWORDS <br>Al-Andalus, Islam, cultural transfer</p>
<p>ABSTRACT</p>
<p>There is Julian the traitor, and there is Julian the<br>vindicator. They are two previous nametags. Two visions of a<br>same process, from the same inevitable essence: the passage and<br>importance of a part of History. However, these two visions
<br>cannot be combined or eliminated, at times they blow this way<br>and that, subject to the burdens of time and circumstance. Both<br>visions refer back to a specific event: the irrefutable<br>existence of an entity called Al-Andalus. The above-mentioned
<br>Julian, traitor or vindicator, was supposedly an important<br>person in the Ceuta of 711, the year of the Islamic invasion of<br>Visigothic Spain. According to the chronicles, he paved the way<br>for the invasion.</p>
<p>From here on, the significance of what happened is usually<br>eclipsed by its symbolic value and contemporary standing. The<br>History of Spain is not revised with every wave of Colombian,<br>Peruvian and Ecuatorian immigration, but it is with regard to
<br>North Africa. Geography becomes earth-based, ideologies become<br>Africanised. However what is more striking is that the symbolic<br>eclipse is not only a product of the present day. The narrow<br>vision of the Andalus reality, its Alleged presences or
<br>absences, has converted it into one of the most interesting<br>interpretations of the Andalus and Spanish historical evolution<br>in general. The Spanish Ballads describe it in plain language:<br>the Sarracens came and gave us a beating. God help the bad when
<br>they are more numerous than the good. This idea of us being the<br>good does not usually dominate the description of previous<br>invasions like those of the Romans, the Carthaginians or<br>Visigoths, or the Phoenician, Celtic or Byzantinian settlements.
<br>Not that our journey through the routes of Islam in Andalucia<br>will lack certain interpretations. This is because there is an<br>interesting game of differing opinions which rarely coincide and<br>that convert the studies on Al-Andalus in an arena of varying
<br>positions. This is normally incompatible with science, but<br>curiously does generate an enormous amount of scientific studies.</p>
<p>Al-Andalus represented more than the geographical half of the<br>Iberian Peninsula during a large part of what we know as the<br>Middle Ages. In fact, it records to a large extent the dating<br>and classification of the ages in Spanish History. On the other
<br>hand, it occupied the total of present day Andalucia, to which<br>it gave its name.</p>
<p>If we pay heed to the treatment of present day processes, and<br>even of some fairly recent in time, we can see how the memory or<br>reminders of Al-Andalus does not leave the same kind of trace as<br>that of similar "civilising" groups. As we have already
<br>deducted an induced nostalgia exists - probably merciful - that<br>sees it like a blissful dream, which is more or less in<br>disagreement with present day opinion. </p>
<p>And, on the other hand, there also exists a selective austere<br>pride that denies we could have been any other way - in reality,<br>we are different. A people's history is its DNA chain. At this<br>point, the purpose of our journey along the routes of Islam in
<br>Andalucia becomes clear, from a comfortably distant point of<br>view. The load, as we said, is quite light: historical processes<br>do not end in a moral or with some kind of warning to<br>navigators. They are simply included, make the present possible,
<br>and mediatize the future among other numerous conditions. </p>
<p>However, given that this future is ramified, faced with<br>uncertainty we tend to dwell too long upon determined elements<br>from former times between dreams nourished from the past. And<br>what is worse, it causes us to try to establish canons: to purge
<br>and trim a preferred line of thought, which we want to be<br>continuous. In reality, all we are achieving is to undo the<br>future, with the impoverishing counterweight of denying that we<br>are all that we were and that - as the perfect crime does not
<br>exist - all that is buried in the past prepares its revenge.</p>
<p>No historic event of the past failed, died, or triumphed<br>entirely. The elements are submerged and are included in<br>subsequent events. Is this not the paragraph that should cover,<br>for example, the way in which Thomas of Aquino translated
<br>Aristoteles from the Christian point of view, in what today is<br>known as Italy using the texts of an Andalusian - Averroes - to<br>which he had access through Islamic Sicily? But the example<br>adapts itself to that idea, of the possible cultural
<br>impoverishment in the biased analysis: is it scientific,<br>intellectually valid, or humanly acceptable to believe in a<br>Thomas of Aquino in succeeding generations? Is it not clearer<br>to see History as a permanent logical crisis of adaptation to
<br>the environment submerged in the circumstances that give rise to<br>the present day, built on the remains of the past?</p>
<p>BIOGRAPHY </p>
<p>Emilio González Ferrin is a Full Profesor of Islamic Sociology<br>at the University of Seville. He is currently heading a research<br>project for the Centra Foundation (Council of Andalucia) on Al-<br>Andalus, halfway between East and West, which is essential
<br>material for the objectives of the foundation which has just<br>been created and which he chairs: Gordion (East and West). </p>
<p>He has a Ph.D in Euro-Arab dialogue. He has had numerous<br>articles and six books published on the subject of cultural<br>cooperation with the Arab world, with titles including *Diálogo<br>Euro-Arabe* (1997), (Euro-Arab Dialogue), *Salvaciones
<br>Orientales* (1999), (Eastern Salvations), and *La palabra<br>descendida* (The word handed down), an intellectual reading of<br>the Koran that was awarded the "Premio Internacional de Ensayo<br>Jovellanos 2002" (The International Jovellanos Essay Award). He
<br>has been a visiting researcher at the universities of Louvain,<br>London, Amman, Damascus and Cairo.</p>
<p>He is a jury member for Arts for the Prince of Asturias Awards,<br>and in the last edition he defended the candidacy of the<br>Moroccan writer Fátima Mernissi, who achieved the award together<br>with Susan Sontag.</p>
<p>_____________________________</p>
<p>LOS CONCEPTOS DEL TIEMPO Y DEL ESPACIO EN EL LENGUAJE DE IBN '<br>ARABI: <br>UN ENFOQUE LINGÜÍSTICO<br><br>by Leila Khalifa<br>Doctor en historia y civilización de la Escuela de Estudios<br>Superiores en Ciencias Sociales (París). Miembro del laboratorio
<br>"Estudio y edición de textos de la Edad Media Sección - Arte y<br>Literatura de Occidente-Oriente" (UPRESA 8092) del CNRS y de la<br>Universidad de París IV-Sorbonne, France</p>
<p>KEYWORDS </p>
<p>Ibn 'Arabi, Islam, spirituality</p>
<p>ABSTRACT</p>
<p>Ibn 'Arabi se sitúa indiscutiblemente en el corazón del<br>rencuentro entre la ciencia, la espiritualidad y lo imaginario,<br>en tierra del Islam. La exploración de su concepto del mundo<br>puede revelarse fecunda. Nuestra exposición consta de tres
<br>partes. En la primera, presentamos la figura de Ibn ' Arabi, al<br>cheik al-akbar, su vida y su obra, así como las grandes líneas<br>de su doctrina (en particular sobre la problemática de la<br>unicidad divina, ahadiyya y wahdaniyya). Mostraremos,
<br>igualmente, la influencia de su enseñanza en el mundo musulmán,<br>en Europa, en Japón y en Estados Unidos. En la segunda parte,<br>procederemos al análisis lingüístico del vocabulario de la<br>temporalidad (waqt, zaman, 'asr, dahr) y de la espacialidad
<br>(makan, hayyiz, mawdi', mawqa'). Profundizaremos en el uso de<br>algunos de estos términos interesantes (miqat, por ejemplo,<br>significa a la vez el espacio, el tiempo y el acto). En la<br>tercera parte, examinaremos este rico vocabulario en el contexto
<br>propio del lenguaje y de la perspectiva akbariana,<br>esencialmente a través del futuhat al-makkiyya.</p>
<p>BIOGRAPHY </p>
<p>Doctor en historia y civilización de la Escuela de Estudios<br>Superiores en Ciencias Sociales (París). Miembro del laboratorio<br>"Estudio y edición de textos de la Edad Media Sección - Arte y<br>Literatura de Occidente-Oriente" (UPRESA 8092) del CNRS y de la
<br>Universidad de París IV-Sorbonne. Presentó y defendió una tesis<br>sobre Ibn 'Arabi en el 2000, publicada con el título *Ibn Arabi.<br>L'Initation à la Futuwwa* (ed.Albouraq, Paris, 2001). Continuó<br>sus estudios de psicología y de historia en la Universidad de
<br>Jordania (Aman) y en la Universidad de Nottingham (Gran Bretaña).</p>
<p><br>_____________________________<br><br>PENSAMIENTO LINEAL Y CONOCIMIENTO: UN PROCESO ALQUIMICO </p>
<p>by Francesca Del Carmen Sanchez<br>Anthropologist, Spain<br>Apartado de Correos 3030<br>C.P.: 04006<br>Almería, Spain<br>rasul [@] cajamar [dot] es<br>KEYWORDS <br>Sufism, history, Al-Andalus</p>
<p>ABSTRACT</p>
<p>The origins go back to the doctrines of DulNun the Egyptian,<br>taken to the peninsula by Ibn Masarra, influenced by al Gazel<br>the Persian, renewed by Ibn al Arif from Almeria and brought<br>back again to East by Ibn Arabi from Murcia.
</p>
<p>We find the clearest symptom of the continuity of the spirit of<br>Ibn Masarra in the bosom of the peninsular Sufism, in the huge<br>influence made by the esoteric, mystical cultural focus of the<br>School of Almeria. This city, inheritor of the School of
<br>Pechina, turned to be a seedbed of heterodox Sufism of masarri<br>filiation.</p>
<p>At the beginnings of the 12th century under the rule of<br>Almoravides, Almeria becomes the spiritual metropolis of the<br>peninsula. Here it was where the first and only shout of<br>collective protest was heard against the burning of the books of
<br>al Gazel the Persian, which were described as godless by the<br>Alfaquies of Cordoba. During the lifetime of this author his<br>main works Makacid and Tehafort were burnt by an official decree<br>of 1109, enacted by the Almoravid Sultan Yusuf ben Taxufin.
</p>
<p>The Alfaquies of Almeria, led by el Berchi from Berja, drafted<br>a fatwa of protest, which blamed the behaviour of Aben Hamin,<br>Cadi of Cordoba.</p>
<p>This mystic flowing returned, in the 13th century (four<br>centuries after the arrival of Ibn Masarra) with Ibn Arabi from<br>Murcia to East where it came from, but modified in the batini<br>sense. The germs of Sufi Pantheism of Ibn al Arif spread in this
<br>way to the furthest countries of Islam (Turkey, Persia and<br>India) contributing to the spreading of "Ixraquuuies" in East<br>Islam. This has been the most plentiful source of inspiration<br>where all philosophers, especially the Persian ones, have gone
<br>to slake their thirst of religious ideals, who longed for an<br>explanation of cosmos. Therefore nowadays the voluminous books<br>of Ibn Arabi, inspired by the School of Almeria of Ibn al Arif <br>are reissued constantly in Cairo, Constantinople and Mumbay. The
<br>fundamental principles of this school and the symbols of the<br>language are used nowadays in Sufi vocabulary. Even more, the<br>orders and guilds of East are still being inspired in the<br>original rules of the School of Almeria.
</p>
<p>The last great known master of this school is Abu Isaac Ibrahim<br>ibn al Havy from Almeria. He was born in Velefique (Almeria) in<br>1158 and passed away in Marrakesh in 1219. He was a first rate<br>mystic poet. His great great grandson Abu I Barakat says that
<br>some masters told him that Abu Isaac managed to join 40000<br>disciples and opened a hall with this invocation: "Lord, make us<br>look for shelter in You and be our most beautiful friendship<br>until the day You send us death. Hidden, concealed, satisfied
<br>with your blessing, we will run to You the day we go to meet<br>You".</p>
<p>This invocation was the destiny of this school, to perpetuate<br>until today stealthily in these Andalusian lands, overcoming<br>obstacles and changes, covering the language and the apparently<br>easiest customs: food, clothes, words, songs, children´s games.
<br></p>
<p>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>BONUS SECTION<br>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MELILLA CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS<br>by Chris Alexander</p>
<p>I was extremely happy when I first heard about this conference,<br>from Roger, and was excitedly looking forward to the<br>discussions. I am profoundly sorry that ill health and stress,<br>caused by the final countdown of production on the four books of
<br>*The Nature of Order*, now finally completed, has prevented me<br>from joining you at our conference. I am especially sorry, too,<br>that I shall miss the rich union of many cultures, a subject in<br>itself dear to my heart for decades, and which I was so much
<br>looking forward to. </p>
<p>I thought, at least I could give you a summary of the remarks I<br>would have made, and that these few pages might be distributed<br>to all of you, in the hope that through this method I can at<br>least join you in the dialogue.
</p>
<p>For nearly 30 years, now, I have been working on *The Nature of<br>Order*, - an attempt to bring a fusion of the scientific world<br>view, with an adequate view of art and architecture - not merely<br>a theoretical view, or the kind of thing an analytical or
<br>critical thinker might produce, but rather something that<br>directly affects the life and day-to-day work of a working<br>artist, like myself - yet simultaneously is clearly expressed in<br>terms that physicists and biologists can appreciate, benefit
<br>from - so that in some way our picture of the universe can be<br>altered by this new picture.</p>
<p>Above all, none of this can work unless it is seen in a<br>context, which admits God - unrestricted wholeness - as the<br>underpinning of all that is seen and experienced. I certainly<br>do not mean, by this, adherence to any particular religion or
<br>religious tradition - but rather, it means that the life of<br>objects and buildings and places, and our inner experience of<br>self, all of which we experience in art, can be understood both<br>in terms congruent with science as we presently know it, and
<br>also, that it makes sense in personal terms which touch us in<br>our hearts and activates our hearts.</p>
<p>The view of science that provides the underpinning to all four<br>books relies on relatively small number of observations, and a<br>small number, also, of new concepts which define living<br>structure and the processes which generate living structure in
<br>objective terms.</p>
<p>These include: an attempt to identify wholeness as an<br>objective structure, existing in some degree, in all material<br>systems: a method of observation which allows impartial<br>observers to measure the degree of life in different structures
<br>according to their own inner state when in the presence of these<br>structures; an attempt to see all evolution and development in<br>physical systems, in living systems, and in the creation of<br>works of art, as defined by a sequence of structure preserving
<br>transformations which take some existing wholeness as point of<br>origin and define a new structure as a new wholeness which is<br>reached from a previous one by structure-preserving<br>transformations. The new way of thinking thus provides a vision
<br>of reality in which all events come about as transformations of<br>the existing whole.</p>
<p>It takes some effort, and above all study of and creation of<br>worked examples, to understand this theoretical scheme. </p>
<p>What is most important, is that all this is not merely a<br>theoretical scheme, but rather a way of thinking, and a set of<br>tools, which first teach the artist to make things, and show the<br>way to making things - paintings, works of sculpture, buildings,
<br>and the many manifold possible structures which must appear in<br>buildings at a huge range of scales. The buildings and public<br>spaces which can be reached by these methods are entirely<br>different from those typically created in the 20th century, and
<br>point the way to a humane world in the future, and a cogent, and<br>sharable way for people to reach this humane world together.</p>
<p>It is no small thing to have attempted a fusion of science and<br>art, in a hard nosed fashion, compatible with scientific<br>thinking, yet inspired and nourished by concern for the well-<br>springs of human experience and in the origin of the human self.
<br>I could never have managed even this first step without the<br>range of cultures and civilizations that I have paid attention<br>to, visited, and been part of, during my life. </p>
<p>For, the material in these books is largely culture-<br>independent. By that I do not mean that different cultures<br>should be somehow absorbed in some general mass culture of the<br>future. Quite the opposite. It turns out that the criteria of
<br>life in artifacts, has the same deep substrate, in all cultures<br>and civilizations, and the work in these four books draws on<br>these hugely different cultures, and shows what is common to<br>them, doing it in a way which honors and respects the art and
<br>building traditions of these world wide range of civilizations. </p>
<p>In particular, I have benefited from my life long association<br>with Islamic culture and my love of ancient Turkish and Persian<br>carpets, and my long association and friendship with Japan and<br>Japanese people and the projects I have built for them. India,
<br>Latin America, Russia, the art of the Pacific, many European<br>nations, Moorish Spain, North Africa, and China have all played<br>a significant role in helping me to understand the phenomena<br>with which I have been concerned.
</p>
<p>The unification of cultures, and the exchange of profound<br>respect from culture to culture, is vital to the proper<br>understanding of artistic phenomena, and to the practice of<br>individual art, and individual building, in various local
<br>cultures today. </p>
<p>All this, may find inspiration and support from the studies to<br>which I have dedicated my life.</p>
<p>During the last two centuries, art and science were strongly<br>separated. The thought which made sense in science made little<br>sense in art; and vice versa. This has been most uncomfortable.<br>It made both - both art and science in their separate ways -
<br>seem less valid, since it was obvious that neither one of them<br>had much claim to an authentic view of reality, able to<br>encompass the strength of human intellect and the stretch of<br>human passion. I think you will find that the world picture I
<br>have painted, suggests that there is a single view of matter,<br>the universe, and mind, which stretches wide enough to encompass<br>both. If that is true, we shall all be very much the richer for<br>it, in the future.
</p>
<p>I hope you will read *The Nature of Order*. It is not bombast<br>that makes me say this, rather the hope that all of you -<br>members of a group dedicated to finding a way forward, in which<br>art and science, and multicultural humanity are fused, made one -
<br>may find some basis in the work presented in these books, that<br>allows you to go forward in your own way, and in a way which<br>leaves the schisms of the past and of the present behind.</p>
<p>I hope, very much, one day to have the privilege of meeting<br>some of you in person, and invite you, most warmly, to visit me<br>in England, at my house in the country. Please do come if you<br>have the chance, and at the very least I can offer you tea and
<br>refreshments, and we may have a chance to continue this<br>dialogue. I am much looking forward to seeing the summaries of<br>the contributions which all of you make to the conference.</p>
<p>Here the titles of the four books:</p>
<p>Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life<br>Book 2: The Process of Creating Life<br>Book 3: A Vision of a Living World<br>Book 4: The Luminous Ground</p>
<p>You may visit the website of the publisher, Center for<br>Environmental Structure Publishing, and preview the books, at<br><a href="http://www.natureoforder.com">http://www.natureoforder.com</a>. Sample chapters from each of the
<br>four books, in PDF format, are available for downloading, free<br>of charge, from the website.</p>
<p>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>ONE FROM THE VAULT: FROM THE LEA ARCHIVES<br>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>CINEMATIC THRESHOLDS - INSTRUMENTALITY, TIME AND MEMORY IN THE<br>VIRTUAL<br>First published: (LEA 3:7), July 1995<br><a href="http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/TEXT/Vol_2/lea_v3_n07.txt">http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/TEXT/Vol_2/lea_v3_n07.txt
</a></p>
<p>by Ed Keller<br>133 Mulberry #6N<br>NYC 10013<br>U.S.A.<br>Tel/Fax: 212 431 5705<br>mantis [@] basilisk [dot] com<br><a href="http://swerve.basilisk.com/C/CineThressH_966.html">http://swerve.basilisk.com/C/CineThressH_966.html
</a></p>
<p>[Editor's Note: The article presented here is Section 1 of a<br>longer article, the full text of which can be found on the<br>author's web page listed above. It is published here by<br>permission of the author].</p>
<p>THE VIRTUAL</p>
<p>I would like to begin with a mise en abyme, a meditation on the<br>nature of the virtual which will throw this essay through its<br>entire trajectory and deposit us in a place where a more<br>detailed development of each of these concepts can occur. As a
<br>starting point I find the formulation of the virtual that<br>Deleuze gives us via Proust fascinating:</p>
<p>'Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.' <br>p96, Bergsonism</p>
<p>This understanding of the virtual insists upon its operative<br>nature; moreover, the operative nature of something that is not,<br>most likely, visible. It is used by Deleuze within the context<br>of the performance of memory as a force that conditions our
<br>perception ineluctably and shapes us as subjects. In Deleuze's<br>investigation of the subject through Bergson's idea of memory,<br>virtuality is the key realm within which memory locates itself. </p>
<p>[THIS TEXT CAN BE VIEWED IN ITS ENTIRETY BY LEA/LEONARDO<br>SUBSCRIBERS AT: <a href="http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-">http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-</a><br>journals/LEA/archive.html]</p>
<p>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>LEONARDO REVIEWS<br>2005.8<br>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>June's editorial for Leonardo Reviews features one of our newer<br>reviewers Rob Harle. As you can see from the reviews published<br>below and in the Leonardo Reviews archive, Rob's research has a<br>particular transdiciplinarity, which makes him a great asset to
<br>our project. His prolific output and particular combination of<br>interest in biomedicine and architecture, consciousness and<br>culture, situate him at the core of recent publications in our<br>field. </p>
<p>Also included in this month's feature is Kathleen Quillian's<br>first review for us. Although a newcomer as a reviewer, Kathleen<br>has been a colleague working in the San Francisco office and a<br>great supporter and help. We are delighted that she has found
<br>the additional energy to publish a review with us. </p>
<p>In July's edition, the difficulty one has in imposing a<br>thematic structure on the contributions included in Leonardo<br>Reviews testifies to the extraordinary diversity of the<br>panellists and materials reviewed. Perhaps the consistency lies
<br>in the way the copy reflects the complexity and increasing cross-<br>disciplinarity of contemporary scholarly discourse. As ever,<br>certain areas such as film and experimental music are well<br>covered. Jan Baetens scrutinizes a major and timely exposition
<br>of Jean-Luc Godard's work, Mike Mosher views the Japanese<br>documentary, *A Visit to Ogawa Productions*, Stefaan van Ryssen<br>assesses Peter Cusak's *Baikal Ice*, and Mike Mosher considers<br>three innovative releases from the prolific Cuneiform Records.
</p>
<p>Also represented is the growth in literature and events that<br>seek to illuminate the relationship between mind and art using<br>insights from science. Ian Verstegen's review of a book by Lucia<br>Pizzo Russo, *Le Arti e la Psicologia*, shows the value of a
<br>Continental perspective on a topic so often dominated by Anglo-<br>American approaches, while Martha Blassnigg's report from the<br>*Light/Image/Illusion* forum on Austria is further evidence of<br>the growing cross-disciplinary activity between the arts and the
<br>sciences.</p>
<p>Included in July's Leonard Electronic Almanac are Rob Harle's<br>piece on Elizabeth Grosz's book, *The Nick of Time: Politics,<br>Evolution and the Uncanny*, which uses Darwin, Nietzsche and<br>Bergson to generate a new philosophical analysis of time, Alex
<br>Rotas' review of Jill Bennett's work on trauma and contemporary<br>art, and in the current political climate of concern with<br>African issues Mike Mosher's review of Elizabeth Harney's work<br>on art and avant-gardism in Senegal.
</p>
<p>All these can be read on-line at <a href="http://leonardoreviews.mit.edu">http://leonardoreviews.mit.edu</a></p>
<p>Michael Punt (June)<br>Editor-in-Chief<br>Leonardo Reviews</p>
<p>and<br>Robert Pepperell (July)<br>Associate Editor<br>Leonardo Reviews</p>
<p>_____________________________<br></p>
<p>REVIEWS POSTED JUNE AND JULY 2005</p>
<p>Art Inquiry: Recherches Sur Les Arts, Volume V (XIV)<br>Cyberarts, Cybercultures, Cybersocieties<br>Published by The Scientific Society in Lodz<br>Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher</p>
<p>Arte Telemática. Dos intercâmbios pontuais aos ambientes<br>virtuais multiusuário<br>Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen</p>
<p>Barricade 3<br>by ZNR<br>Reviewed by René van Peer</p>
<p>Bauhaus: Less Is More<br>by Eliseo Alvarez<br>and<br>Dessau's Bauhaus<br>by Frederic Compain<br>Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens</p>
<p>Caging the Beast: A Theory of Sensory Consciousness _<br>Advances in Consciousness Research<br>by Paula Droege<br>Reviewed by Rob Harle </p>
<p>Charlotte: Life or Theater?<br>by Richard Dindo<br>Reviewed by Artur Golczewski</p>
<p>Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art<br>by Grant Kester<br>Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg</p>
<p>Dream Bridges-Traumbrücken<br>by Wolfdietrich Ziesel<br>Reviewed by Rob Harle (Australia)</p>
<p>D-B. A: Digital-Botanic Architecture<br>by Dennis Dollens<br>Reviewed by Rob Harle</p>
<p>Film and Cinema Spectatorship: Melodrama and Mimesis<br>by Jan Campbell<br>Reviewed by Jan Baetens</p>
<p>The Future Is Not What It Used To Be<br>by Mika Taanila<br>Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen</p>
<p>Hokusai<br>by Gian Carlo Calza, with additional essays by others<br>Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens</p>
<p>Keeping It Real<br>by Sunny Bergman<br>Reviewed by Artur Golczewski</p>
<p>Music Query: Methods, Models, and User Studies<br>by Walter B. Hewlett and Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Eds.<br>Reviewed by Joao Pedro Martins, Marcelo Gimenes and Qijun Zhang</p>
<p>Pop Trickster Fool: Warhol Performs Naiveté<br>by Kelly M. Cresap<br>Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher</p>
<p>Pork Chop Blue Around The Rind<br>by Fast 'n' Bulbous<br>Reviewed by René van Peer</p>
<p>Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body<br>by Elizabeth A. Wilson<br>Reviewed by Rob Harle (Australia)</p>
<p>The Subject of Documentary<br>by Michael Renov<br>Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher</p>
<p>Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition<br>Lynn Spigel, Ed.<br>Reviewed by Kathleen Quillian</p>
<p>What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance<br>by Jane Blocker<br>Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen</p>
<p>William Roberts: An English Cubist<br>by Andrew Gibbon Williams<br>Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens</p>
<p>Le arti e la psicologia<br>by Lucia Pizzo Russo<br>Reviewed by Ian Verstegen</p>
<p>Baikal Ice<br>by Peter Cusack<br>Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen</p>
<p>Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art<br>by Jill Bennett<br>Reviewed by Alex Rotas</p>
<p>For Ever Godard<br>by Michael Temple, James S. Williams and Michael Witt, Eds.<br>Reviewed by Jan Baetens</p>
<p>Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System Is<br>Endangering Innovation and Progress, and What to Do About It<br>by Adam B. Jaffe and Josh Lerner<br>Reviewed by Zainub Verjee</p>
<p>Leap Second Neutral<br>by Machine and the Synergetic Nuts</p>
<p>and<br>Pork Chop Blue Around The Rind<br>by Fast n' Bulbous</p>
<p>and<br>Emissaries<br>by Radio Massacre International<br>Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher</p>
<p>Light/Image/Illusion‹‹The Aegina Academy<br>A Forum for Art and Science<br>Organized by C3 Center for Culture & Communication and<br>Nederlands Filmmuseum<br>Reviewed by Martha Blassnigg</p>
<p>Masterworks of Technology: The Story of Creative Engineering,<br>Architecture, and Design<br>by E.E. Lewis<br>Reviewed by Rob Harle (Australia)</p>
<p>The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely<br>by Elizabeth Grosz<br>Reviewed by Rob Harle (Australia)</p>
<p>The Other Side of Nowhere. Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities<br>in Dialogue<br>by Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble, Eds., with introduction by<br>Ingrid Monson<br>Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen</p>
<p>In Senghor's Shadow: Art, Politics and the Avant-Garde in<br>Senegal, 1960-1995<br>by Elizabeth Harney<br>Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher</p>
<p>Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity<br>by Maeda Ai<br>Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg</p>
<p>Unsorted: An A to Z for SonicActsX<br>by Arie Altena et al, with an introduction by Taco Stolk<br>Reviewed by René Beekman</p>
<p>VAS: An Opera in Flatland<br>by Steve Tomasula; art and design by Stephen Farrell<br>Reviewed by Eugene Thacker </p>
<p>A Visit to Ogawa Productions<br>by Oshige Jun' Ichiro, Director; produced by Yasui Yoshio<br>Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher</p>
<p>Vocals<br>by Ian Breakwell<br>Reviewed by Mike Leggett </p>
<p>Walter Benjamin and Art<br>by Andrew Benjamin, Ed.<br>Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher</p>
<p>_____________________________<br><a name="2"></a><br>DREAM BRIDGES - TRAUMBRÜCKEN</p>
<p>by Wolfdietrich Ziesel<br>Springer-Verlag, Wien, New York, NY, 2004<br>247 pp., illus. Trade, €36,45<br>ISBN: 3-211-21269-8.</p>
<p>Reviewed by Rob Harle<br>Australia<br>harle [@] dodo [dot] com [dot] au</p>
<p>This book is both inspiring and delightful. All text is written<br>in both English and German. "A voice crying in the wilderness"<br>is a phrase used to describe the passion and vision of<br>Wolfdietrich Ziesel. The wilderness alluded to is the
<br>impoverished emptiness of postmodernism driven by "turbo-<br>capitalism".</p>
<p>Whilst the subject of the book is bridges, the book is really<br>about dreams, ". . . it is a compilation of thoughts about<br>desires and dreams relating to bridges" (p. 9). It is about the<br>state of the built environment and the *quality* of life
<br>associated with, and in turn influenced by, the *integrity* of<br>architects, engineers, planners, and construction company<br>executives. Ziesel argues (p. 12) as does Jörg Schlaich (p. 54-<br>59) that this integrity leaves much to be desired in our
<br>contemporary society.</p>
<p>Schlaich also stresses, quite forcefully, that the dramatic<br>increase in technologies, which should engender innovation and<br>an exquisitely built environment, has done just the opposite.<br>Technology, especially computer design applications, has the
<br>potential to liberate or enslave a designer's imagination. The<br>elimination of the engagement of extreme creative efforts, by<br>allowing computer software to take over, as it were, is a recipe<br>for a bland, uninspired soul-less built environment.
</p>
<p>*Dream Bridges* is lavishly illustrated with sketches,<br>engineering drawings and photographs, both colour, and black and<br>white. There are six essays, including one by Ziesel himself;<br>all are inspiring and challenging. The first essay - *Dreaming
<br>about Bridges - Dream Bridges* by Ziesel explains his attitude<br>to design, and his passion for all things bridges, both<br>metaphorically and literally. Wolfdietrich Ziesel is Professor<br>and Director of the Institute for Statics and Theory of
<br>Structures at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.</p>
<p>Günter Feuerstein's essay, *What is Truth?*, discusses the<br>notion of truth to materials and truth of appearances. He<br>believes Ziesel's work, ". . . stands for a new truth, a new<br>beauty, and therefore a new transcendence in building, without
<br>his being doctrinaire or puritanical" (p. 23). Schlaich in<br>*Wolfdietrich Ziesel - A Voice Crying in the Wilderness*, as<br>already mentioned, challenges contemporary architects and<br>engineers and the way they are trained, suggesting alternative
<br>methods. Monika Gentner's essay, *Somewhere over the Rainbow*<br>uses examples from literature to help us understand the<br>importance of bridges, not so much in their literal structural<br>sense but in their metaphorical imaginative power. The
<br>architects Brell, Cokcan in *Pedestrian Bridge of the Golden<br>Horn* discuss the favorable influence of Ziesel's teaching, "He<br>taught us not just to dream our architecture, but to live it"<br>(p. 184). Finally, Otto Kapfinger's essay, *The Art of Civil
<br>Engineering - An Unknown Species in Austria?* comments quite<br>critically on the state of the built environment in Austria,<br>including historical examples and architecture's relationship<br>with technology.</p>
<p>The book is mostly set in Austria, Ziesel's homeland, and most<br>of the structures are from this part of Europe. When I started<br>the book, I wondered if this visionary and globally aware<br>designer/engineer would mention the Harbour Bridge in Sydney,
<br>Australia - arguably one of the greatest, creative engineering<br>feats of the 20th century. And, yes, indeed on page 16 there is<br>a mention of our beloved "Coathanger" as we Ozzies like to call<br>it. Many of the great landmark bridges around the world are
<br>mentioned throughout the course of the book, giving considerable<br>credibility to Ziesel's authority as a leading innovative<br>engineer.</p>
<p>The book has an excellent graphic layout and would be at home<br>on any coffee table, though the book is far more serious than<br>just a "nice" production. There is no bibliography, which I<br>think would have been useful for students and researchers. Some
<br>of the essays could have been longer and perhaps a little more<br>in-depth, especially concerning a bridge's relationship to the<br>two locations it connects. Although, this aspect of the book is<br>covered, to a certain extent, in the text accompanying the 20 or
<br>so "case studies" that intersperse the essays.</p>
<p>This book is essential reading for all built environment design<br>students and those professional architects and engineers in<br>practice at present who have the responsibility of further<br>despoiling our visual urban landscape or perhaps *improving* it.
<br>It puts such designers "on notice" to leave their egos at the<br>office/studio door and work co-operatively with each other and<br>the hapless public that has to endure and use their creations.</p>
<p>_____________________________<br><br>PSYCHOSOMATIC: FEMINISM AND THE NEUROLOGICAL BODY<br><br>by Elizabeth A. Wilson<br>Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2004<br>136 pp., illus. 5 b/w. Trade, $64.95; paper, $18.95<br>
ISBN: 0-8223-3356-2; ISBN: 0-8223-3365-1.</p>
<p>Reviewed by Rob Harle<br>Australia<br>harle [@] dodo [dot] com [dot] au</p>
<p>This book is about trying to put "humpty dumpty" back together<br>again. Humpty Dumpty is no less than the *whole* human being.<br>The neurological body, that Wilson rescues from the myopic<br>extremes of second-wave feminism, is bought back to life in a
<br>carefully argued and well-written work.</p>
<p>Wilson's rescue mission attempts to bring into balance<br>cultural, social and political theories of the body,<br>specifically those of feminism, and<br>biological/neurophysiological theories. "Fierce antibiologism
<br>marked the emergence of second-wave feminism" (p. 13). This<br>*fierce* unholistic approach has been as equally unproductive<br>and unbalanced as the extreme scientific reductionism<br>(biological determinism) that feminist critique attempts to
<br>expose.</p>
<p>*Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body* seems very<br>much to be a book that transcends the extremes of reductionism<br>regardless of discipline. This is in keeping with a "new wave"<br>of avant garde thinkers and writers who have rediscovered the
<br>holistic nature of existence. This is evident in research areas<br>as disparate as quantum physics, environmental ecology,<br>medicine, mathematics and architecture.</p>
<p>The book has five chapters together with an informative<br>introduction, good bibliography and index. Throughout the<br>chapters Wilson, ". . . moves between the central and peripheral<br>nervous systems and among the cognitive, the affective, and the
<br>unknowing, in an attempt to build a critically empathic alliance<br>with neurology" (p. 29).</p>
<p>Chapter one, *Freud, Prozac and Melancholic Neurology*, looks<br>at neurological determinism, some of Freud's neurological work,<br>and Kramer's *Listening To Prozac*. The quote from Kramer on<br>page 26, in a sense sums up the nature of Wilson's quest,
<br>"Spending time with patients who responded to Prozac had<br>transformed my views about what *makes* people the way they are<br>[my emphasis]."</p>
<p>Chapter two, *The Brain in the Gut* discusses<br>neurogastroenterology and psychoanalysis and argues that, ". . .<br>the nervous system extends well beyond the skull, and as it so<br>travels through the body it takes the psyche with it" (p. 47).
</p>
<p>Chapter three, *Hypothalamic Preference: LeVay's Study of<br>Sexual Orientation* looks at LeVay's study of the hypothalamus,<br>carefully and non-hysterically, and what implications this organ<br>has for the development of gay men, hence the participation of
<br>neurology as a role in personality development.</p>
<p>Chapter four, *Trembling, Blushing: Darwin's Nervous System*<br>highlights the benefits of assessing some of Darwin's work as an<br>aid to critical neurological thinking. Special attention is<br>giving to the unique human trait of blushing.
</p>
<p>Chapter five, *Emotional Lizards: Evolution and the Reptilian<br>Brain* discusses various aspects of evolution, the triune brain<br>and how evolutionary theory may be employed to expand ". . .<br>feminist theories of psyche and soma" (p. 95). This chapter also
<br>discusses how Oliver Sacks' approach to motor function in<br>reptiles helps us understand neurological modification and<br>development in human beings.</p>
<p>My only criticism of this book apart from being rather slim<br>(126 pages) is that developmental psychology and the work of<br>researchers, such as Andy Clark, *Being There: Putting Brain,<br>Body and World Together Again*, are not given enough
<br>consideration. Clark's "feedback loops" from brain to peripheral<br>nervous system, for example, seem to me to be especially<br>relevant to Wilson's thesis. Yet some of Freud's questionable,<br>outdated theories are given perhaps too much discussion. As an
<br>example, Freud's notion of excessive masturbation and/or *coitus<br>interruptus* being implicated in "neurasthenic melancholia" and<br>"somatic weakness" does nothing to help Wilson's argument. A<br>
reference to Oriental medicine and the vast experience of the<br>Chinese in this regard could have been a worthwhile inclusion.</p>
<p>This is an important book because it moves positively towards<br>bringing about a balance between the extremist views of the<br>antibiologist ranting of certain second-wave feminist theories<br>and the myopic view of absolute biological determinism.
</p>
<p>_____________________________<br><a name="3"></a><br>TELEVISION AFTER TV: ESSAYS ON A MEDIUM IN TRANSITION<br>by Lynn Spigel, Ed. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2005.<br>480 pp., illus. Paper. ISBN: 0-8223-3393-7.
</p>
<p>Reviewed by Kathleen Quillian<br>kathleen [@] dprojx [dot] org</p>
<p><br>Undoubtedly the Internet has changed the nature of mass<br>communication from a centralized one-way model to a de-<br>centralized multi-directional model. How this will affect the<br>industry of broadcast media has yet to be fully decided. While
<br>producers are falling over themselves to try to figure out how<br>to successfully negotiate the media landscape in the age of the<br>Internet, scholars are building upon their cache of expertise to<br>develop a new dialogue of communications studies. In an attempt
<br>to give this new era some kind of identifiable form, Lynn Spigel<br>has brought together the perspectives of several leading<br>television scholars in *Television After TV: Essays on a Medium<br>in Transition*. </p>
<p>It seems that while the dialogue is still developing around the<br>new nature of mass communication, so too is the language.<br>Throughout the collection, no less than a dozen different terms<br>are given in the attempt to identify the scope of contemporary
<br>media communications - terms ranging from "omnimedia" (Martha<br>Stewart's term for her own media empire) to "post-broadcasting"<br>to "the neo-network era." The book is divided into four sections
<br>which, broadly speaking, focus on: changes in the television<br>industry in the age of the Internet, television's social context<br>in the larger scope of culture, how television defines or re-<br>defines community and the educational potential of television
<br>studies. </p>
<p>Aside from two essays devoted specifically to European<br>television (lifestyle programming in Britain and the<br>introduction of television in Sweden, respectively) and a look<br>at the development of Hong Kong as a media capital, the majority
<br>of the book is devoted to the many ways that the industry of<br>(U.S.) commercial television has evolved and how it influences,<br>or is influenced by, the Internet. To those of us who cannot<br>conceive of life without the all-pervasive influence of
<br>commercial television, this collection of essays certainly gives<br>one pause to think as we work our way through the next<br>generation of mass media. </p>
<p>One of the more interesting angles on this is given in<br>*Flexible Microcasting: Gender, Generation, and Television-<br>Internet Convergence* by Lisa Parks, in which the author<br>surmises how the rise and popularity of television game shows
<br>foreshadowed the interactivity of the Internet. She then goes on<br>to address how certain forward-thinking big-budget television<br>producers have successfully (or unsuccessfully) negotiated the<br>territory between television and the Internet with programs
<br>designed to encourage the involvement of women and youth while<br>still maintaining the dominant ideologies perpetuated by<br>commercial television. </p>
<p>The "flow" of the book (referencing a term coined by early<br>television scholar Raymond Williams - mentioned consistently<br>throughout this collection of essays) moves from a rather<br>focused look at new forms of marketing in the television
<br>industry to a broader look at the influence of television on<br>culture and society. Two notable contributions presented toward<br>the latter end of the flow are by Anna McCarthy and Lynn Spigel<br>whose respective essays give two very different spins on power
<br>and broadcast media. </p>
<p>In *The Rhythms of the Reception Area: Crisis, Capitalism, and<br>the Waiting Room TV* Anna McCarthy discusses how the market of<br>closed-circuit television programs both manifests and<br>perpetuates certain social and economic strata in relation to
<br>the measurement of time in public waiting areas. Spigel's own<br>contribution to this collection *Television, the Housewife, and<br>the Museum of Modern Art* chronicles a lesser-known and<br>otherwise short-lived era in the early days of television when
<br>the Museum of Modern Art experimented with the potential gains<br>offered by the new, avant-garde medium. In this essay, Spigel<br>weaves an interesting narrative around leisure time, niche<br>marketing and the clash between "high" and "low" culture in post-
<br>war America. An image of Barbara Streisand posing while singing<br>in the museum gallery, wearing a designer gown similar to the<br>modernist paintings on the wall next to her, illustrates this<br>essay quite well.</p>
<p>In the attempt to position so many ideas in one conversation<br>however, inevitably, some parts of the discussion get left out.<br>In this case, it seems that while much thought is developed<br>around the industry of commercial television and the social
<br>consequences of the medium in the age of the Internet, the roles<br>of journalists and media activists - those individuals who<br>negotiate and shape the media landscape on a daily basis - were<br>overlooked altogether. The few times the news media is given
<br>attention in this collection is only in terms of its absence.<br>Anna Everett's essay *Double Click: The Million Woman March on<br>Television and the Internet* describes how the organizers of the<br>Million Woman March utilized the resources of the Internet to
<br>fill in the gaps that were left in the coverage of this event by<br>mainstream media. Similarly, in *<a href="http://Pocho.com">Pocho.com</a>: Reimagining<br>Television on the Internet*, Priscilla Pena Ovalle discusses the
<br>lack of media attention directed towards the Hispanic community<br>and how one website in particular succeeds in shaping an<br>alternative community by subverting mainstream media. The<br>discussion of television in the age of the Internet would
<br>greatly benefit from a focused look at independent media<br>organizations such as the Independent Media Center, Democracy<br>Now! and MoveOn.org who are forced to find their way through and<br>around the tightly-regulated confines of broadcast media to
<br>bring alternative perspectives to the table. These organizations<br>largely rely on the power of the Internet as well as what little<br>room is left in public access and public-sponsored media<br>channels to develop dialogues which are sorely lacking in
<br>corporate-controlled, mainstream media. We could learn a thing<br>or two from their experiences of communicating through new and<br>alternative avenues in broadcast media.</p>
<p>This collection of essays comes at a critical time, when we are<br>looking at not just a change in media, but a change in form,<br>practice and consequence. Whether television producers succeed<br>in steering the market in their favor, governments succeed in
<br>maintaining the hegemony through regulation, or citizens succeed<br>in claiming their rightful territory within the new terrain of<br>mass communications really only comes down to who figures things<br>out first. By revisiting the history of television in terms of
<br>the new media landscape, we may be able to pick up some valuable<br>clues as to how to go about shaping some kind of acceptable<br>future for broadcast communications.</p>
<p>_____________________________<br><br>THE NICK OF TIME: POLITICS, EVOLUTION, AND THE UNTIMELY</p>
<p>by Elizabeth Grosz<br>Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2004<br>336 pp. Trade, $79.95; paper, $22.95<br>ISBN: 0-8223-3400-3; ISBN: 0-8223-3397-x.</p>
<p>Reviewed by Rob Harle<br>Australia<br>Harle [@] dodo [dot] com [dot] au</p>
<p>It is a brave philosopher that dares to go where many other<br>philosophers have feared to tread. In her latest book - *The<br>Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely*, Elizabeth<br>Grosz not only tackles the illusive concept of time head-on but
<br>does so with scholarly rigor and an engaging confidence.</p>
<p>The book is well written, meticulously researched and like<br>Elizabeth Wilson's recent book - *Psychosomatic: Feminism and<br>the Neurological Body* (see Leonardo Reviews, June 2005) is like<br>a breath of fresh air in the areas of cultural and feminist
<br>studies. Both these books recognize the importance of<br>corporeality to feminist critique and attempt to regain some<br>sort of holistic balance; Wilson through neurology and biology -<br>Grosz through evolution, temporality and corporeality, "…we need
<br>to turn again, with careful discernment, to those discourses,<br>once rejected by feminists and political activists, that place<br>the body in the larger cosmological and biological orders in<br>which it always finds itself" (p. 3).
</p>
<p>Grosz's work outlines a new theory of becoming, "…to replace<br>the prevailing ontologies of being in social, political and<br>biological discourse". What makes this book all the more daring<br>and provocative is her analysis of three of the seemingly
<br>strangest bedfellows - Darwin, Nietzsche and Bergson. The<br>relationship of these three major thinkers is not as disparate<br>as one may first think. Grosz brings to life some of the more<br>obscure and little appreciated aspects of their philosophies and
<br>discusses these, drawing on the work of Luce Irigaray and Gilles<br>Deleuze.</p>
<p>The book has an Introduction, Three Parts (each with three<br>chapters), Conclusion, Notes, and an excellent Bibliography and<br>Index. Part I - Darwin and Evolution looks at Life, Force and<br>Change; Biological Difference; and Evolution of Sex and Race.
<br>Part II - Nietzsche and Overcoming discusses Nietzsche's<br>concerns about Darwinism; History and the Untimely; and the<br>Eternal Return and The Overman. Part III - Bergson and Becoming<br>analyzes Bergsonian Difference; The Philosophy of Life; and
<br>Intuition and the Virtual.</p>
<p>Grosz insists that this work is "…very much an initial<br>exploration" and whilst the body is integral to her discussion,<br>the object of investigation is "…time: its modalities, its<br>forms, its effects on both inorganic and organic materiality"
<br>(p. 4). To her credit, Grosz admits in previous work she<br>underestimated the importance of the biological body. "Without<br>some reconfigured concept of the biological body, models of<br>subject-inscription, production, or constitution lack material
<br>force; paradoxically, they lack corporeality" (p. 4).</p>
<p>This book is very much a critique and analysis of time from a<br>Western philosophical perspective or position. That is, time,<br>whilst not seen perhaps as strictly linear, still "moves<br>forward" (p. 247) from past to present to future. There is no
<br>detailed consideration of the Eastern philosophical notion of<br>time being literally "cyclic". This is an important omission<br>because it directly relates to the seemingly teleological aspect<br>of Darwinian evolution (which Darwin himself did not endorse).
<br>Whilst material evolution seems to move from simple to ever more<br>complex forms this is an illusion of time itself. And further,<br>it is our human construction of time in the first place that<br>creates the illusion.
</p>
<p>Grosz discusses the concepts of past, present and future quite<br>extensively but fails to mention what the Eastern philosophers<br>discovered a millennium ago, that the only time that exists or<br>is real is the "eternal present". Time, that is, an elapsed
<br>period from one state to another, is very much a condition of<br>mind. Our contemporary Western notion of time is heavily<br>influenced by the introduction of the Town Clock, invented by<br>monks in the Middle Ages.</p>
<p>Whilst I believe a discussion of time as cyclic would have<br>enhanced and added balance to Grosz's reappraisal of time, the<br>body and evolution, it does not detract from the importance of<br>her work, especially as it relates to feminist critique and
<br>cultural/political investigation. This is an important book,<br>written in a lively, vibrant style, unusual in such complex<br>philosophical discourse. I recommend it as essential reading for<br>all interested in philosophy, feminist critique and the new wave
<br>of holistic humanities studies.</p>
<p>_____________________________<br><br>EMPATHIC VISION: AFFECT, TRAUMA AND CONTEMPORARY ART</p>
<p>by Jill Bennett<br>Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2005<br>208 pp., illus. 23 b/w. Trade, $49.50; paper, $19.95<br>ISBN: 0-8047-5074-2; ISBN: 0-8047-5171-4.</p>
<p>Reviewed by Alex Rotas<br>Bristol, UK<br>alex [dot] rotas [@] bluyeonder [dot] co [dot] uk</p>
<p>This is an insightful, timely book. The common notion that the<br>particular experience of looking at art provides access to<br>broader truths is a vague adage that doesn't take us very far.<br>It needs opening up; just how does this leap from an embodied,
<br>aesthetic experience to thought occur? Bennett describes this as<br>the link between affect and cognition in the visual arts, and<br>this is the issue she explores.</p>
<p>Art, she argues (drawing from Deleuze), has "unique capacities"<br>to trigger an empathic response from the viewer which, far from<br>being an end in itself, ideally leads to thought and critical<br>enquiry. The affective power of the visual is particularly
<br>demonstrated in the case of art that draws from trauma, which as<br>she observes, is traditionally defined as being beyond both<br>language and representation. Nonetheless, traumatic experience<br>such as child sexual abuse, the tyrannies of war, civil war and
<br>political oppression, the Holocaust, and the events of "9/11"<br>have provided artists with opportunities to engage visually and<br>conceptually in difficult and painful arenas. In particular, she<br>charts the emergence of the thematic category of 'trauma art'
<br>since the late 1990s. Interweaving theory drawn from trauma<br>studies, literary studies, art history, visual culture and<br>cultural studies with detailed case-histories, she examines how<br>contemporary art can "engage trauma in a way that respects and
<br>contributes to its politics."</p>
<p>Her interest, however, is more than with a specific grouping of<br>works and with a particular politics. Her illuminating treatment<br>of the artworks that form her case-studies are already reason<br>enough to buy the book but Bennett has a more ambitious aim. As
<br>a contemporary art historian, she sees her remit not as writing<br>about the artworks that form the focus of her inquiry or with<br>demonstrating what they mean, or what trauma is depicted. It is<br>how they work that interests her. How does the particular
<br>'affective imagery' of art drawn from trauma engage us, she<br>asks, and where does it take us? Unlike narrative film, visual<br>art doesn't draw us into an emotional response with a<br>traumatized subject. Equally, it does not elicit a specific
<br>'moral' response, although there are plenty of worthy artworks<br>around that, in telling us what to think, certainly set out to<br>do just that. Yet it is art's affective component, she argues,<br>that paradoxically leads to critical thought just as it is
<br>through relinquishing any moral position that a particular piece<br>can enable ethical inquiry.</p>
<p>This is a book aimed at a theoretically fluent constituency.<br>Bennett's analysis embraces theoretical discussions of memory,<br>testimony, subjectivity, pain, trauma, and loss plus victim and<br>stranger discourses as well as more art-related issues of
<br>representation and the relationship between visual and cognitive<br>processes. It will, therefore, delight a broad, if<br>sophisticated, readership. Nonetheless its primary audience will<br>be readers from art-theory/visual culture/cultural studies
<br>backgrounds together with those interested in trauma studies or<br>post-colonial theory. Innovative, courageous and unashamedly<br>attempting to push "the analysis of culture onto new ground",<br>Bennett makes a powerful case for her central thesis that visual
<br>arts practice is generative rather than representative. Theory,<br>she sets out to demonstrate, can be derived from visual domains<br>and not just applied to them.</p>
<p>The ambitious remit of the book, however, is both its strength<br>and its weakness. It is indeed, as the back-cover proclaims,<br>"written at the highest level" but this implies a readership<br>that can keep up with dense yet often economically argued prose.
<br>Bennett covers a lot of ground in this slim volume. Rather<br>surprisingly, the central notion of 'affect' is never defined<br>(or even discussed) and we are left wondering if the 'affective<br>experience' is synonymous with the 'aesthetic experience', as
<br>Bennett herself implies towards the end. If so, of course, what<br>exactly does this mean? And though keen to emphasize the open-<br>ended nature of the empathic response, she does assume that when<br>she enjoys the affective element in an artwork, we all will;
<br>with the gloriously named Gordon Bennett's work, for example,<br>much as I was fascinated by her analysis, it just didn't happen<br>for me (poor illustrations didn't help).</p>
<p>Nonetheless, these are quibbles. This is an exciting read that<br>more than repays the efforts that Bennett demands. Thought-<br>provoking and at times startling, Empathic Vision opens up new<br>ideas that stay with you long after you have closed its covers.
<br>And it deals with issues that are now relevant to us all; as<br>Bennett observes, since "9/11", trauma has become a globalized<br>phenomenon.</p>
<p>_____________________________<br><br>IN SENGHOR'S SHADOW: ART, POLITICS AND THE AVANT-GARDE IN<br>SENEGAL, 1960-1995</p>
<p>by Elizabeth Harney<br>Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2004<br>344 pp., illus. 78 b/w, 14 col. Paper, $26.95<br>ISBN: 9-8223-3395-3.</p>
<p>Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher<br>Saginaw Valley State University<br>Mosher [@] svsu [dot] edu</p>
<p>Among the former French colonies of West Africa, Senegal had<br>the advantage that the French colonial government assiduously<br>trained a managerial and governing class before independence.<br>Yet Senegal was also unique in that the new nation had an
<br>aesthetic vision behind it. A post-colonial artistic modernism<br>was proposed and promoted by Léopold Sédar Senghor (1905-2001),<br>independent Senegal's first president, in power from 1960 until<br>1980.</p>
<p>Negritude, a call and strategy for black artists from European<br>colonies to celebrate their blackness, was first articulated in<br>the 1930s by the poet Aimé Césaire of Martinique. Like Senghor,<br>Césaire had studied in the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s where
<br>Caribbean, African, Asian and African American students all met.<br>Césaire noted the city's enthusiasm for black artistry, as<br>African artworks and motifs were influencing European artists,<br>poets, dancers and composers (much as the Harlem Renaissance
<br>invigorated culture in New York). Senghor, an accomplished poet,<br>was a major theorist of Negritude but with an African variant;<br>his Africanité looked to the African continent's past more than<br>Césaire did. While the Caribbean cosmopolite celebrated the
<br>diversity of black people, their experiences and creativity, the<br>Senegalese African romanticized the essentialism of their unique<br>"emotive" and "rhythmic" souls to contrast to dry European<br>
Cartesianism and the West.</p>
<p>Upon independence, this Africanist aesthetic served a<br>nationalist function, energizing local artists and<br>intellectuals, promoting unity and establishing a relationship<br>between the new nation and the colonialist powers that were the
<br>capitals of the art market. The new nation offered support for<br>artists, and president Senghor devoted 25-percent of the state<br>budget to culture. He established art schools, a national<br>museum, festivals and touring exhibitions. Africanité was
<br>agreeable to Pan-Africanism, and in 1966 the World Festival of<br>Black Arts was held in Senegal's capital city Dakar. At the new<br>École de Dakar, professor Iba N'Diaye emphasized technical<br>training and was skeptical that emphasis on Africanness wouldn't
<br>lead to dismissal of African artists as "noble savages". His<br>colleague Papa Ibra Tall, though himself Paris-educated,<br>discouraged all European influences on his students. Tall<br>founded Senegal's national tapestry school, where works were
<br>produced by Badara Camara, Moussa Samb, Ibou Diouf, Samba Balde,<br>Bakary Dieme, Amadou Dédé and Modou Niang.</p>
<p>Senghor's aesthetic philosophy also had its critics, including<br>celebrated filmmaker Osumane Sembene (who also criticized his<br>repression of political opponents). Some artists disliked the<br>president's patronizing attitude - he called artists his cher
<br>enfants - as he bestowed patronage. Younger artists chafed under<br>Senghor's definitions of acceptable art and found them<br>reactionary. In the 1970s meetings among actors and artists at<br>Dakar's Café Terrasse birthed the Laboratoire Agit-Art. Its
<br>leader, Issa Ramangelissa Samb, favored mixed media sculptures<br>assemblages, studied and adopted ideas by Europeans Georgi<br>Plekhanov and Anonin Artaud, and cited political events in<br>Southeast Asia and Latin America beyond Mother Africa. The
<br>Laboratoire Agit-Art deconstructed and restaged one epic Senghor<br>poem as a comedy, as well as a Césaire work. They favored a<br>street-level pop sensibility, works created with trash and<br>commercial packing materials or bottle caps found in the
<br>marketplace. This American reviewer is reminded of New Yorkers,<br>Claes Oldenburg and his Store in the early 1960s, and Jean-<br>Michel Basquiat in the 1980s. Among Samb's graffiti-like<br>painting was a Che Guevara portrait evincing black bloodlines
<br>and a confused expression.</p>
<p>El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy often sold his paintings like stage<br>backdrops on jute sacking material for the price of a full sack<br>of rice. Sy created painted figurate "Skites" kites. Sy used his<br>own footprint as a painting motif, much as did California
<br>painter Mike Henderson. To compare the Senegalese artists to<br>American ones is not to say they are unfavorably derivative: It<br>is to acknowledge that the Africans became full participants in<br>a global dialogue. Sy and his friends, sculptor Aly Traoré and
<br>painter Moussa Tine, squatted in an abandoned military camp in<br>downtown Dakar in 1977. Soon joined by actors and other<br>performers, musicians, photographers, they named the camp<br>Village des Arts. Sy established a gallery and meeting place
<br>there and called it TENQ, the Wolof word for articulation.<br>Suspicious government officials began visiting in preparation<br>for reclaiming the base, offering an unsuitable building in a<br>suburb Colobane where some artists had settled. In September
<br>1983 the Village des Arts was attacked by troops in tanks, the<br>residents were evicted and many artworks and the Village<br>archives destroyed.</p>
<p>Under president Diop the World Bank imposed strictures in the<br>early 1980s that caused Senegal to cut support of health care,<br>education, and street cleaning, diminishing the quality of life<br>for most of the citizenry. Inspired by Youssou N'Dour's song
<br>*Set*, and a Wolof word for clean and proper, an urban mural<br>squad called *Set Setal* flourished in 1988 and 1989. Many of<br>their painted walls resemble urban murals in the United States<br>in the 1960s and early 1970s, imagery of power and resistance to
<br>slaveries, whether economic or spiritual. *Set Setal* murals<br>depicted nationalist or historic content (including the slave<br>trade at Gorée), civic campaigns combatting AIDS, diarrhoea,<br>dysentery and malaria, and portraits of Senghor or the second
<br>president Abdou Diouf. They also painted Mao and Lenin,<br>religious figure Cheikh Amadou Bamba, prizefighters Assane Diouf<br>and Manga 11, and Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, Mickey Mouse and<br>Tintin. Critics of Senghor's cultural policies saw *Set Setal*
<br>murals as evidence that the younger generation were happy to<br>incorporate world influences with African ones. The French<br>Cultural Center, where Sy has painted a mural, was another<br>enthusiastic supporter of *Set Setal*.
</p>
<p>In the 1990s there have been impressive sculptures in wood and<br>metal by Gubril André Diop (whose treelike *Ecology Sculpture*<br>of 1995 employed recycled beverage cans) and Moustapha Dimé, who<br>reconciles Islam with figuration in his studio in Gorée. There
<br>have been mixed media works by Djibril N'Diaye, figurative<br>paintings by Sedou Barry and Ousmane Faye, and non-<br>representational paintings of Kan Si and Viyé Diba. Alpha<br>Wouallid Diallo created history paintings from photographs of
<br>battles and events in the founding of the nation of Senegal. Pre-<br>independence traditions of sous-verré glass painting have been<br>revived by Germaine Anta Gaye. She has combined glass painting<br>with wood or gold leaf, and used it to boldly celebrate
<br>signares, African women who had intercourse (business or sexual)<br>with Portuguese traders in the 15th century.</p>
<p>International notice came early to Senegal's artists, and in<br>the 1960s France's Minister of Culture André Malraux said the<br>best of them "match the greatest European artists for stature".<br>Mor Faye, a painter who died at 37 in 1984, was celebrated by
<br>New York critics as the great outsider, "a poor black Picasso,"<br>"a solitary medicine man". Sy, Samb and Souleyman Keita showed<br>in London in 1995. Dak'Art, the international art bienniale, has
<br>been held in Dakar for over a decade.</p>
<p>This reviewer studied with the Africanist Perkins Foss (the<br>first grad student of Robert Farris Thompson) and hungers for<br>more investigations of contemporary African culture. </p>
<p>*In Senghor's Shadow* is a subtle exploration of Senegal's<br>artists, their motivations and their relations to the<br>government's cultural policies. Elizabeth Harney presents the<br>political contradictions inherent in national cultural policy,
<br>between encouragement of raw and provincial local talent versus<br>rigorous training to world-class standards designed for the<br>discourse of the world's cultural capitals. The book deals with<br>the question of authenticity in a globalist age, the
<br>contradictions of the artists' support system, both private<br>patronage and that of the former colonizer. The author has<br>provided us with a satisfying study of one nation's cultural<br>aims and artistic achievements.
</p>
<p>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>ISAST NEWS<br>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>LYNNE CARSTARPHEN NAMED COORDINATING EDITOR OF *LEONARDO*</p>
<p>Lynne Carstarphen has been promoted to Coordinating Editor of<br>*Leonardo*. In her new capacity she will be taking over from<br>Managing Editor Pamela Grant-Ryan much of the responsibility for<br>coordinating and editing manuscripts for the print journal.
</p>
<p>Lynne has been involved with *Leonardo* since September 2002,<br>first as Editorial Assistant, then as Associate Editor. She has<br>a background in art history and Internet cataloging, and holds a<br>master's degree in writing.
</p>
<p>_____________________________</p>
<p>*LEONARDO* LAUNCHES YASMIN DISCUSSION LIST</p>
<p>*Leonardo* and the YASMIN Group are pleased to announce the<br>launching of the YASMIN mailing and discussion list, hosted by<br>the University of Athens. It is a collaborative project by a<br>consortium of organizations and individuals around the
<br>Mediterranean Rim and region.</p>
<p>YASMIN is a network of artists, scientists, engineers,<br>theoreticians and institutions promoting communication and<br>collaboration in art, science and technology around the<br>Mediterranean Rim.</p>
<p>YASMIN welcomes information on events, artists' works and<br>organizations' programs, projects and initiatives as well as<br>discussions and critical analysis.</p>
<p>YASMIN aims to identify the players and to facilitate<br>cooperation within the Mediterranean Rim. All postings should be<br>relevant to the YASMIN mandate.</p>
<p>The official language of the YASMIN list is English. However,<br>posts in the other languages mastered by the moderators are<br>allowed as long as a summary of the post in English is provided.<br>Those languages are currently: Arabic, Catalan, French, Greek,
<br>Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.</p>
<p>We welcome everyone to subscribe to the list at: <br><a href="http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin/">http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin/</a>.</p>
<p>The list is currently moderated by the following team: Julien<br>Knebusch, Samirah Alkassim, Ahmed Hassouna, Pau Alsina, Dimitris<br>Charitos, Neora Berger and Nina Czegledy. They form the YASMIN<br>Group, together with Roger Malina, Jaco Du Toit, Annick Bureaud
<br>and Andreas Giannakoulopoulos.</p>
<p>The YASMIN mailing list, co-sponsored by the DigiArts Programme<br>of UNESCO, was made possible thanks to the Internet Society<br>(ISOC), the Rockefeller Foundation, Leonardo/OLATS, The<br>University of Athens, Artnodes-UOC Barcelona and all the
<br>coordinators of the YASMIN Group.</p>
<p>_____________________________</p>
<p>SPECTOR AND LARSON JOIN GOVERNING BOARD</p>
<p>The Leonardo/ISAST Governing Board of Directors welcomes Tami<br>Spector and Larry Larson as two of its newest members.</p>
<p>Tami Spector is a professor of organic chemistry at the<br>University of San Francisco. She received her B.A. from Bard<br>College and her Ph.D. from Dartmouth College and was a<br>postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota. She is
<br>trained as a physical organic chemist; her experimental research<br>interests are focused on the transformations of strained ring<br>organics, the design and synthesis of organic selective ion<br>transport systems, and spectroscopic analysis of intramolecular
<br>hydrogen bonding. In addition, she has published in the field of<br>computational chemistry with an emphasis on molecular dynamics<br>and free energy calculations of biomolecular systems. She also<br>has a strong interest in aesthetics and chemistry and has
<br>published and presented work on the molecular aesthetics of<br>disease, John Dalton and the aesthetics of molecular<br>representation, and the visual image of chemistry.</p>
<p>Larry R. Larson, principal of Larry Larson and Associates, is a<br>consultant working with arts organizations seeking to use<br>technology to create new ways of reaching and serving audiences.<br>He has specialized in helping these groups use databases and
<br>dynamic web sites to realize ambitious programmatic and<br>administrative goals. Larson's current or recent clients include<br>Laurie Anderson, Minnesota Public Radio, Nonesuch Records, the<br>John Cage Trust and the American Music Center. Notably, Larson
<br>and his associates recently completed and launched<br>MusicVista.org, a joint web/database development project for a<br>consortium of major American music service organizations. Prior<br>to launching his consulting practice, Larson was Director of
<br>Grant Programs for the California Arts Council and was a member<br>of the original National Endowment for the Arts National<br>Information Systems Project (NISP), the first such project of<br>its type. He has also served in senior administrative positions
<br>at the San Francisco and Houston symphonies, and has been an<br>advisor on musical and technical matters to the William and<br>Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and many others.<br>Larson also serves on the boards of the Kronos Quartet and the
<br>American Music Center.</p>
<p>For more information about the Leonardo/ISAST Governing Board,<br>see <a href="http://www.leonardo.info">www.leonardo.info</a>></p>
<p>_____________________________</p>
<p>LEONARDO BOOK SERIES ACTIVITIES</p>
<p>The past year found the Leonardo Book Series brimming with<br>activity. We are pleased to announce the publication of five new<br>titles in the series: *At A Distance: Precursors to Art and<br>Activism on the Internet*, edited by Annmarie Chandler and Norie
<br>Neumark; *Visual Mind II*, edited by Michele Emmer; *CODE:<br>Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy*, edited by<br>Rishab Aiyer Ghosh; *The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics<br>and Culture* by Eugene Thacker; and *Media Ecologies:
<br>Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture* by Matthew Fuller<br>- with several more soon to be released. </p>
<p>In May 2005, the Math Science Research Institute, Berkeley, CA,<br>hosted a book-signing party for Michele Emmer to celebrate the<br>release of *Visual Mind II*. </p>
<p>Visit <a href="http://www.lbs.mit.edu">http://www.lbs.mit.edu</a> for more information.<br>Leonardo/ISAST members receive a 20% discount on Leonardo Books;<br>visit http:<a href="http://www.leonardo.info/members.html">
www.leonardo.info/members.html</a> for more information.</p>
<p>_____________________________</p>
<p>LEONARDO/OLATS AND SPACE STUDY</p>
<p>The European Space Agency has awarded a consortium led by the<br>Arts Catalyst, and which includes Leonardo/OLATS, a contract to<br>carry out a 6-month study of possible cultural utilization of<br>the International Space Station. The European Space Agency is
<br>interested in opening the Space Station to a new community of<br>artistic and cultural users. The study sets out to focus the<br>interest of the cultural world on the Space Station, to generate<br>a policy for involving cultural users in the Space Station
<br>program in the longer term, and to develop a representative set<br>of ready-to-implement demonstrator projects in arts, culture and<br>media.</p>
<p>Under the lead of the Arts Catalyst (London, U.K.), the study<br>team includes Leonardo/OLATS (Paris, France), Delta Utec<br>(Leiden, Netherlands) and the MIR Network, a group of European<br>arts organizations in Slovenia, Germany, Spain, Netherlands,
<br>U.K. and France. Artists and cultural practitioners across<br>Europe are being consulted on features of the Space Station and<br>its ground-based support facilities - including launch sites,<br>astronaut training facilities and national user support centers.
</p>
<p>To become involved or receive further information about this<br>study, e-mail the study leader, Nicola Triscott, at iss [@]<br>artscatalyst [dot] org.</p>
<p>The European Space Agency press release about the study can be<br>found at: <a href="http://www.esa.int/esaCP/Pr_p_EN.html">http://www.esa.int/esaCP/Pr_p_EN.html</a>. The German and<br>French translations can also be accessed from this URL.
</p>
<p>_____________________________</p>
<p>LEONARDO REACHES OUT TO EDUCATIONAL COMMUNITY</p>
<p>As part of an ongoing effort to reach out to the educational<br>community, Leonardo/ISAST has instituted several initiatives<br>under the Leonardo Educators and Students Program. These include<br>participation in the annual College Art Association (CAA)
<br>Conference, Leonardo Abstracts Service (LABS), the Leonardo<br>International Faculty Alerts list (LIFA) and special discounts<br>on student memberships. </p>
<p>Students working in or interested in art, science and<br>engineering are invited to join the Leonardo community with an<br>annual associate membership to Leonardo/ISAST at the special<br>student rate of $48. Benefits include associate membership in
<br>the organization, discounts on books and invitations to join us<br>at conferences and symposia, including the College Art<br>Association Conference, SIGGRAPH and the 2006 Pacific Rim New<br>Media Summit and ISEA 2006 Festival and Symposium.
</p>
<p>Leonardo/ISAST is also interested in connecting with<br>educational organizations and organizations with similar goals<br>and interests through the Leonardo Organizational Membership<br>Program, which was initiated in 2004. Through the program,
<br>Leonardo/ISAST connects members of the Leonardo network and<br>organizations, faculty and students who are working at the<br>confluence of art, science and technology. </p>
<p>Leonardo/ISAST is pleased to include Intel, the San Francisco<br>Art Institute, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Rhode<br>Island School of Design, the University of Texas and the<br>University of Plymouth among the current members in the
<br>organizational membership program. </p>
<p>For more information about student or organizational<br>memberships, please visit the members page of Leonardo On-Line<br><a href="http://www.leonardo.info/members.html">http://www.leonardo.info/members.html</a></p>
<p>_____________________________</p>
<p>LEONARDO EDUCATORS FORUM</p>
<p>The Leonardo Educators Forum (formerly known as the<br>Leonardo/CAA Working Group) is soliciting input from students<br>about their interests and needs to help develop programs and<br>activities that could benefit their professional development.
</p>
<p>One of the focuses of the Leonardo Educators Forum is to<br>provide opportunities and resources in a mentoring capacity for<br>students and emerging professionals in areas relating to the<br>intersection of art, science and technology. Current activities
<br>include a mentorship panel at the CAA annual meeting and ongoing<br>mentorship resources provided on the Leonardo On-Line web site<br>and through the Leonardo Educators Forum listserv and blog<br><a href="http://www.leocaa.blogspot.com">
http://www.leocaa.blogspot.com</a>.</p>
<p>Students and emerging professionals are encouraged to offer<br>their ideas and comments about how the Leonardo Educators Forum<br>can assist them in the development of the next generation of<br>art/science/technology researchers and practitioners.
</p>
<p>Some of the many areas to address include: writing across the<br>disciplines; collaboration between<br>artists/scientists/technologists; essential<br>connections/historical considerations; negotiating the job<br>market; and teaching art/science/technology: working inside and
<br>outside of academia. </p>
<p>Please submit comments or questions to gharp [@] umich [dot] edu.</p>
<p>LEONARDO NETWORK NEWS COORDINATOR: Kathleen Quillian<br>isast [@] leonardo [dot] info</p>
<p>_____________________________</p>
<p>THE PACIFIC RIM NEW MEDIA SUMMIT (PRNMS)<br>A PRE-SYMPOSIUM TO ISEA2006<br>7-8 August 2006, San Jose, California</p>
<p>The ISEA2006 Symposium is being held in conjunction with the<br>first biennial ZeroOne San Jose Global Festival for Art on the<br>Edge in San Jose, California, 5--13 August 2006. As part of the<br>ISEA2006 Symposium, the CADRE Laboratory for New Media at San
<br>Jose State University will host a 2-day pre-symposium entitled<br>the *Pacific Rim New Media Summit*, co-sponsored by Leonardo.</p>
<p>With a purview encompassing all states and nations that border<br>the Pacific Ocean, the Pacific Rim New Media Summit is intended<br>to explore and build interpretive bridges between institutional,<br>corporate, social and cultural enterprises, with an emphasis on
<br>the emergence of new media arts programs. </p>
<p>In preparation for the summit, seven working groups are<br>currently laying the groundwork for the main areas of<br>investigation to be pursued in depth at the summit: Creative<br>Community, Curatorial, Education, Directory, Eco-Social
<br>Activism, Mobile Computing and Urbanity, and Latin American-<br>Pacific/Asia New Media. </p>
<p>Following is another statement from one of the working group<br>chairs, in the continuation of our ongoing series as a build-up<br>to the conference. </p>
<p>_____________________________</p>
<p>PRNMS WORKING GROUP ON CONTAINER CULTURE</p>
<p>SCOPE AND OBJECTIVES</p>
<p>The Pacific Rim Curatorial Workgroup is developing a pan-<br>Pacific Rim exhibition, *Container Culture*, as part of the<br>overarching Pacific Rim New Media Summit for the ISEA2006<br>Symposium in San Jose, California, August 5-13, 2006. The
<br>exhibition will feature work by artists in the "catch basin" of<br>the port city where the curator is located or working. It will<br>use standardized shipping containers for presentation of this<br>work. The shipping container is an index of the economic
<br>relationships that exist among otherwise culturally diverse<br>Pacific Rim countries and will become a temporary zone of<br>quotidian "white cube" galleries for unstable media placed in<br>the very public context of the central Plaza Cesar Chavez in San
<br>Jose.</p>
<p>GROUP MEMBERS</p>
<p>Steve Dietz (San Jose) <br>stevedietz [@] yproductions [dot] com<br>ZeroOne, co-chair</p>
<p>Zhang Ga (Shanghai/New York)<br>z [@] apiece [dot] net</p>
<p>Alice Ming Wai Jim (Vancouver) <br>alice [dot] jim [@] centrea [dot] org<br>Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art<br>(Centre A)</p>
<p>Deborah Lawler-Dormer (Auckland)<br>deborah [@] mic [dot] org [dot] nz<br>Centre for Moving Image</p>
<p>Guna Nadarajan (Singapore)<br>pups2320 [@] pacific [dot] net [dot] sg<br>Co-chair</p>
<p>Ellen Pau (Hong Kong)<br>ellenpau [@] hkstar [dot] com<br>Videotaage</p>
<p>Johan Pijnappel (Mumbai)<br>pijnappel [@] hotmail [dot] com<br>Indian Video Archive</p>
<p>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>BYTES<br>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>***** CALL FOR PAPERS *****</p>
<p>LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL 16 (2006)<br>NOISES OFF - SOUND BEYOND MUSIC</p>
<p>These days sound is more than just music. Museums, galleries<br>and artists' studios are getting noisier: it's not that there is<br>so much more "Sound Art," but rather that so much more art has<br>sound. Cellphone ringtones generated four billion dollars in
<br>sales worldwide in 2004. Incoming email and outgoing popcorn<br>announce themselves with plops and gongs and boops and beeps -<br>the emerging field of "sonification" addresses this<br>proliferation of all these "earcons" and other representational
<br>uses of sound. Sound design is a vital part of Hollywood films<br>and computer games. While CD sales shrink with the proliferation<br>of peer-to-peer file exchange, the creative use of sound is<br>expanding in almost every other part of our lives.
</p>
<p>For the next issue of Leonardo Music Journal we invite papers<br>on the expanded role of sound in art, science, business and<br>everyday life. Topics could include (but are not limited to):<br>audio art, radio art, phonography; sound design for video, film,
<br>and gaming; the role of sound in performance art, theatre,<br>dance; sonificitation; architectural acoustics; instrument<br>design.</p>
<p>DEADLINES</p>
<p>15 October 2005 - Rough proposals, queries<br>1 January 2006 - Submission of finished article</p>
<p>Address inquiries to Nicolas Collins, Editor-in-Chief, at:<br>ncollins [@] artic [dot] edu.</p>
<p>Finished articles should be sent to the LMJ Editorial Office at<br>lmj [@] leonardo [dot] info.</p>
<p>Editorial guidelines and information for authors can be found<br>on our Information for Authors page.</p>
<p>Note: LMJ is a peer-reviewed journal. All manuscripts are<br>reviewed by LMJ editors, editorial board members and/or members<br>of the LMJ community prior to acceptance.</p>
<p>_____________________________</p>
<p><br>SCHOOL OF ART INSTITUTE CHICAGO<br>FACULTY POSITION IN FILM, VIDEO AND NEW MEDIA</p>
<p>The Department of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of<br>the Art Institute of Chicago invites applications from artists<br>working in video to teach and expand an innovative curriculum in<br>moving image media. We are looking for artists who work with
<br>various applications of video/digital media, experimental<br>narrative and non-fiction forms, installation, video<br>performance, interactive environments and web-based work.<br>Candidates should have a strong conceptual and historical grasp
<br>of contemporary issues in the intersecting worlds of independent<br>video production, experimental filmmaking, and new media. The<br>department is committed to alternative forms and practices that<br>emphasize experimentation, innovation, and the hybridization of
<br>existing media and modes of presentation. Candidates should<br>demonstrate the ability and desire to participate in curricular<br>initiatives; should be able to work with undergraduate and<br>graduate students in an interdisciplinary, fine arts context;
<br>and should have advanced proficiency in one or more areas of the<br>media arts. Applicants must have an active professional creative<br>practice. Teaching experience preferred. The position is full-<br>time, tenure-track and begins in the fall of 2006. Rank and
<br>salary are commensurate with experience.</p>
<p>Please send a letter of application, curriculum vitae, artist's<br>statement, teaching philosophy, portfolio samples which may<br>include CD-Rom, DVD, VHS, mini-DV, and/or website URLs, names<br>and contact information for three references, and an SASE (if
<br>you wish to have the materials returned) by November 15, 2005<br>for priority consideration to:</p>
<p>FVNM Search/LEA<br>School of the Art Institute of Chicago<br>Office of Deans and Division Chairs<br>37 South Wabash Avenue<br>Chicago, IL 60603</p>
<p>For more information on the School and its programs, available<br>faculty positions, and details regarding application, consult<br><a href="http://www.artic.edu/saic/public/jobs">www.artic.edu/saic/public/jobs</a>. For additional assistance,
<br>questions may be directed to Shanna Linn at <a href="mailto:slinn@artic.edu">slinn@artic.edu</a>,<br>312.899-7472.</p>
<p>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>___________________<br>| |<br>| |<br>| CREDITS |<br>| |<br>|___________________|</p>
<p>Nisar Keshvani: LEA Editor-in-Chief<br>Natra Haniff: LEA Editor<br>Michael Punt: LR Editor-in-Chief<br>Andre Ho: Web Concept and Design Consultant<br>Roger Malina: Leonardo Executive Editor<br>Stephen Wilson: Chair, Leonardo/ISAST Web Committee
<br>Craig Harris: Founding Editor</p>
<p>Editorial Advisory Board:<br>Irina Aristarkhova, Roy Ascott, Craig Harris, Fatima Lasay,<br>Michael Naimark, Julianne Pierce</p>
<p>Gallery Advisory Board:<br>Mark Amerika, Paul Brown, Choy Kok Kee, Steve Dietz, Kim Machan</p>
<p>fAf-LEA Corresponding Editors:<br>Lee Weng Choy, Ricardo Dal Farra, Elga Ferreira, Young Hae-<br>Chang, Fatima Lasay, Jose-Carlos Mariategui, Marcus Neustetter, <br>Elaine Ng, Marc Voge </p>
<p>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>_________________<br>| LEA |<br>| PUBLISHING |<br>| INFORMATION |<br>|_________________|</p>
<p>Editorial Address:<br>Leonardo Electronic Almanac<br>PO Box 850<br>Robinson Road<br>Singapore 901650<br>lea [@] mitpress [dot] mit [dot] edu</p>
<p>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>Copyright (2005), Leonardo, the International Society for the<br>Arts, Sciences and Technology<br>All Rights Reserved.</p>
<p>Leonardo Electronic Almanac is published by:<br>The MIT Press Journals, Five Cambridge Center,<br>Cambridge, MA 02142<br>U.S.A.</p>
<p>Re-posting of the content of this journal is prohibited without<br>permission of Leonardo/ISAST, except for the posting of news and<br>events listings which have been independently received.<br>Leonardo/ISAST and the MIT Press give institutions permission to
<br>offer access to LEA within the organization through such<br>resources as restricted local gopher and mosaic services. Open<br>access to other individuals and organizations is not permitted.</p>
<p>________________________________________________________________</p>
<p>Ordering Information ></p>
<p><a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=4&tid=27&">http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=4&tid=27&</a><br>mode=p </p>
<p>Leonardo Electronic Almanac is free to Leonardo/ISAST members<br>and to subscribers to the journal Leonardo for the 2005<br>subscription year. The rate for Non-Leonardo individual<br>subscribers is $35.00, and for Non-Leonardo institutional
<br>subscribers the rate is $77.00. All subscriptions are entered<br>for the calendar year only.</p>
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