[LEAuthors] Leonardo Electronic Almanac Volume 13, Number 8, August 2005

[Leonardo Electronic Almanac]

  [image: The MIT Press] <http://mitpress.mit.edu/default.asp?mlid=474>

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Leonardo Electronic Almanac Volume 13, Number 8, August 2005
http://lea.mit.edu
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ISSN #1071-4391
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| CONTENTS |
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INTRODUCTION
------------

EDITORIAL
---------

A Colloquium on Art/Science/Spirituality Reconnections Within
Emerging Planetary Cultures @ Melilla 2004, by Roger Malina >

A NOTE FROM THE GUEST EDITOR
----------------------------

Organizing a Symposium, by Julien Knebush>

ABSTRACTS
---------

Introductory address by Mohammed Aziz Chafchaouni, Symposium
Director >

Foundations for a Culture of Peace and Justice based on
Intertradition Cooperation, by Lama Denys >

Approaches of the Planetary Dimension in Media Art, by Julien
Knebusch >

Useful Tension Between C.P. Snow's Two Cultures Debate and
the Emergence of a Context of Five Cultures in the Planetary
Context, by Roger Malina >

Imagination as a Space of Life and of Resistance to
Mercantile Logic, by Mohammed Taleb >

Marks and Images of Reality in Media Reasoning, by Hashim
Cabrera >

Burdens (and Gifts) of Cinema on Experimental Video - the
Idea of Experimentation and Resistance in Cairo, by Samirah Al-
Kasim >

Network Projects in Brazil. Gente (online) Que Faz, by Karla
Schuch-Brunet >

ME DEA EX: Intertwining Virtual and Real World to Form
Immersive/Interactive Theatre, by Neora >

The Interpresence Project, by Arthur Matuck >

GATES - Beyond Net-Art: Real Things Across Cyberspace, by
Caterina Davinio >

Mediterranean Maps, by Paolo Atzori and Nicole Leghissa >

Mapping a Thesis in Systems Theory in New Media Art, by Jane
Cole Forrester Winne >

A Universal Mother Tongue, by Celestino Soddu and Enrica
Colabella >

The Religious Models of Globalism, by Harry Rand >

The Ubiquitous Dot in Cosmic Justice, by Ahmad Mostafa >

La Metafora Andalusi: La Utopia Necesaria, by Emilio Gonzalez
Ferrin >

Los conceptos del tiempo y del espacio en el lenguaje de Ibn
'Arabi:
un enfoque lingüístico, by Leila Khalifa >

Pensamiento lineal y conocimiento: un proceso alquímico, by
Francesca Del Carmen Sanchez >


BONUS SECTION
-------------

An Open Letter to the Melilla Conference Participants, from
Chris Alexander >


ONE FROM THE VAULT: FROM THE LEA ARCHIVES
-----------------------------------------

Cinematic Thresholds - Instrumentality, Time and Memory In
The Virtual, by Ed Keller >


LEONARDO REVIEWS
----------------

Dream Bridges - Traumbrücken, reviewed by Rob Harle >

Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body, reviewed
by Rob Harle >

Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition,
reviewed by Kathleen Quillian >

The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely,
reviewed by Rob Harle >

Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art,
reviewed by Alex Rotas

In Senghor's Shadow: Art, Politics and the Avant-Garde in
Senegal, 1960-1995, reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher >


ISAST NEWS
----------

Lynne Carstarphen Named Coordinating Editor of *Leonardo* >

*Leonardo* Launches Yasmin Discussion List >

Spector and Larson Join Governing Board >

*Leonardo* Book Series Activities >

*Leonardo*/OLATS and Space Study >

*Leonardo* Reaches Out to Educational Community >

*Leonardo* Educators Forum >

The Pacific Rim New Media Summit: A Pre-Symposium to ISEA2006 >

PRNMS Working Group On Container Culture >


BYTES
-----

CFP - Leonardo Music Journal 16 (2006) >

SCHOOL OF ART INSTITUTE CHICAGO - FACULTY POSITION IN FILM,
VIDEO AND NEW MEDIA >

________________________________________________________________

INTRODUCTION
________________________________________________________________

LEA's August issue is the first of a double digest, guest
edited by Julien Knebush, which re-lives a Colloquium on
Art/Science/Spirituality Reconnections Within Emerging Planetary
Cultures. This global event was hosted by the 1st International
Festival of Cultures. It took place in Melilla, Spain from 18-20
July 2004, and was co-sponsored by Al Andalus Foundation, UNESCO
DIGIARTS, Leonardo/OLATS, Ford Foundation and Rockefeller
Foundation.

In our journey into the past, One From the Vault relives Ed
Keller's *Cinematic Thresholds - Instrumentality, Time and
Memory in the Virtual*, which first appeared in LEA in July 1995.

Leonardo Reviews features one of its newer reviewers, Rob
Harle, whose prolific output and particular combination of
interest in biomedicine and architecture, consciousness and
culture, situate him at the core of recent publications in our
field. He reviews two books: *Dream Bridges - Traumbrücken* and
*Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body*. Also
included is Kathleen Quillian's first review: *Television After
TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition*. Although a newcomer as a
reviewer, Kathleen has been a colleague working in the San
Francisco office and a great supporter and help.

An inundation of news on *Leonardo* awaits in the ISAST news
section, and our ongoing series on *The Pacific Rim New Media
Summit: A Pre-Symposium to ISEA2006* features yet another
working group, this time on container culture.

Finally, Bytes features a call for paper for Leonardo Music
Journal's next issue. Also, find out more about the availability
of a full-time faculty position.

________________________________________________________________

EDITORIAL
________________________________________________________________

A COLLOQUIUM ON ART/SCIENCE/SPIRITUALITY RECONNECTIONS WITHIN
EMERGING PLANETARY CULTURES @ MELILLA, SPAIN, JULY 2004

by Roger Malina
Astrophysician
Editor, Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille, France
c/o Leonardo,
SFAI, 800 Chestnut Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
U.S.A.
rmalina [@] ssl [dot] berkeley [dot] edu / rmalina [@] alum
[dot] mit [dot] edu
http://www.astrsp-mrs.fr/www/mal.html

Modern cosmology and physics emphasize the interdependence of
complex systems on scales from the microscopic to the
macroscopic. Contemporary genetics reveal the underlying shared
genetic identity not only of all human beings, but the genetic
relatedness of all life on earth. Current scientific discoveries
reconnect science to a number of philosophical and spiritual
traditions. These reconnections offer the promise of the
development of new philosophical and value systems appropriate
to new emerging linked planetary cultures.

This promise must face a number of dangers of globalization
including: Accentuation of the inequalities within global
development, negative aspects of the digital divide, cultural
homogenization, over and unsustainable consumption, hyper-
specialization, local isolation. The technologies of the
Information Society offer tools to counterbalance some of these
dangers through the potential of global dissemination of
information and knowledge, new models for distance learning, the
emergence of a planetary consciousness based on the shared
genetic heritage of all human life. But beside these particular
dangers how "to be and become" in this world undergoing profound
changes? Can we adapt to these changes? How? Artists and
scientists have been at the forefront of the use of these new
systems to build life enhancing cultural developments in linked
planetary contexts.

This colloquium, with 20 participating artists, scientists and
philosophers, was intended to be a listening post, an
opportunity for inter-cultural dialogue and a specific step
towards magnifying and amplifying emerging new emerging
planetary cultural developments. Speakers presented specific
scientific and artistic work, and made visible the
cultural/philosophical/religions contexts that set a priori
conditions and constraints on the speakers approaches and
specific work.

The choice of the city of Melilla as host was not an accident.
Melilla has a millennial history of multi-cultural, multi-
lingual synergy and dialogue within the Mediterranean context.
The city offered itself as a podium to communicate outcomes of
this first colloquium: To make real the opportunities for the
reconnection of art, science and spirituality for the building
of new 21st century planetary cultures.

The Colloquium was divided into four different sessions
articulated around the more general question of relationships
between art, science, technology, and spirituality by
creation/reinvention of patterns, symbols and integrated
practices.

In the initial instalment of our two-part digest, we focus on
the first two sessions. The other two sessions will be published
in the following LEA edition.

BIOGRAPHY

Roger Malina is an astrophysicist at the Laboratoire
d'Astrophysique de Marseille CNRS in France and Executive Editor
of the Leonardo publications circulated by MIT Press. As a
visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Space Science Laboratory, he
is currently a co-investigator for the Supernova Acceleration
Probe Consortium that seeks to build a new space observatory to
help understand the nature of dark energy and dark matter in the
universe. Collaborating amongst the science team for the Galaxy
Evolution Explorer, Malina employs his expertise to help map the
sky in the far ultra void to understand the evolution of
galaxies.

Malina also serves as Chairman of the Board of Leonardo, The
International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, and
President of the Observatoire Leonardo des Arts et
Technosciences in Paris. He is Co-chair of the International
Advisory Board of the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts, a
member of the International Academy of Astronautics, and is
currently an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium. He is a member
of the International Academy of Astronautics and co-chair of
their Committee on Space Activities and Society. Since 1982 he
has served as Executive Editor of the journal Leonardo. He
writes on the relationship between the arts, sciences and
technology.

________________________________________________________________

A NOTE FROM THE GUEST EDITOR
________________________________________________________________

ORGANIZING A SYMPOSIUM

by Julien Knebusch
Assistant Editor
Leonardo, France
22, rue Caulaincourt
75018 Paris
France
jknebusch [@] noos [dot] fr / julien_knebusch [@] yahoo [dot] fr
http://www.olats.org

Organizing this event was much of a challenge, regarding the
topic addressed and the location of the symposium. We gathered
scholars, scientists, and artists from very different areas and
met in a place completely unknown for international dialogue:
Melilla, one of the Spanish cities (enclaves) still existing in
Morocco. The city is encircled by a militarized wall,
reminiscent of the Israeli wall. Melilla is one of the "doors"
to the European Union and astonishing because of the different
cultural groups living within the city (Jews, Spaniards,
Moroccans, Tziganes, and Indians). The city created a festival
entitled the "5 Cultures" within our symposium.

We discovered this unusual, complex, and politically sensitive
context very late, more or less when we arrived there last
summer. As organizers, we came from "outside", but worked
together with the Director of the Symposium, Aziz Chafchaouni,
who was living in Melilla. It was really a challenge to work
with Aziz Chafchaouni in Melilla, Douglas Vakoch in California,
Roger Malina in Marseille, Sangeetha Menon in Bangalore (I live
in Paris). Together we constituted the organizing committee.

During the organization of the symposium (which took six
months) and the arrival in the City of Melilla (last summer), I
always felt in the middle of a situation where it was very
difficult to find one's way around. But this precisely made the
whole event very interesting to me. I learned that organizing is
always a very delicate issue because of our intervention in a
preexisting context of political oppositions, prejudices and
given world views. I learned also that there is a true value to
a very "open" definition of a symposium - I was very hesitant at
the beginning - because our discussions could take unforeseen
directions. Certainly our symposium lacked coherence. But, I
will keep a very special feeling of our interactions, which were
very dense and continuous during the three days we spent in
Melilla. Today, I feel deeply influenced by the organization of
this event. Beside the intellectual interest of the symposium,
this event, the arrival in the city, and the various unforeseen
interactions and encounters with the participants constitutes a
profound experience for me. I learned that I needed to lose
control over the world (predicting what and how something would
happen) in order to belong to it.

BIOGRAPHY

Julien Knebusch was born in Munich (Germany) and now lives in
Paris. He obtained a Master's degree in history and politics
(Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) and also in
cultural management (University Paris-IX-Dauphine). He is
currently project leader at Leonardo/OLATS
(http://www.olats.org) for the editorial program "Fondements
Culturels de la Mondialisation" (Cultural Roots of
Globalization).

________________________________________________________________

ABSTRACTS
________________________________________________________________

INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS

by Mohammed Aziz Chafchaouni
Symposium Director
Al Andalus Foundation
Avenida Reyes Catolicos
10 3er Iz
52 002 Melilla
chaf_aziz [@] hotmail [dot] com

As we move into the 21st century, humankind has acquired the
tools to embark upon a journey toward a new phase of human
capacity, toward a universal and holistic understanding of the
universe and ourselves.

The conference brought together some 25 scientists,
international philosophers, and artists, in order to establish
the bases of a new hybrid dialogue between art, science and
spirituality. The colloquium showed the veracity and the
accuracy of the set of themes approached. Indeed, during the
last decades, we were accustomed to see emerging binary
dialogues among Art/Science, Science/Spirituality, or
Art/Spirituality. Multiple international institutions were born
from this intellectual ideal and the effort to establish
footbridges between the various fields of knowledge and human
experience.

For the first time in the universal history of ideas, and
precisely in response to the era of the globalization, a
conference emerges which establishes a "multidimensional"
dialogue between the three most essential fields of the human
endeavor.

During the last centuries, human culture and knowledge domains
have become increasingly atomized and specialized, each
specialization requiring years of training. With new methods and
tools of visualization and communication, humans can achieve an
intuitive grasp of planetary cultures and scientific
information, while evolving away from isolation and fear, and
moving toward responsive appreciation and sharing.

While the information necessary to achieve this potential is
available through new media and the Internet, there are
currently many difficulties in exploring the vast streams of
knowledge. Human society is moving deeply into limiting trends
of homogenous culture. This is accentuated by the paradox of the
current tendency towards drowning in torrents of data. An
alternative is to create a universal methodology based upon the
breadth of human experience. This paradigm should arise from a
deep understanding of our common universal heritage, as embedded
in the wisdom and knowledge of cultures East and West.

This paradigm will help us filter and organize the ever-
expanding cyber universe. In the process, it is possible to
utilize the precise data gathered within the scientific domain,
as the structural basis for the visualization of information.
This will bring the Buckminster Fuller conception of "doing more
with less" into the realm of knowledge acquisition.

Eventually computer users could be navigating through
tridimensional animated highways of interactive content
organised according to principles of scientific knowledge. In
this way, knowledge can be, in a broad sense, made user
friendly, understandable and within reach. Al Andalus Foundation
seeks to create new universal tools for Humanity to grasp and
experience, in a better and cohesive way, holistic
understanding. This conference was conceived to move us closer
to this vision.

_____________________________

INTRODUCTION TO SESSION 1

The theme of Session 1 was Art/Science/Spirituality relations
within planetary cultures and features 14 abstracts. This
session dealt with worldwide phenomenon: 1) Creation of a single
world which encompasses the planet and 2) of worldwide
dissemination of worlds (2). We have planetary cultures emerging
today (culture defined by a worldwide extension). The
terminology "planetary culture" has been introduced in order to
avoid the more common and difficult concept of "globalisation".
The session aimed to explore art/science/spirituality
reconnections within the context of globalization.

_____________________________

FOUNDATIONS FOR A CULTURE OF PEACE AND JUSTICE BASED ON
INTERTRADITION COOPERATION

by Lama Denys
Congrégation Dachang Rimay, France
Hameau de St Hugon
73110 Arvillard
France
lamadenys[@] rimay [dot] net
http://www.karmaling.org

KEYWORDS

unity, diversity, ethics
ABSTRACT

The Teaching of the Buddha (Dharma) is an art of living based
on a spiritual science. In its inspiration I would suggest first
to make evident the ethical and spiritual common ground of all
peace and justice, wholesome, traditions.

Concerning spirituality, the common ground could be summarized
as the absolute (God or Nature) experienced before mental
representations, names and forms, or in the "know yourself"
injunction.

Concerning ethics, all wholesome traditions share the
altruistic, selfless, love and compassion summarized by the
Golden Rule.

Awareness of this common and universal ground generates a
vision of intertradition unity in diversity. Unity in the
fundamental experience, whether ethical or spiritual, and
diversity in its expressions and ways of realization.

This paradigm of ethical and spiritual unity in diversity, as
developed in the "Manifesto for ethical and spiritual unity in
diversity", is the heart of an education to religious pluralism
and cooperation needed for a global harmonization in a culture
of peace and justice.

BIOGRAPHY

Lama Denys is the spiritual heir of Kyabdje Kalou Rinpoche
(1904-1989), one of the greatest contemporary Buddhist Tibetan
masters. Since 1980 he teaches in various countries and is the
spiritual guide of Rimay Sangha International, a network of
Buddhist centers.

For more than 20 years, Lama Denys has been very active in
intertradition and transdisciplinary dialogue. He is Honorary
President of the European Buddhist Union, a participant of the
World Council of Religious Leaders, and a member of the former
International Interreligious Advisory Committee of UNESCO.

He is also co-founder of the United Traditions Network,
developing the vision of unity in diversity of all authentic
traditions. Inspired by the activity of His Holiness the Dalaï
Lama, he supports many initiatives for a culture of peace,
justice and non-violence.

_____________________________

APPROACHES OF THE PLANETARY DIMENSION IN MEDIA ART

by Julien Knebusch
Assistant Editor
Leonardo, France
22, rue Caulaincourt
75018 Paris
France
jknebusch [@] noos [dot] fr / julien_knebusch [@] yahoo [dot] fr
http://www.olats.org

KEYWORDS

phenomenology, planetary dimension, media artists

ABSTRACT

This presentation is about the description of a certain
sensitivity, which can be found in contemporary Media Art and
further the development of a phenomenology of the global.
Contemporary philosophy has considered globalization as an
ontological event or issue (Jean-Luc Nancy and Peter Sloterdijk
for example).

We will ask in this presentation how contemporary media
artists, from the last 20 years, became aware of globalization,
and developed ways of appropriation of this phenomenon. We will
outsketch two important approaches of the planetary becoming of
one's/our world: 1) an approach centered on the relationship of
the individual to entities/notions as otherness or humanity and
2) an approach centered more on the artist's relationship to
earth.

Within the first group, the global has been experienced
differently a) as an autonomous and creative entity (through
networks by Roy Ascott in La Plissure du texte, 1984, for
example) b) as a wave coming from an expanding center (the
global is experienced from a peripheral position, for example in
the video of Peter Callas Night's High Noon: An Anti-Terrain,
1988) and c) a component of locality (the global considered as
an extension of the horizon of locality, for example by
Knowbotik Research in Mental immigration).

Within the second group, artists experimented a planetary
dimension through the sensing of geophysical processes by using
earth science data in a creative manner. The planetary dimension
has been: a) seen through an extension of human's vision
(visualization of planetary processes by Gloria Brown-Simmons in
Oceannet, started in 1997); sensed physically (the body of the
planet sensed by the human body as illustrated by the Japanese
group Sensorium in Breathing Earth, 1998-2000); sensed
physically through one's desire of horizontal extension (for
example by Stephan Barron in Traits, 1989).

These descriptions could help develop a phenomenology of the
Planetary Dimension, which has been initiated in contemporary
philosophy (Peter Sloterdijk for example) and sociology (Samuel
Bordreuil for example).

BIOGRAPHY

Julien Knebusch was born in Munich (Germany) and now lives in
Paris. He obtained a Master's degree in history and politics
(Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) and also in
cultural management (University Paris-IX-Dauphine). He is
currently project leader at Leonardo/OLATS
(http://www.olats.org) for the editorial program "Fondements
Culturels de la Mondialisation" (Cultural Roots of
Globalization).

_____________________________

USEFUL TENSION BETWEEN C.P. SNOW'S TWO CULTURES DEBATE AND THE
EMERGENCE OF A CONTEXT OF FIVE CULTURES IN THE PLANETARY CONTEXT

by Roger Malina
Astrophysician
Editor, Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Marseille, France
c/o Leonardo
SFAI
800 Chestnut Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
U.S.A.
rmalina [@] ssl [dot] berkeley [dot] edu / rmalina [@] alum
[dot] mit [dot] edu
http://www.astrsp-mrs.fr/www/mal.html

KEYWORDS

PLANETARY CONTEXT, DEVELOPMENT, NETWORKS

ABSTRACT

C.P.Snow and his colleagues framed a discussion 40 years ago on
the need to reconnect the arts and sciences and to help provide
the intellectual coherence to drive planet wide development
within the context of global inequities and unequal development.

However, as the planet has become interconnected, both by the
means of transportation and communication, an interesting
tension between "holistic" approaches to reconnecting art and
science versus "useful differentiation" is appearing as new
planetary cultures emerge. I define the "five cultures" as the
"art, design and entertainment culture", "the science and
government culture", "the engineering and corporate R and D
culture", "distributed planet wide world views and value
systems", and "new regionalisms and the importance of locality
and personal situation".

Individuals working within planetary context become used to
working in multiple personal situations where projects connect
in different ways with the five cultures. Rather than insisting
on reunification of dualities, as has been prevalent in western
art-science discourse, I wish to emphasize a network model of
entry points into problem solving. I will discuss how as an
astrophysicist working also within a number of distributed
planetary art communities this tension between "holism" and
"useful differentiation" can be articulated.

BIOGRAPHY


Roger Malina is an astrophysicist at the Laboratoire
d'Astrophysique de Marseille CNRS in France and Executive Editor
of the Leonardo publications circulated by MIT Press. As a
visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Space Science Laboratory, he
is currently a co-investigator for the Supernova Acceleration
Probe Consortium that seeks to build a new space observatory to
help understand the nature of dark energy and dark matter in the
universe. Collaborating amongst the science team for the Galaxy
Evolution Explorer, Malina employs his expertise to help map the
sky in the far ultra void to understand the evolution of
galaxies.

Malina also serves as Chairman of the Board of Leonardo, The
International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, and
President of the Observatoire Leonardo des Arts et
Technosciences in Paris. He is Co-chair of the International
Advisory Board of the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts, a
member of the International Academy of Astronautics, and is
currently an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium. He is a member
of the International Academy of Astronautics and co-chair of
their Committee on Space Activities and Society. Since 1982 he
has served as Executive Editor of the journal Leonardo. He
writes on the relationship between the arts, sciences and
technology.

_____________________________

IMAGINATION AS A SPACE OF LIFE AND OF RESISTANCE TO MERCANTILE
LOGIC

by Mohammed Taleb
Philosopher
Director Interdisciplinary Arab University (Paris)
France

KEYWORDS

neoliberal globalization, cultural standardization

ABSTRACT

The explanation of the philosophical vision introduced by
neoliberal globalization is a necessary task, as the latter
cannot be reduced to an economic process. The neo-liberalisation
of the economic sphere (deregulation, financing) only acquires
its true meaning when it is considered in a wider spectre that
some researchers call mercantile objectivation.

This makes us return to the essence, to the very heart of the
"capitalist economy" (Immanuel Wallerstein). Objectivation
defines the transformation into inert objects of all that exists
in the universe, separate and distinguishable: Women, men,
nations and nature. What is happening in present day
globalization (which has its roots in colonial expansion in
Latin-Indian, America, Africa, Asia and in the Arab world) is
the intensification of this nihilistic and mortiferous process.

Together with economic neoliberation, "Violence of the
Imagination" (to take the title of the book of the ex-Guinea
Minister of Culture, Animata Traoré as an example) shows the
other side of globalization. Cultural biodiversity, linguistic
pluralism, imagination, know-how, and the multiplicity of
spiritual horizons, represent obstacles for mercantile
objectivation.

This violation, which makes uniform the cultural identities and
standardizes historic personages, is seen as a real attack
against the anthropological foundation from which the human
adventure is initiated in history. We shall never tire of
saying to what extent the human figure that triumphs with
globalization is the "unidimensional man" (Herbert Marcuse).
This man is disfigured, mutilated and restricted because he is
transformed in object. Said another way, it is proclaimed the
triumph of the "homo economicus" (Louis Dumont).

The General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (which is a
treaty of the World Trade Organization (WTO) that entered into
effect in 1995) is one of the judicial-political instruments of
this mercantile objectivation-westernization-globalization. Its
reason for being is to make a contribution to the progressive
global disappearance of Culture and Nature from the public
arena.

Agnès Bertrand and Laurence Kalafatidès, in "WTO, the Invisible
Power", have demonstrated that the WTO and GATT aimed at the
privatization of the entrails of the earth. There is, therefore,
danger in delay. However, as the words of Holderlin, the
romanticist, say, "Where there is danger there is also
salvation".

_____________________________

MARKS AND IMAGES OF REALITY IN MEDIA REASONING

by Hashim Cabrera
Painter and writer, Spain
Fuen Real Alto
Camino de Alisné s/n
Almodóvar del Río 14720
Córdoba, Spain
hashim [@] webislam [dot] com
http://www.webislam.com

KEYWORDS

imaginary world, tawhid, tracks

ABSTRACT

Art in the media is not a separate art from life nor unaware of
science or spirituality. It is more a reasoning that allows the
interplay and the meeting and at the same time tends to break
the myth, by exhaustion, of the sacred nature of texts and
images.

The procedures and artistic disciplines find an apt field for
their spreading and global reproduction. But the mediation
becomes in many cases so powerful that the contents turn into a
subsidiary and reference material, inside inexhaustible lots of
possibilities. The nature laws and the rules of art join and
share the same support.

The recurrence of images underlie between the dream of video
and the presence of digital pictures, the building of an endless
allegory of history and cultures, and that digital environment
is lived as an experience of shapeless melancholy, according to
what Professor Arnheim said in the 70s of the last century.

From the live experience of reality we walk to a relative and
consensual reality, that is to say, virtual. We face the
dissolution of the subject, the fiction of the I, in a world of
images but poor of signs, in a crossroad, like carrier pigeons
that stopped in the air for a while to remember their destiny.

Contrary to what happens when we contemplate the landscape of
nature, when we lean out to the digital one we can get away from
the effort of retaining it in our memory, because we know that
it can be instantaneous and unlimitedly played. The digital
image is kept, protected from oblivion and spoiling, in that
same cavern where Plato placed the ideas, in the image world
(alam al mithal) where Ibn Arabi discovered his independent and
autonomous kind, like a pure spiritual being.

The mass media change vertiginously and they bind us to a
constant learning of new languages. The field where
communication happens now is the net, an open structure, which
connects individual nodes, as well as others where group tasks
gather.

The key of this new way of knowledge and expression is not so
much instrumental as something related to identity. The
homogeneity of the net and the autonomy of nodes are placating
the appearance of a new form of spontaneous organization that
collides strongly with the traditional, hierarchic and
centralized power structures.

We go along from close identities to an open and global
identity, from the fragmentary exclusion to the unifying
inclusion, from analysis to the integrative experience of the
tawhid.

BIOGRAPHY

Hashim Cabrera was born in 1954. He opted to multidiscipline
from 1973, and has since dabbled in analysis of forms in the
Superior Technical School of Architecture of Seville, philosophy
in the Faculty of Letters of Cordoba, Spanish literature in the
Complutense University of Madrid and as a plastic artist and
writer.

He has also produced works of investigation and artistic pieces
around nature/culture, tradition/modernity, thought/vanguard in
collaboration with the University of Cordoba, group of
investigation TIEDPAAN.

Hashim is also the publisher and co-founder of the magazine of
information and analysis *Verde Islam* and of the web site
www.webislam.com <http://www.webislam.com>

Other projects include the investigation on systems of forms
and visual thought with the Museum of contemporary art of
Shimewaru, Kyusyu, Japan. He is also a member of the Ras al
Hanut Project of Mediterranean intercultural development group,
Euromed.

_____________________________

BURDENS (AND GIFTS) OF CINEMA ON EXPERIMENTAL VIDEO - THE IDEA
OF EXPERIMENTATION AND RESISTANCE IN CAIRO

by Samirah Al-Kasim
Assistant Professor of Film
Department of Performing & Visual Arts
American University in Cairo, Egypt
113 Kasr el Aini Street
P.O. Box 2511
Cairo, Egypt 11511
salkasim [@] aucegypt [dot] edu

KEYWORDS

experimental video, discursive formations, in Cairo

ABSTRACT

There are a series of questions surrounding the possibilities
and problems of doing experimental video work in Egypt, most of
the latter of which are socio-economically and culturally
determined.

In this paper I will contextualize the current situation of
experimental video-makers in Egypt, for whom there is very
little funding and state-sponsorship, and where there is a
serious economic recession that impacts the production of art. I
will refer to texts on the post-colonial subject in cinema by
Robert Stam and Ellah Shohat; different notions of "the global"
and culture by Arjun Appadurai; and the "dehumanization of art"
by Ortega Y Gasset, among other sources, in describing the
context of this techno-cultural scene within the larger context
of the aims of this colloquium.

I speculate that the reason why there is experimentation
happening at all in video, in Egypt, which for simplicity's sake
we can consider to be Cairo, while there is very little
discussion about aesthetics and practices within the medium, is
on the simplest level due to Cairo's timeless cultural
diversity. But there is another reason born of the positive and
negative effects of globalization: The proliferation of counter-
images from the new Arab satellite channels thrown into the
generally complex mix of poorly-managed development programs and
government corruption, with their impact on every strata of
social life.

Out of all this springs the artist, who, without my wishing to
attribute too great a supernatural power to him/her, is able to
more easily confront and possibly transcend borders and lines of
law (than the average citizen) and who often belongs to the
middle classes and above. Of further impact is the general
milieu of the cinema "crisis" with its effects on independent
cinema and video-makers; and the seemingly imminent rupture of
the "law of order" if the economic situation worsens and if the
political "balance" shifts from the hegemony of the corrupt
national Democratic Party to an Islamic Brotherhood rulership.

But transparent rigidity eventually breeds its own demise -
like other moments and experiences where rigid
social/cultural/religious and political systems have bred
generations of dissident voices (and eyes). Where does the role
of spirit come into this? Artists are using electronic means to
engage in their relationships to the city and notions of
identity and authority, both of which in this particular
situation are fragmented and reconsolidated.

I speculate that there is spirit enough in these connections,
practices and works, to affirm the role of the spirit in
artistic production, especially in these times of impending,
though perhaps slow-moving, change.

BIOGRAPHY

Samirah Alkassim is a professor of film studies teaching at the
American University in Cairo in the Department of Performing &
Visual Arts. She has written about Egyptian cinema (Schirmer
Encyclopedia of Film, Thomson & Gale), and Egyptian video art
(*Cracking the Monolith: Film and Video Art in Cairo*, New
Cinemas Journal of Contemporary Cinema, UK: Intellect); and
recently produced a 35-minute experimental documentary *from
here to there* (which takes a boy's imaginary space shuttle as
an allegory for the idea of technology in Cairo). She is
currently making a documentary about Palestinian identity in
Jordan.

_____________________________

NETWORK PROJECTS IN BRAZIL. GENTE (ONLINE) QUE FAZ

by Karla Schuch-Brunet
Photographer, Brazil
and Ph.D candidate
University Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain), Brazil
email [@] karlabrunet [dot] com
http://www.karlabrunet.com/cv_english.htm

KEYWORDS

network projects, social issues

ABSTRACT

Faced many times with a lack of knowledge, by foreigners and
even Brazilians, about the projects involving technology and
social issues in Brazil, I felt the necessity of writing a paper
on network projects in the country. It seems that information
from the North hemisphere reaches the South but it does not
happen often the other way around. So, the intention here is to
show abroad some projects done in Brazil.

The title, *Gente (online) que faz*, comes from short
documentary films showed on TV in Brazil called *Gente que faz*
(people that do). Every program presented someone, who, on their
own initiative, started any sort of project, had success and
helped others generate jobs or community work.

The phrase "Gente que faz" became an idiomatic expression that
got popular with the general public. It was accepted and used by
everybody to describe someone doing something better. The
expression was used many times as an opposition to people that
say. In Brazil, a lot of people say too much (especially those
in politics) and do little. "Gente que faz" were people who said
little and did much. They were the anonymous heroes of the
neighborhoods and villages.

Here "Gente (online) que faz" are projects on the net by people
from different backgrounds; they are getting together to
generate different work. They are trying to use the net
positively. It is what Jim Walch in *In the Net. An Internet
Guide to Activists* would term 'better use' of technology. Or
what Michael Heim in *The Cyberspace Dialectic* would call
virtual realism, a middle path between naïve realism and network
idealism.

There is a selection of some social and political network
projects. It has taken in consideration works that involve
collaboration, cooperation and participation above all. I
searched how people get together to construct something in the
net. How they come up with simple ideas to solve everyday
problems.

The projects are simple, they don't have the intention of
'changing the world', they are sometimes rethinking the way we
see and use media. Some of these works can be thought as
examples of Tactical Media. They are using the media in a
critical and oppositional way. "Recicle 1 Político" can be an
example of that, as many others.

"Gente (online) que faz" is about networking, about people
working together and contributing to produce something. It is
telepresence; it is getting assistance and collaboration of
people from other places. It is critical, it is opposition and
it is also about 'making'. These are the ideas that "Re-combo",
"Rede viva favela", "LigaNóis", "VivaSP", "Autolabs" among
others, are working on.

See a compilation of the projects in htp://www.networkbr.tk

Rede viva favela
http://www.redevivafavela.com.br/

VivaSP
http://www.vivasp.com/conteudo.asp?sid=3

Re:combo
http://www.recombo.art.br/

Rizoma
http://www.rizoma.net/hp6.htm

Metáfora
http://www.projetometafora.org/

LigaNóis
http://www.liganois.com.br/

Autolabs
http://www.midiatatica.org/autolabs.htm

CHD - Coletivo de Histórias Digitais
http://chd.memelab.org/

Ajuda Brasil
http://www.ajudabrasil.com.br/

CMI- Centro de Mídia Independente
http://www.brasil.indymedia.org/

BIOGRAPHY

Karla Schuch Brunet was born in Brazil in 1972. She has a
degree in Social Communication and another in Language. After
university, she got a grant to take her MFA (Master in Fine
Arts) in San Francisco, U.S.A., where she studied and worked in
digital imaging for three years.

Back in Brazil she participated in diverse projects involving
photography and the Internet. She also worked for a few years
doing commercial work on the web. Parallel to that, she
exhibited works such as "Aspire, Strive, Attain", "Corpo
Estranho", "Pessoas e Comércio no Centro de São Paulo",
"Errante", in San Francisco, São Paulo and Santa Maria.

When in São Paulo she taught multimedia students in
Universidade Anhembi Morumbi and ESPM (Escola Superior de
Propaganda e Marketing). Now, with another scholarship from the
Brazilian government, she lives in Spain where she is writing
her thesis on network projects.

_____________________________

ME DEA EX: INTERTWINING VIRTUAL AND REAL WORLD. TO FORM
IMMERSIVE/INTERACTIVE THEATRE

by Neora
Cyberculture explorer and VR worlds creator
16 Usishkin St
Tel-Aviv 62591
Israel
neoradotcom [@] gmail [dot] com
http://www.neora.com

KEYWORDS

interactive 3D, theatre, virtual reality

ABSTRACT

The intertwining of science, technology and art results in the
experience of the spirit (webster: the intelligent, immaterial
and immortal part of man). Thus, inspiration and spirituality,
in my approach, define the state of mind, the spirit, achieved
by interlacing the virtual and real worlds, to form some new
experience of knowledge and understanding. Such experience may
be complex/confusing; hence the way to reach clarity depends on
our willingness to abandon or redesign our traditional solid
grounds.

MEDEAEX is an adaptation of the classic Myth of Medea,
projected cross-culture wise on:
- The Middle-East Reality (Medea = Palestinian, Jason = Israeli
officer, Chorus = audience).
- The CyberSpace Virtual Reality (Medea is a hacker trying to
debug and redesign the script).

The MEDEAEX universe is a 3D environment that resides on the
Internet and is projected during the performance in 360 degrees
around the audience. It is a proactive environment, whereas
Medea is a live actress (Khaula ElHadj-Dibsi) all the other
characters are pre-programmed bot avatars, and the audience
(e.g. the global village) can interact and influence the flow
and ambience of the show, using SMS from their cellular phones.

The script is fully hyper-textual, based on the original texts
by Euripides, Heiner Muller and Seneca. It is written and
performed in English, Hebrew and Arabic, and so is the
background music cross-cultural and cross-lingual. The
exposition to each scene is the actual Middle East News (Medea -
betrayed, evicted, exiled, and after all sacrifices her children
by sending them as suicide bombers to Jerusalem). The chorus
lines are performed with text-to-speech mechanism, allowing
online and real time audience to add to their digital singing
data bank.

The MEDEAEX project has been performed in Schiller Festival
Germany, and Acco Festival in Israel in 2003. The technology and
mechanisms are now tested as environment for VR studies programs
and interactive storytelling projects, in Shenkar College and
other installations. It is fully documented (including technical
notes, images, critics, full script, video) in
http://www.medeaex.org.

BIOGRAPHY

Neora is the designer and producer of several advanced
interfaces for museum sites, academic and commercial web sites.
She is the creator of *Ayuni* - telepresence in Nablus, *NYSE*-
VR 3D interactive simulation of the trading floor, and of
*Medea_ex* (http://www.medeaex.org) - immersive/interactive
theatre play, which was performed in the Schiller Festival in
Manheim, Germany and Acco Theatre Festival 2003, Israel. Since
then, she's been experimenting with online worlds for remote
learning, and pro-active projected "cave-like installations" for
large audiences. Neora teaches cyberculture in Tel-aviv
University, and VR in Shenkar College of Engineering & Design.

Neora is involved with the open source movement in Israel, and
is the organizer of the first two hackers conferences in Israel
(http://www.y2hack4.org). In April 2000, Neora was chosen as one
of the 10 most influential people on the Israeli Internet
(published in Yediot Aharonot newspaper. The other nine figures
were tie/suited distinguished men). She got this title for the
insights in her novel, web works, several publications and
teachings - all of which were way ahead of her time.

In the last millenium, Neora was a UNIX programmer and PC
support team leader in Dec Ltd and CDC Ltd for several years,
and co-founder/co-developer in SGH, a startup in 1994, for multi-
user games. She's the author of *Digital Affair*(Hakibutz
Hameuchad Publishing, 1993), journalist, editor and columnist in
a few professional magazines and newspapers over the years.

_____________________________

THE INTERPRESENCE PROJECT

by Arthur Matuck
Professor Ph.D
MFA School of Communications and Arts
University of São Paulo (USP)
São Paulo, SP, CEP 05508-900
Brazil
arturmatuck [@] terra [dot] com [dot] br

KEYWORDS

telepresence, experience, intercommunication

ABSTRACT

RESEARCH PROJECT FOR TELEACTIVE HUMAN LANGUAGE

Interpresence exercises the language of mediatecture to propose
planetary coalescence through cyberspace. It favours worldwide
integration allowing for interactive television and the
experience of telebrations between distant cities.

Interpresence is defined as mutually sensed human telepresence.
As a project Interpresence merges telecommunication,
architecture, design, media arts, performance, television, and
programming, with implications for cultural studies,
anthropology, contemporary theory, epistemology and
psychoanalysis.

Its curatorial concept purports the telepresential encounter
providing for the valorization of the Other through mutual
knowledge and co-authored aesthetic propositions.

The envisioned systems would enable local participants to
interact with remote audiences, they would see and be seen,
listen and be listened, experiencing interpresence.

THE INTERPRESENCE VISION

Interpresence represents an alternative global television. It
introduces a political proposition, claiming a right to
communicate through technologies that only have to be
reconfigured to provide for interpresential experiences.

The long-term social design involves the gradual creation of a
worldwide network of community or university-operated
telesystems. Design and implementation will be carried out
through web-based property-free interchange triggering
continuous co-evolution.

MEDIATECTURE FOR TELEACTIVITY

Mediatectural projects for terminals should permit diverse
modes of long distance interaction. They were conceived for
bilateral and multilateral intercommunication. Teleperformance
terminals consist of interpresential units integrating
distributed screens with video cameras.

A vertical system allows for conversational interactions, while
a horizontal one enables table mode interactions. Multiple-
connection terminals provide interaction with many remote
locations. Specially conceived audience spaces enable remote
audioviewing of interactions occuring at teleperformance spaces.

MEDIA DESIGN FOR CO-EVOLUTIONARY TELEACTIVITY

An intercreative process will be gradually extended through net-
collaboration. Concepts, designs, projects, propositions will be
available as released information, as common property, providing
for a worldwide collective planning, a linux-like co-
evolutionary development of the project design.

A permanent webpresence would enable long-term quality
interaction between participating artists and institutions.
Propositions for projects, programs, events and performances
will trigger long-distance interconnections.

Intervisions, teleactions and videologues would result from
community and artistic initiatives supported by institutional
agreements. Subsequent coordinated planning and networking would
entail a diversity of increasingly creative long-distance human
encounters.

Those connections will form an invisible web of creative
collaboration, and mutual responsibility providing the human
structure needed for the unfolding of quality projects and
events. The network should entail the co-creation of scripts,
technology evaluation, co-planning and finally the actualization
of teleactivities.

RESEARCH FOR INTERCOMMUNICATION

Research for interpresence will be centered upon alternative
intercommunication. Proposals for computer-supported systems
enabling understanding between speakers of different languages
will be encouraged.

Software and media design can also be articulated to program
intertranslations between different sign systems allowing, for
instance, tactile stimuli to be remotely sensed as heat
formations varying in form and intensity.

Research can also take a different direction. Specially
designed software could morph human traces indicating the
possibility of artificiality, not only of realism, in the
experience of telepresence.

BIOGRAPHY
Artur Matuck has been an assistant professor at the School of
Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo since
1984. In São Paulo, Brazil, Europe and North America, he has
worked as teacher, researcher, writer, visual artist, video
producer, performer and more recently as a designer of teleart
events and interactive sites. Since 1977, Mr. Matuck has been
delivering conferences and workshops on New Media Arts,
Interactive Television, Telecommunication Arts, Performance
project Art, Computer-Generated Writing, and Intellectual
Property issues. In 1990, he was awarded a prize in the video-
art category from the São Paulo Art Critics Association. At the
same year, he completed a comprehensive study on the history of
video art and interactive television which resulted in a
doctoral thesis: "The Dialogical Potential of Television".
During 1991, as research fellow at Carnegie Mellon University,
Pittsburgh, he produced Reflux, a worldwide Telecommunication
Arts, one of the very first artistic experiments to call for
collaborative networking activities. In 1995, as post graduate
fellow at the University of Florida, he starts experimenting
with text-reprocessing programming. Landscript, a web-based tool
for person-computer co-authored textual creation was selected to
participate in the 25th edition of the Biennial International of
São Paulo, in 2002, in the category of net-art. Artur Matuck is
the creator of Semion - an international symbol for released
information, a theoretical and conceptual contribution to the on-
going debates on intellectual property rights and information
dissemination in the electronic age. His most recent endeavours
involves planning videocommunication and web-based multicultural
exchanges between artists, researchers and individuals from
different countries and cultures.

_____________________________

GATES - BEYOND NET-ART: REAL THINGS ACROSS CYBERSPACE

by Caterina Davinio
Media Artist, Italy
Via Sassi 10
23900 LECCO (LC)
Italy
davinio [@] tin [dot] it
http://www.xoomer.virgilio.it/cprezi/caterinadav.html
KEYWORDS

Communic/Action, network, poetry

ABSTRACT

I have been working with new media in Italy since the early
90s, focusing on relationship among word, writing, and new
media.

Since 1998 my work appeared in the Internet with collaborative
projects: *Karenina.it*, still in course, *Parallel Action -
Bunker*, online poetry event done for the 49th Biennale di
Venezia, *Paint from Nature*, *Global Poetry*, both created in
2002, and the last project, *GATES Beyond Net-Art*, in 2003,
dedicated to Pierre Restany.

In all these projects there is an increasing relationship
between one or more *real* events, and a virtual event online
made of e-communication. The reality coefficient has grown
progressively in these collaborative works, in polemic against
net art as use of software for creating spectacular web pages
and net-objects.

In my works net-art is network, performance in network of
connected artists, poets, critics, theoreticians. *Gates*, as
*Global Poetry* in 2002, is a planetary performance that
happened contemporaneously in numerous places of the world, in
collaboration with experimental artists, who were in the spirit
of this totally new experimental adventure, something that was
never realized before. These artists created a node of the
project in their countries, using also exchange and circulation
of materials among the nodes; the circulated materials were
poems, digital art, photos and video of real events, but also
discourses, theories, critical interventions. Every node was a
node of the performance, but also a performance and a meeting in
itself: this means that to everybody in this collaborative
action, we asked to involve other persons.

I have been going in this direction of art as communic-action
and relationship since my first net project: *Karenina.it<http://Karenina.it>-
Poetry in Phatic Function* - the first Italian website dedicated
to experimental poetry - described with a definition by
Jakobson, that calls phatic the use of the language that has the
finality to maintain open and operative the communication
channel between the interlocutors. The idea was to open every
limit between word and visual art, critic, theories of art, and
art, by creating a space of meeting among artists. This space
was at the beginning virtual, as it was at that time still new
to consider a web page a "space" to explore, where to be present
and act. By becoming, during the 90s, this conception normal,
acquired, net-art was progressively in the consideration of many
artists a run to the up to date software, for creating
spectacular websites and pages. For this reason it was important
to clarify the original sense of net art as art in network, with
its central aspects of communic-action. *Karenina.it* uses ready
made found in the world wide web and some techniques of visual
poetry, and Futurism, but also focuses on the matter of an art
piece in the web, that is deeply linguistic, because digital or
digitalized, and because made of data transfer. To these aspects
of digital art as linguistic art, net-art adds the one of
communication and network, typical of the Internet. This is the
idea on which projects such as *Global Poetry* and *GATES* are
based on.

The Italian node of GATES was at D'Ars Gallery on 18 December
2003. Other nodes were in Chile, Spain, Brazil, United States,
United Kingdom, Germany, Lebanon, Turkey, Morocco, Greece,
Venezuela, and in other countries. Exploring the concept of
remote presence and action, and continuous passage form real to
virtual and vice versa, using the surface between real and
virtual as sensible semiotic area, in the context of relational
art, e-Fluxus, Situationism. The call was directed to
experimental artists and poets, critics, *e-post-Fluxus-
casseurs, post-post duchampists*

BIOGRAPHY

Caterina Davinio, Italian techno-artist and writer, experiments
on non-conventional solutions in computer art, net-art, video,
digital visual poetry, Internet-performance, video-performance,
and also involves herself in computer printings exhibitions,
paintings, and artist's books, using writing and digital
techniques.

Among the pioneers of Italian digital art, she is experienced
in curatorial and consultant activity in international
festivals. Her works have been presented in more than 80
exhibitions worldwide; we recall the participation in the Venice
Biennial in 1997, 1999, 2001, in the context of new media art
and experimental poetry festivals, and in net and Fluxus events
of the 50th Venice Biennial.

Author of the essay *Techno-Poetry and Virtual Realities*
(Mantoa, IT, 2002), first Italian book on this topic, and of the
novel *Color Color* (Pasian di Prato, UD, IT, 1998), she has
published articles, poems, and digital works in international
magazines and journals of the avant-garde.

Since 1998 her work has appeared on the Internet with
collaborative net-art/poetry projects and events, among them
"Karenina.it <http://Karenina.it>", a point of reference for the
avant-garde, *Global
Poetry* (UNESCO, 2002), and *GATES*(2003).

For a more detailed biobibliography:
http://space.tin.it/arte/cprezi/caterinadav.html

_____________________________

MEDITERRANEAN MAPS

by Paolo Atzori
Communication architect and video-stage designer

and

Nicole Leghissa
Filmmaker and director, Italy
atzorman [@] tiscali [dot] it

KEYWORDS

contemporary Mediterranean Rim, mapping, networks

ABSTRACT

In this particular historical moment it is fundamental to
overcome stereotypes and misunderstandings that characterize the
mutual relationship between the Islamic and Western worlds,
mainly breaking the reciprocal cultural isolation.

A consistent way to approach the problem is to create
communication and shared knowledge channels between these
cultural realities, taking a clear position against the
ideological conflict between West and Islam, North and South of
the world, and reaffirming the values of mutual respect and
diversities' confrontation.

*Mediterranean Maps* consists of a multicultural and
interdisciplinary grouping of scientific and cultural
institutions of the South and North of the Mediterranean, aimed
to research and give expression to a mutual knowledge space: A
multicultural, hyper-textual and dynamic Atlas of the
contemporary Mediterranean rim that could be continuously
updated and freely consultable on line.

The group will include artists, scientists and cultural
operators, whose mission is to bridge the knowledge gap between
North and South of the Mediterranean area.

Each partner will propose a specific research/action plan
creating a sub-network in different locations and promote the
formation of multimedia teams of young professionals, located in
every major area covered by the action.

During the development of the researches/actions, all
individuals and institutions belonging to the different sub-
networks will communicate online in a transversal way through
the "collaborative platform" specifically designed for this
project to archive different kind of documents: Texts, notes,
graphics, pictures, interviews, short video reports, graphics,
maps, archive images, sounds, etc.

MAP-MAKING

Until a few years ago, cartography representation has been
exclusively static. The project *Mediterranean Maps* envisions a
cartographic model that could integrate dynamic processes and
automatic sampling by the application of information technology
to the data patterns relative to geographical and cultural
representation.

The maps represent a contemporary view of the Mediterranean
area visualized by a digital interface that will enable access
and supply indications on possible knowledge courses on a
digital sea, navigable in linear and transversal ways.

THE LABORATORY BOAT

A geographical route on the Mediterranean basin will be drawn
to represent the physical link among the different researchers
and participating countries. Significant ports will represent
the local attractors, where specific actions and special public
events will take place at the landing of the boat.

The boat, equipped with advanced communication technologies,
will host a crew of multimedia and communication experts,
scientists and artists, writer and poets, and will originate the
map-making process of the Mediterranean Sea. The journey is an
exploration, a re-discovery of this region.

The travel itself will be a source of data coming from
observations of the natural environment, concerning, for
example, biology, fluid dynamics, ecology, but also social
relationship on a mobile micro-environment. The boat will
perform a transversal data collection, traveling along a course
unifying all participating Mediterranean ports.

This lab-boat, besides being a creative and research forge, is
a logistic support to install the public telematic stations (or
lighthouses) in the ports. These stations will become the
material places from where to launch the data on lines and where
to freely join the net global information.

TELEMATIC LIGHTHOUSE

It is a public wireless interzone for global networking
communication implemented on a transportable architecture,
planned with environmentally conscious design that minimizes
sustenance or resource consumption. Its main purpose is to give
shape to the process of communication characteristic of the
information age, where communication equals transportation of
the mind, establishing dedicated channels of the "MED MAP"
network. Its equipment and architecture will be used also for
displaying the public event.

_____________________________

MAPPING A THESIS IN SYSTEMS THEORY IN NEW MEDIA ART

by Jane Cole Forrester Winne
Independent MLS Program
University of Maine, Orono, USA
Owen Smith Chair
Jane_Forrester [@] umit [dot] maine [dot] edu

ABSTRACT

My thesis is in Systems Theory, and this particular
presentation displayed through power point, one project in my
studies that utilized intuitive and cognitive thought to "map"
areas of study in my thesis as mixed media art. The visuals
represent interdisciplinary areas of research covering time and
space of self directed inquiry as maps.

Artworks of my own creation, giving 'voice' to the "mapping
out" of my thesis, alone or incorporated with images that depict
"maps" represented systems of interest in varying degrees.
Accompanying this presentation was a book created for the
project to hold text and scans of the full compliment of art
works.

The presentation was also a collaborative, incorporating work
from two undergraduate students, one concerned with musical
sound and one performing spoken word of her own writing. I am
concerned with exploring the form of systems to discover
structure, in part, that may reveal patterns that seem to
support the life force. I am looking for what are called in some
disciplines 'emergent properties', in others, 'evolutionary'
traits, and still others protective or conserving strategies in
cultures.

I have a wide topical range, including the Ayurvedic and Iching
systems, post modern artists/philosophers (fluxus, and Henri
Bergson) Ancient cultures spanning from the British Isles to
northern China, India to the Mediterranean. Ecological systems
theory, the Internet, its history, directions, and alternative
economies.

_____________________________

A UNIVERSAL MOTHER TONGUE

by Celestino Soddu and Enrica Colabella
Director of Generative Design Lab Chair of annual international
Generative Art Conference Coordinator of EC program "Euro-China
Exchange: Technology and Culture of Generative Design Approach"
DiAP, Politecnico di Milano University, Italy
DIAP, Politecnico di Milano University
Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32
20133 Milano
Italy
celestino [dot] soddu [@] polimi [dot] it
http://www.celestinosoddu.com
http://www.generativeart.com
http://www.generativedesign.com

KEYWORDS

generative art, codes of harmony, universal language

ABSTRACT

IDENTITY RISES FROM A SOUNDLESS SITE, BECAUSE BIRDS HAVE NO TEARS

A universal language talks as a mother tongue.

Generative Design is the idea realized as a genetic Code of
artificial events.

This generative project is a concept-software that works
producing three-dimensional unique and unrepeatable scenarios as
infinite expressions of an idea that rises from a subjective
visionary world.

This approach opens a new era in design: The challenge of a new
Natural science of Artificial ware like mirror of human
uniqueness. Once more man imitates Nature, as in the act of
making Art. This is like a universal language. As DNA in Nature
the genetic code of artificial ware identifies a species of
objects. So we can design the idea able of generating infinite
variations.

ARS SINE SCIENTIA NIHIL EST

This was an enthusiastically creative operation discovering the
cultural approach of Renaissance, able to combine Science and
Art. We define a process as a code of Harmony that identifies a
representation of our subjective vision of a possible world. The
code of Harmony, like all codes, contains some rules that trace
certain forms of behaviors. Therefore it is not only a sequence,
a database of events, of forms, but a transforming patterns
definition: the performing from what exists into the complexity
of visionary becoming. The design act changes from forming to
transforming, because each form is only one of possible parallel
results of the same idea.

RUN, LITTLE BOY, FIND THE RIVER IN YOUR MIND

This design challenge started up in 1987 with the realization
of Generative Projects of architecture, historical cities,
industrial design and visions of Art from Piranesi, Picasso and
Van Gogh.

Today these projects are upgraded as extremely complex and
directly operative as interfaces with intelligent productive
systems.

After 200 years of the industrial era of mass cloned objects,
the "unique" object becomes a new answer to the human needs to
live in a world where each artificial object can mirror the
uniqueness of every person. A mother tongue can generate a
universal code. By working in advanced technological fields such
as non-linear dynamic systems, artificial life and artificial
intelligence, the Generative Design finds again the notions of a
new aesthetic and ethical pleasure of rediscovering the
processes and characters of Nature in an epoch marked by
repeated attempts at the cloning of natural beings.

BIOGRAPHY

Celestino Soddu, 1945, registered architect, is tenure
Architectural Design professor and director of Generative Design
Lab at Politecnico di Milano University, Honorary professor at
Xi'an University and Shanghai University, Chair of Generative
Art International Annual Conference. His architectural projects,
realized like AI/AL generative tools, can generate endless
different 3D models of architectures/environments characterized
by the same artificial DNA. His generative design projects are a
useful tool to manage the new intelligent industrial production
of each-one-different objects by automatic reprogramming of
robots. He has presented his generative works in books,
articles, exhibitions and conferences all over the world.

_____________________________

THE RELIGIOUS MODELS OF GLOBALISM

by Harry Rand
Senior Curator, Cultural History
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington DC, USA
AHB 4100, MRC 616
Smithsonian Institution
PO Box 37012
Washington DC 20013-7012
U.S.A.
RandH [@] nmah [dot] si [dot] edu
KEYWORDS
globalism, art-science, religion

ABSTRACT

The Church pioneered so many aspects of modern globalism that
we should heed the reactions of earlier peoples faced with
challenges to their values - challenges every bit as monumental
as confrontations with modern globalism. The Church first
understood the potency of: brand name, trademark, distinctive
architecture and presentation imposed on indigenous cultures, a
franchisor's location analysis and local market demographics for
a franchise outlet (the diocesan system), a mixed formula of buy-
in costs that balance local capital with distant management and
oversight, the value of uniforms and scripted exchanges with
clients, quality control from a centralized headquarters, and
profit-sharing; all of this is now associated with commercial
globalization. The Church's aesthetic position aimed to link the
planet into a network of identical communities.

The cultural reaction to this system's rise is still producing
a dialogue across cultures about the multiple contexts of
commercial and religious globalization, which is a discussion of
value.

The Church's franchising did not first arise from commercial
globalization that overspread national boundaries to create
supranational loyalties. The idea of a planetary consciousness
and cultural homogenization did not arise from the urge toward a
universal empire of assembled landmasses - Mongol, Roman,
British, etc., in which subject peoples were encouraged to
maximize productivity. The move toward the omni-pervasive (now
found in Islam as a kind of corporate globalism) derived from a
Christian worldview that dared call itself, in its very infancy,
"catholic", universal. No Shinto, Jew, Jain, or pagan had ever
thought this way. Globalism is cultural not economic.

Before science could arise, one presupposition distinguished it
from the technologies found in every high civilization: that the
world was governed by a unified field of forces unrelated to the
caprices of multiple deities: theology.

Theology is not universal, although technology is (beginning
with language as an amelioration of the environment); the
Church's unintentional gift of theology allowed science to
arise, to de-throne the Church.

While theology was a precondition for science, the two have
long since ceased to engage in constructive debate as artists
and scientists strive to build the life-enhancing cultural
developments that link, becoming a planetary context. The
franchising Church continues to diffuse a unified world without
warring gods, divine whimsy, or fate; this (inadvertently)
uniformitarian hypothesis is the predicate upon which modern
physics developed its radical cosmology that must reconcile the
micro to the macroscopic.

The conjoining of "art, science, and spirituality" assumes they
are sundered. Contemporary science does not need to "reconnect"
to spirituality, as they were never disconnected, despite
appearances. The present challenge transcends organized religion
to regain the generative emotions of awe, curiosity, respect,
and diligence that initiated and permeate modern egalitarian
society. The religious (distinguished from organized religion)
never abandoned science, and still promises a planet-wide
ideology resembling classically optimistic and ambitious
modernism.

BIOGRAPHY

Trained as an art historian, Harry Rand has explored long-term
patterns of human behavior as evidenced in the ways that art,
science, folklore, and religion exchange ideas and shape each
other. His publications in this pursuit include threescore
museum catalogues, over a dozen books (author or co-author) and
over fifty articles or published letters.

_____________________________

INTRODUCTION TO SESSION 2

In Session 2, the theme was Art/Science/Spirituality relations:
The heritage of the Arabian-Spanish world. We feature four
abstracts from this session, which looked at the following
questions: How did these cultures consider these relationships?
Does the triad make sense in these cultures? How did they
integrate these relations?
_____________________________

THE UBIQUITOUS DOT IN COSMIC JUSTICE

by Ahmad Mostafa
Artist, U.K.
Fe-Noon Ahmed Moustafa (UK) Ltd
5-9 Creekside
Deptford
London
SE8 4SA
fenoon [@] btinternet [dot] com
http://www.fenoon.com

KEYWORDS

geometry, Islam, spirituality

ABSTRACT

The motto adopted in 500 BC or thereabouts by the Pythagorean
brotherhood, which translates roughly as 'a diagram and a step
higher, not a diagram and a penny', tells us that the
Pythagoreans viewed geometrical diagrams as embodying truthful
knowledge capable of sustaining man's spiritual nourishment and
showing him the way to rectitude.

By the same token the early Muslim scholars believed that
geometry is a divine language articulating the coercive laws,
which govern all aspects of existence, hence they were motivated
to translate most if not all the Pythagorean legacy into Arabic.
It is this legacy, which inspired the Abbasid Wazir Ibn Muqla
(866-940 AD/ 272-328 AH) to devise the theory of proportional
script, an epoch-making system which made it possible for the
Arabic script to assume its rightful role as the prime means of
expression in the visual arts of Islam. Yet there is no detailed
study of this topic existing in print so far, and scholarly
attempts at developing a full grasp of the principles involved
have for a long time remained inconclusive. I have been
extremely fortunate in uncovering the true nature of Ibn Muqla's
theory after 14 years of research, which resulted in a doctoral
thesis entitled 'The Scientific Foundation of Arabic
Lettershapes'.

Since time is too short for an exhaustive and comprehensive
analysis of Ibn Muqla's theory my presentation will focus on the
square-shaped dot, the basic unit of measurement in Ibn Muqla's
system. It firstly requires the nib of the pen to be cut at an
exact angle and conditions the correct manner of holding the
pen. Secondly, it determines the surface area and proportions of
the individual letter-shapes with respect to each other. Yet the
significance of this dot exceeds its role as a measuring device
in both 2- and 3-dimensional space. At a conceptual level, the
relationship between dot and letter-shapes in Ibn Muqla's system
appears intended to mirror that between unity and multiplicity
in divine creation, an image taken up and fully explored in
later Islamic mystical thought.

Indeed, the nature of the dot can be seen as instrumental in
explaining further the inner meaning of concepts such as
'Justice', 'Infinity', 'Harmony', and 'Oneness', which reside at
the confluence of the rational and the spiritual.

It will thereby be shown that Ibn Muqla's achievement of
constructing the Arabic script in accordance with certain
geometrical rules makes an implicit statement about the
metaphysical nature and function of writing, which came to be of
abiding significance for the entire artistic tradition of Islam.
It will thus become evident that Ibn Muqla's theory, once fully
understood, has the potential of clarifying the manner in which
the Arabic alphabet came to represent what may be identified as
The Structural Morphology in the Artistry of Islam.

BIOGRAPHY

Ahmed Moustafa is an artist and scholar of international repute
and a leading authority on Arabic art and design. Born in
Alexandria, Egypt, in 1943, he was initially trained as an
artist in the neoclassical European tradition. Drawing his
inspiration primarily from Renaissance masters, he subsequently
rediscovered his lslamic roots, and his work is now almost
exclusively devoted to abstract compositions inspired by texts
from the Holy Qur'an.

Ahmed Moustafa gained a BA in Fine Arts with Highest National
Distinction in 1966 from the University of Alexandria, where he
remained as a lecturer in painting and stage design in the
Faculty of Fine Arts until 1973.

In 1974, he was awarded a scholarship to pursue advanced
studies in printmaking at the Central School of Art and Design
in London, where he obtained his MA with Distinction in 1978,
and where he lectured in Arabic calligraphy from 1980 to 1982.

In 1989, he was awarded a Ph.D by the Council for National
Academic Awards for his work on the Scientific Foundation of
Arabic Lettershapes, undertaken at the Central School of Art and
Design in collaboration with the British Museum.
This painstaking research over 11 years has illuminated the
geometric principles underpinning the visual harmony of all
Islamic art and architecture.

Ahmed Moustafa has lived and worked in London since 1974 and
directs the "Fe-Noon Ahmed Moustafa - Research Centre for Arab
Art and Design", which he established in 1983. He has taught and
lectured in many parts of the world, and is currently a visiting
professor at the Prince of Wales' Institute of Architecture,
London, the University of Westminster, London, and the Faculty
of Fine Arts, University of Alexandria, Egypt.

Ahmed Moustafa is a consultant in Islamic art and design on
many private projects throughout the Middle East. These have
included tapestries for the Royal Pavilion, King Abdul Aziz
Airport in Jeddah, and the Royal Reception at King Khald Airport
in Riyadh. He has also designed several new Arabic typefaces as
well as corporate identity programmes and logotypes for numerous
organizations.

_____________________________

LA METAFORA ANDALUSI: LA UTOPIA NECESARIA

by Emilio Gonzalez Ferrin
Professor of Islamic Sociology, University of Seville, Spain
KEYWORDS
Al-Andalus, Islam, cultural transfer

ABSTRACT

There is Julian the traitor, and there is Julian the
vindicator. They are two previous nametags. Two visions of a
same process, from the same inevitable essence: the passage and
importance of a part of History. However, these two visions
cannot be combined or eliminated, at times they blow this way
and that, subject to the burdens of time and circumstance. Both
visions refer back to a specific event: the irrefutable
existence of an entity called Al-Andalus. The above-mentioned
Julian, traitor or vindicator, was supposedly an important
person in the Ceuta of 711, the year of the Islamic invasion of
Visigothic Spain. According to the chronicles, he paved the way
for the invasion.

From here on, the significance of what happened is usually
eclipsed by its symbolic value and contemporary standing. The
History of Spain is not revised with every wave of Colombian,
Peruvian and Ecuatorian immigration, but it is with regard to
North Africa. Geography becomes earth-based, ideologies become
Africanised. However what is more striking is that the symbolic
eclipse is not only a product of the present day. The narrow
vision of the Andalus reality, its Alleged presences or
absences, has converted it into one of the most interesting
interpretations of the Andalus and Spanish historical evolution
in general. The Spanish Ballads describe it in plain language:
the Sarracens came and gave us a beating. God help the bad when
they are more numerous than the good. This idea of us being the
good does not usually dominate the description of previous
invasions like those of the Romans, the Carthaginians or
Visigoths, or the Phoenician, Celtic or Byzantinian settlements.
Not that our journey through the routes of Islam in Andalucia
will lack certain interpretations. This is because there is an
interesting game of differing opinions which rarely coincide and
that convert the studies on Al-Andalus in an arena of varying
positions. This is normally incompatible with science, but
curiously does generate an enormous amount of scientific studies.

Al-Andalus represented more than the geographical half of the
Iberian Peninsula during a large part of what we know as the
Middle Ages. In fact, it records to a large extent the dating
and classification of the ages in Spanish History. On the other
hand, it occupied the total of present day Andalucia, to which
it gave its name.

If we pay heed to the treatment of present day processes, and
even of some fairly recent in time, we can see how the memory or
reminders of Al-Andalus does not leave the same kind of trace as
that of similar "civilising" groups. As we have already
deducted an induced nostalgia exists - probably merciful - that
sees it like a blissful dream, which is more or less in
disagreement with present day opinion.

And, on the other hand, there also exists a selective austere
pride that denies we could have been any other way - in reality,
we are different. A people's history is its DNA chain. At this
point, the purpose of our journey along the routes of Islam in
Andalucia becomes clear, from a comfortably distant point of
view. The load, as we said, is quite light: historical processes
do not end in a moral or with some kind of warning to
navigators. They are simply included, make the present possible,
and mediatize the future among other numerous conditions.

However, given that this future is ramified, faced with
uncertainty we tend to dwell too long upon determined elements
from former times between dreams nourished from the past. And
what is worse, it causes us to try to establish canons: to purge
and trim a preferred line of thought, which we want to be
continuous. In reality, all we are achieving is to undo the
future, with the impoverishing counterweight of denying that we
are all that we were and that - as the perfect crime does not
exist - all that is buried in the past prepares its revenge.

No historic event of the past failed, died, or triumphed
entirely. The elements are submerged and are included in
subsequent events. Is this not the paragraph that should cover,
for example, the way in which Thomas of Aquino translated
Aristoteles from the Christian point of view, in what today is
known as Italy using the texts of an Andalusian - Averroes - to
which he had access through Islamic Sicily? But the example
adapts itself to that idea, of the possible cultural
impoverishment in the biased analysis: is it scientific,
intellectually valid, or humanly acceptable to believe in a
Thomas of Aquino in succeeding generations? Is it not clearer
to see History as a permanent logical crisis of adaptation to
the environment submerged in the circumstances that give rise to
the present day, built on the remains of the past?

BIOGRAPHY

Emilio González Ferrin is a Full Profesor of Islamic Sociology
at the University of Seville. He is currently heading a research
project for the Centra Foundation (Council of Andalucia) on Al-
Andalus, halfway between East and West, which is essential
material for the objectives of the foundation which has just
been created and which he chairs: Gordion (East and West).

He has a Ph.D in Euro-Arab dialogue. He has had numerous
articles and six books published on the subject of cultural
cooperation with the Arab world, with titles including *Diálogo
Euro-Arabe* (1997), (Euro-Arab Dialogue), *Salvaciones
Orientales* (1999), (Eastern Salvations), and *La palabra
descendida* (The word handed down), an intellectual reading of
the Koran that was awarded the "Premio Internacional de Ensayo
Jovellanos 2002" (The International Jovellanos Essay Award). He
has been a visiting researcher at the universities of Louvain,
London, Amman, Damascus and Cairo.

He is a jury member for Arts for the Prince of Asturias Awards,
and in the last edition he defended the candidacy of the
Moroccan writer Fátima Mernissi, who achieved the award together
with Susan Sontag.

_____________________________

LOS CONCEPTOS DEL TIEMPO Y DEL ESPACIO EN EL LENGUAJE DE IBN '
ARABI:
UN ENFOQUE LINGÜÍSTICO

by Leila Khalifa
Doctor en historia y civilización de la Escuela de Estudios
Superiores en Ciencias Sociales (París). Miembro del laboratorio
"Estudio y edición de textos de la Edad Media Sección - Arte y
Literatura de Occidente-Oriente" (UPRESA 8092) del CNRS y de la
Universidad de París IV-Sorbonne, France

KEYWORDS

Ibn 'Arabi, Islam, spirituality

ABSTRACT

Ibn 'Arabi se sitúa indiscutiblemente en el corazón del
rencuentro entre la ciencia, la espiritualidad y lo imaginario,
en tierra del Islam. La exploración de su concepto del mundo
puede revelarse fecunda. Nuestra exposición consta de tres
partes. En la primera, presentamos la figura de Ibn ' Arabi, al
cheik al-akbar, su vida y su obra, así como las grandes líneas
de su doctrina (en particular sobre la problemática de la
unicidad divina, ahadiyya y wahdaniyya). Mostraremos,
igualmente, la influencia de su enseñanza en el mundo musulmán,
en Europa, en Japón y en Estados Unidos. En la segunda parte,
procederemos al análisis lingüístico del vocabulario de la
temporalidad (waqt, zaman, 'asr, dahr) y de la espacialidad
(makan, hayyiz, mawdi', mawqa'). Profundizaremos en el uso de
algunos de estos términos interesantes (miqat, por ejemplo,
significa a la vez el espacio, el tiempo y el acto). En la
tercera parte, examinaremos este rico vocabulario en el contexto
propio del lenguaje y de la perspectiva akbariana,
esencialmente a través del futuhat al-makkiyya.

BIOGRAPHY

Doctor en historia y civilización de la Escuela de Estudios
Superiores en Ciencias Sociales (París). Miembro del laboratorio
"Estudio y edición de textos de la Edad Media Sección - Arte y
Literatura de Occidente-Oriente" (UPRESA 8092) del CNRS y de la
Universidad de París IV-Sorbonne. Presentó y defendió una tesis
sobre Ibn 'Arabi en el 2000, publicada con el título *Ibn Arabi.
L'Initation à la Futuwwa* (ed.Albouraq, Paris, 2001). Continuó
sus estudios de psicología y de historia en la Universidad de
Jordania (Aman) y en la Universidad de Nottingham (Gran Bretaña).


_____________________________

PENSAMIENTO LINEAL Y CONOCIMIENTO: UN PROCESO ALQUIMICO

by Francesca Del Carmen Sanchez
Anthropologist, Spain
Apartado de Correos 3030
C.P.: 04006
Almería, Spain
rasul [@] cajamar [dot] es
KEYWORDS
Sufism, history, Al-Andalus

ABSTRACT

The origins go back to the doctrines of DulNun the Egyptian,
taken to the peninsula by Ibn Masarra, influenced by al Gazel
the Persian, renewed by Ibn al Arif from Almeria and brought
back again to East by Ibn Arabi from Murcia.

We find the clearest symptom of the continuity of the spirit of
Ibn Masarra in the bosom of the peninsular Sufism, in the huge
influence made by the esoteric, mystical cultural focus of the
School of Almeria. This city, inheritor of the School of
Pechina, turned to be a seedbed of heterodox Sufism of masarri
filiation.

At the beginnings of the 12th century under the rule of
Almoravides, Almeria becomes the spiritual metropolis of the
peninsula. Here it was where the first and only shout of
collective protest was heard against the burning of the books of
al Gazel the Persian, which were described as godless by the
Alfaquies of Cordoba. During the lifetime of this author his
main works Makacid and Tehafort were burnt by an official decree
of 1109, enacted by the Almoravid Sultan Yusuf ben Taxufin.

The Alfaquies of Almeria, led by el Berchi from Berja, drafted
a fatwa of protest, which blamed the behaviour of Aben Hamin,
Cadi of Cordoba.

This mystic flowing returned, in the 13th century (four
centuries after the arrival of Ibn Masarra) with Ibn Arabi from
Murcia to East where it came from, but modified in the batini
sense. The germs of Sufi Pantheism of Ibn al Arif spread in this
way to the furthest countries of Islam (Turkey, Persia and
India) contributing to the spreading of "Ixraquuuies" in East
Islam. This has been the most plentiful source of inspiration
where all philosophers, especially the Persian ones, have gone
to slake their thirst of religious ideals, who longed for an
explanation of cosmos. Therefore nowadays the voluminous books
of Ibn Arabi, inspired by the School of Almeria of Ibn al Arif
are reissued constantly in Cairo, Constantinople and Mumbay. The
fundamental principles of this school and the symbols of the
language are used nowadays in Sufi vocabulary. Even more, the
orders and guilds of East are still being inspired in the
original rules of the School of Almeria.

The last great known master of this school is Abu Isaac Ibrahim
ibn al Havy from Almeria. He was born in Velefique (Almeria) in
1158 and passed away in Marrakesh in 1219. He was a first rate
mystic poet. His great great grandson Abu I Barakat says that
some masters told him that Abu Isaac managed to join 40000
disciples and opened a hall with this invocation: "Lord, make us
look for shelter in You and be our most beautiful friendship
until the day You send us death. Hidden, concealed, satisfied
with your blessing, we will run to You the day we go to meet
You".

This invocation was the destiny of this school, to perpetuate
until today stealthily in these Andalusian lands, overcoming
obstacles and changes, covering the language and the apparently
easiest customs: food, clothes, words, songs, children´s games.

________________________________________________________________

BONUS SECTION
________________________________________________________________

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MELILLA CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS
by Chris Alexander

I was extremely happy when I first heard about this conference,
from Roger, and was excitedly looking forward to the
discussions. I am profoundly sorry that ill health and stress,
caused by the final countdown of production on the four books of
*The Nature of Order*, now finally completed, has prevented me
from joining you at our conference. I am especially sorry, too,
that I shall miss the rich union of many cultures, a subject in
itself dear to my heart for decades, and which I was so much
looking forward to.

I thought, at least I could give you a summary of the remarks I
would have made, and that these few pages might be distributed
to all of you, in the hope that through this method I can at
least join you in the dialogue.

For nearly 30 years, now, I have been working on *The Nature of
Order*, - an attempt to bring a fusion of the scientific world
view, with an adequate view of art and architecture - not merely
a theoretical view, or the kind of thing an analytical or
critical thinker might produce, but rather something that
directly affects the life and day-to-day work of a working
artist, like myself - yet simultaneously is clearly expressed in
terms that physicists and biologists can appreciate, benefit
from - so that in some way our picture of the universe can be
altered by this new picture.

Above all, none of this can work unless it is seen in a
context, which admits God - unrestricted wholeness - as the
underpinning of all that is seen and experienced. I certainly
do not mean, by this, adherence to any particular religion or
religious tradition - but rather, it means that the life of
objects and buildings and places, and our inner experience of
self, all of which we experience in art, can be understood both
in terms congruent with science as we presently know it, and
also, that it makes sense in personal terms which touch us in
our hearts and activates our hearts.

The view of science that provides the underpinning to all four
books relies on relatively small number of observations, and a
small number, also, of new concepts which define living
structure and the processes which generate living structure in
objective terms.

These include: an attempt to identify wholeness as an
objective structure, existing in some degree, in all material
systems: a method of observation which allows impartial
observers to measure the degree of life in different structures
according to their own inner state when in the presence of these
structures; an attempt to see all evolution and development in
physical systems, in living systems, and in the creation of
works of art, as defined by a sequence of structure preserving
transformations which take some existing wholeness as point of
origin and define a new structure as a new wholeness which is
reached from a previous one by structure-preserving
transformations. The new way of thinking thus provides a vision
of reality in which all events come about as transformations of
the existing whole.

It takes some effort, and above all study of and creation of
worked examples, to understand this theoretical scheme.

What is most important, is that all this is not merely a
theoretical scheme, but rather a way of thinking, and a set of
tools, which first teach the artist to make things, and show the
way to making things - paintings, works of sculpture, buildings,
and the many manifold possible structures which must appear in
buildings at a huge range of scales. The buildings and public
spaces which can be reached by these methods are entirely
different from those typically created in the 20th century, and
point the way to a humane world in the future, and a cogent, and
sharable way for people to reach this humane world together.

It is no small thing to have attempted a fusion of science and
art, in a hard nosed fashion, compatible with scientific
thinking, yet inspired and nourished by concern for the well-
springs of human experience and in the origin of the human self.
I could never have managed even this first step without the
range of cultures and civilizations that I have paid attention
to, visited, and been part of, during my life.

For, the material in these books is largely culture-
independent. By that I do not mean that different cultures
should be somehow absorbed in some general mass culture of the
future. Quite the opposite. It turns out that the criteria of
life in artifacts, has the same deep substrate, in all cultures
and civilizations, and the work in these four books draws on
these hugely different cultures, and shows what is common to
them, doing it in a way which honors and respects the art and
building traditions of these world wide range of civilizations.

In particular, I have benefited from my life long association
with Islamic culture and my love of ancient Turkish and Persian
carpets, and my long association and friendship with Japan and
Japanese people and the projects I have built for them. India,
Latin America, Russia, the art of the Pacific, many European
nations, Moorish Spain, North Africa, and China have all played
a significant role in helping me to understand the phenomena
with which I have been concerned.

The unification of cultures, and the exchange of profound
respect from culture to culture, is vital to the proper
understanding of artistic phenomena, and to the practice of
individual art, and individual building, in various local
cultures today.

All this, may find inspiration and support from the studies to
which I have dedicated my life.

During the last two centuries, art and science were strongly
separated. The thought which made sense in science made little
sense in art; and vice versa. This has been most uncomfortable.
It made both - both art and science in their separate ways -
seem less valid, since it was obvious that neither one of them
had much claim to an authentic view of reality, able to
encompass the strength of human intellect and the stretch of
human passion. I think you will find that the world picture I
have painted, suggests that there is a single view of matter,
the universe, and mind, which stretches wide enough to encompass
both. If that is true, we shall all be very much the richer for
it, in the future.

I hope you will read *The Nature of Order*. It is not bombast
that makes me say this, rather the hope that all of you -
members of a group dedicated to finding a way forward, in which
art and science, and multicultural humanity are fused, made one -
may find some basis in the work presented in these books, that
allows you to go forward in your own way, and in a way which
leaves the schisms of the past and of the present behind.

I hope, very much, one day to have the privilege of meeting
some of you in person, and invite you, most warmly, to visit me
in England, at my house in the country. Please do come if you
have the chance, and at the very least I can offer you tea and
refreshments, and we may have a chance to continue this
dialogue. I am much looking forward to seeing the summaries of
the contributions which all of you make to the conference.

Here the titles of the four books:

Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life
Book 2: The Process of Creating Life
Book 3: A Vision of a Living World
Book 4: The Luminous Ground

You may visit the website of the publisher, Center for
Environmental Structure Publishing, and preview the books, at
http://www.natureoforder.com. Sample chapters from each of the
four books, in PDF format, are available for downloading, free
of charge, from the website.

________________________________________________________________

ONE FROM THE VAULT: FROM THE LEA ARCHIVES
________________________________________________________________

CINEMATIC THRESHOLDS - INSTRUMENTALITY, TIME AND MEMORY IN THE
VIRTUAL
First published: (LEA 3:7), July 1995
http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/TEXT/Vol_2/lea_v3_n07.txt

by Ed Keller
133 Mulberry #6N
NYC 10013
U.S.A.
Tel/Fax: 212 431 5705
mantis [@] basilisk [dot] com
http://swerve.basilisk.com/C/CineThressH_966.html

[Editor's Note: The article presented here is Section 1 of a
longer article, the full text of which can be found on the
author's web page listed above. It is published here by
permission of the author].

THE VIRTUAL

I would like to begin with a mise en abyme, a meditation on the
nature of the virtual which will throw this essay through its
entire trajectory and deposit us in a place where a more
detailed development of each of these concepts can occur. As a
starting point I find the formulation of the virtual that
Deleuze gives us via Proust fascinating:

'Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.'
p96, Bergsonism

This understanding of the virtual insists upon its operative
nature; moreover, the operative nature of something that is not,
most likely, visible. It is used by Deleuze within the context
of the performance of memory as a force that conditions our
perception ineluctably and shapes us as subjects. In Deleuze's
investigation of the subject through Bergson's idea of memory,
virtuality is the key realm within which memory locates itself.

[THIS TEXT CAN BE VIEWED IN ITS ENTIRETY BY LEA/LEONARDO
SUBSCRIBERS AT: http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-
journals/LEA/archive.html]

________________________________________________________________

LEONARDO REVIEWS
2005.8
________________________________________________________________

June's editorial for Leonardo Reviews features one of our newer
reviewers Rob Harle. As you can see from the reviews published
below and in the Leonardo Reviews archive, Rob's research has a
particular transdiciplinarity, which makes him a great asset to
our project. His prolific output and particular combination of
interest in biomedicine and architecture, consciousness and
culture, situate him at the core of recent publications in our
field.

Also included in this month's feature is Kathleen Quillian's
first review for us. Although a newcomer as a reviewer, Kathleen
has been a colleague working in the San Francisco office and a
great supporter and help. We are delighted that she has found
the additional energy to publish a review with us.

In July's edition, the difficulty one has in imposing a
thematic structure on the contributions included in Leonardo
Reviews testifies to the extraordinary diversity of the
panellists and materials reviewed. Perhaps the consistency lies
in the way the copy reflects the complexity and increasing cross-
disciplinarity of contemporary scholarly discourse. As ever,
certain areas such as film and experimental music are well
covered. Jan Baetens scrutinizes a major and timely exposition
of Jean-Luc Godard's work, Mike Mosher views the Japanese
documentary, *A Visit to Ogawa Productions*, Stefaan van Ryssen
assesses Peter Cusak's *Baikal Ice*, and Mike Mosher considers
three innovative releases from the prolific Cuneiform Records.

Also represented is the growth in literature and events that
seek to illuminate the relationship between mind and art using
insights from science. Ian Verstegen's review of a book by Lucia
Pizzo Russo, *Le Arti e la Psicologia*, shows the value of a
Continental perspective on a topic so often dominated by Anglo-
American approaches, while Martha Blassnigg's report from the
*Light/Image/Illusion* forum on Austria is further evidence of
the growing cross-disciplinary activity between the arts and the
sciences.

Included in July's Leonard Electronic Almanac are Rob Harle's
piece on Elizabeth Grosz's book, *The Nick of Time: Politics,
Evolution and the Uncanny*, which uses Darwin, Nietzsche and
Bergson to generate a new philosophical analysis of time, Alex
Rotas' review of Jill Bennett's work on trauma and contemporary
art, and in the current political climate of concern with
African issues Mike Mosher's review of Elizabeth Harney's work
on art and avant-gardism in Senegal.

All these can be read on-line at http://leonardoreviews.mit.edu

Michael Punt (June)
Editor-in-Chief
Leonardo Reviews

and
Robert Pepperell (July)
Associate Editor
Leonardo Reviews

_____________________________

REVIEWS POSTED JUNE AND JULY 2005

Art Inquiry: Recherches Sur Les Arts, Volume V (XIV)
Cyberarts, Cybercultures, Cybersocieties
Published by The Scientific Society in Lodz
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher

Arte Telemática. Dos intercâmbios pontuais aos ambientes
virtuais multiusuário
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen

Barricade 3
by ZNR
Reviewed by René van Peer

Bauhaus: Less Is More
by Eliseo Alvarez
and
Dessau's Bauhaus
by Frederic Compain
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens

Caging the Beast: A Theory of Sensory Consciousness _
Advances in Consciousness Research
by Paula Droege
Reviewed by Rob Harle

Charlotte: Life or Theater?
by Richard Dindo
Reviewed by Artur Golczewski

Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art
by Grant Kester
Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg

Dream Bridges-Traumbrücken
by Wolfdietrich Ziesel
Reviewed by Rob Harle (Australia)

D-B. A: Digital-Botanic Architecture
by Dennis Dollens
Reviewed by Rob Harle

Film and Cinema Spectatorship: Melodrama and Mimesis
by Jan Campbell
Reviewed by Jan Baetens

The Future Is Not What It Used To Be
by Mika Taanila
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen

Hokusai
by Gian Carlo Calza, with additional essays by others
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens

Keeping It Real
by Sunny Bergman
Reviewed by Artur Golczewski

Music Query: Methods, Models, and User Studies
by Walter B. Hewlett and Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Eds.
Reviewed by Joao Pedro Martins, Marcelo Gimenes and Qijun Zhang

Pop Trickster Fool: Warhol Performs Naiveté
by Kelly M. Cresap
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher

Pork Chop Blue Around The Rind
by Fast 'n' Bulbous
Reviewed by René van Peer

Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body
by Elizabeth A. Wilson
Reviewed by Rob Harle (Australia)

The Subject of Documentary
by Michael Renov
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher

Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition
Lynn Spigel, Ed.
Reviewed by Kathleen Quillian

What the Body Cost: Desire, History, and Performance
by Jane Blocker
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen

William Roberts: An English Cubist
by Andrew Gibbon Williams
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens

Le arti e la psicologia
by Lucia Pizzo Russo
Reviewed by Ian Verstegen

Baikal Ice
by Peter Cusack
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen

Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art
by Jill Bennett
Reviewed by Alex Rotas

For Ever Godard
by Michael Temple, James S. Williams and Michael Witt, Eds.
Reviewed by Jan Baetens

Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System Is
Endangering Innovation and Progress, and What to Do About It
by Adam B. Jaffe and Josh Lerner
Reviewed by Zainub Verjee

Leap Second Neutral
by Machine and the Synergetic Nuts

and
Pork Chop Blue Around The Rind
by Fast n' Bulbous

and
Emissaries
by Radio Massacre International
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher

Light/Image/Illusion‹‹The Aegina Academy
A Forum for Art and Science
Organized by C3 Center for Culture & Communication and
Nederlands Filmmuseum
Reviewed by Martha Blassnigg

Masterworks of Technology: The Story of Creative Engineering,
Architecture, and Design
by E.E. Lewis
Reviewed by Rob Harle (Australia)

The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely
by Elizabeth Grosz
Reviewed by Rob Harle (Australia)

The Other Side of Nowhere. Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities
in Dialogue
by Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble, Eds., with introduction by
Ingrid Monson
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen

In Senghor's Shadow: Art, Politics and the Avant-Garde in
Senegal, 1960-1995
by Elizabeth Harney
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher

Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity
by Maeda Ai
Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg

Unsorted: An A to Z for SonicActsX
by Arie Altena et al, with an introduction by Taco Stolk
Reviewed by René Beekman

VAS: An Opera in Flatland
by Steve Tomasula; art and design by Stephen Farrell
Reviewed by Eugene Thacker

A Visit to Ogawa Productions
by Oshige Jun' Ichiro, Director; produced by Yasui Yoshio
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher

Vocals
by Ian Breakwell
Reviewed by Mike Leggett

Walter Benjamin and Art
by Andrew Benjamin, Ed.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher

_____________________________

DREAM BRIDGES - TRAUMBRÜCKEN

by Wolfdietrich Ziesel
Springer-Verlag, Wien, New York, NY, 2004
247 pp., illus. Trade, €36,45
ISBN: 3-211-21269-8.

Reviewed by Rob Harle
Australia
harle [@] dodo [dot] com [dot] au

This book is both inspiring and delightful. All text is written
in both English and German. "A voice crying in the wilderness"
is a phrase used to describe the passion and vision of
Wolfdietrich Ziesel. The wilderness alluded to is the
impoverished emptiness of postmodernism driven by "turbo-
capitalism".

Whilst the subject of the book is bridges, the book is really
about dreams, ". . . it is a compilation of thoughts about
desires and dreams relating to bridges" (p. 9). It is about the
state of the built environment and the *quality* of life
associated with, and in turn influenced by, the *integrity* of
architects, engineers, planners, and construction company
executives. Ziesel argues (p. 12) as does Jörg Schlaich (p. 54-
59) that this integrity leaves much to be desired in our
contemporary society.

Schlaich also stresses, quite forcefully, that the dramatic
increase in technologies, which should engender innovation and
an exquisitely built environment, has done just the opposite.
Technology, especially computer design applications, has the
potential to liberate or enslave a designer's imagination. The
elimination of the engagement of extreme creative efforts, by
allowing computer software to take over, as it were, is a recipe
for a bland, uninspired soul-less built environment.

*Dream Bridges* is lavishly illustrated with sketches,
engineering drawings and photographs, both colour, and black and
white. There are six essays, including one by Ziesel himself;
all are inspiring and challenging. The first essay - *Dreaming
about Bridges - Dream Bridges* by Ziesel explains his attitude
to design, and his passion for all things bridges, both
metaphorically and literally. Wolfdietrich Ziesel is Professor
and Director of the Institute for Statics and Theory of
Structures at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.

Günter Feuerstein's essay, *What is Truth?*, discusses the
notion of truth to materials and truth of appearances. He
believes Ziesel's work, ". . . stands for a new truth, a new
beauty, and therefore a new transcendence in building, without
his being doctrinaire or puritanical" (p. 23). Schlaich in
*Wolfdietrich Ziesel - A Voice Crying in the Wilderness*, as
already mentioned, challenges contemporary architects and
engineers and the way they are trained, suggesting alternative
methods. Monika Gentner's essay, *Somewhere over the Rainbow*
uses examples from literature to help us understand the
importance of bridges, not so much in their literal structural
sense but in their metaphorical imaginative power. The
architects Brell, Cokcan in *Pedestrian Bridge of the Golden
Horn* discuss the favorable influence of Ziesel's teaching, "He
taught us not just to dream our architecture, but to live it"
(p. 184). Finally, Otto Kapfinger's essay, *The Art of Civil
Engineering - An Unknown Species in Austria?* comments quite
critically on the state of the built environment in Austria,
including historical examples and architecture's relationship
with technology.

The book is mostly set in Austria, Ziesel's homeland, and most
of the structures are from this part of Europe. When I started
the book, I wondered if this visionary and globally aware
designer/engineer would mention the Harbour Bridge in Sydney,
Australia - arguably one of the greatest, creative engineering
feats of the 20th century. And, yes, indeed on page 16 there is
a mention of our beloved "Coathanger" as we Ozzies like to call
it. Many of the great landmark bridges around the world are
mentioned throughout the course of the book, giving considerable
credibility to Ziesel's authority as a leading innovative
engineer.

The book has an excellent graphic layout and would be at home
on any coffee table, though the book is far more serious than
just a "nice" production. There is no bibliography, which I
think would have been useful for students and researchers. Some
of the essays could have been longer and perhaps a little more
in-depth, especially concerning a bridge's relationship to the
two locations it connects. Although, this aspect of the book is
covered, to a certain extent, in the text accompanying the 20 or
so "case studies" that intersperse the essays.

This book is essential reading for all built environment design
students and those professional architects and engineers in
practice at present who have the responsibility of further
despoiling our visual urban landscape or perhaps *improving* it.
It puts such designers "on notice" to leave their egos at the
office/studio door and work co-operatively with each other and
the hapless public that has to endure and use their creations.

_____________________________

PSYCHOSOMATIC: FEMINISM AND THE NEUROLOGICAL BODY

by Elizabeth A. Wilson
Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2004
136 pp., illus. 5 b/w. Trade, $64.95; paper, $18.95
ISBN: 0-8223-3356-2; ISBN: 0-8223-3365-1.

Reviewed by Rob Harle
Australia
harle [@] dodo [dot] com [dot] au

This book is about trying to put "humpty dumpty" back together
again. Humpty Dumpty is no less than the *whole* human being.
The neurological body, that Wilson rescues from the myopic
extremes of second-wave feminism, is bought back to life in a
carefully argued and well-written work.

Wilson's rescue mission attempts to bring into balance
cultural, social and political theories of the body,
specifically those of feminism, and
biological/neurophysiological theories. "Fierce antibiologism
marked the emergence of second-wave feminism" (p. 13). This
*fierce* unholistic approach has been as equally unproductive
and unbalanced as the extreme scientific reductionism
(biological determinism) that feminist critique attempts to
expose.

*Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body* seems very
much to be a book that transcends the extremes of reductionism
regardless of discipline. This is in keeping with a "new wave"
of avant garde thinkers and writers who have rediscovered the
holistic nature of existence. This is evident in research areas
as disparate as quantum physics, environmental ecology,
medicine, mathematics and architecture.

The book has five chapters together with an informative
introduction, good bibliography and index. Throughout the
chapters Wilson, ". . . moves between the central and peripheral
nervous systems and among the cognitive, the affective, and the
unknowing, in an attempt to build a critically empathic alliance
with neurology" (p. 29).

Chapter one, *Freud, Prozac and Melancholic Neurology*, looks
at neurological determinism, some of Freud's neurological work,
and Kramer's *Listening To Prozac*. The quote from Kramer on
page 26, in a sense sums up the nature of Wilson's quest,
"Spending time with patients who responded to Prozac had
transformed my views about what *makes* people the way they are
[my emphasis]."

Chapter two, *The Brain in the Gut* discusses
neurogastroenterology and psychoanalysis and argues that, ". . .
the nervous system extends well beyond the skull, and as it so
travels through the body it takes the psyche with it" (p. 47).

Chapter three, *Hypothalamic Preference: LeVay's Study of
Sexual Orientation* looks at LeVay's study of the hypothalamus,
carefully and non-hysterically, and what implications this organ
has for the development of gay men, hence the participation of
neurology as a role in personality development.

Chapter four, *Trembling, Blushing: Darwin's Nervous System*
highlights the benefits of assessing some of Darwin's work as an
aid to critical neurological thinking. Special attention is
giving to the unique human trait of blushing.

Chapter five, *Emotional Lizards: Evolution and the Reptilian
Brain* discusses various aspects of evolution, the triune brain
and how evolutionary theory may be employed to expand ". . .
feminist theories of psyche and soma" (p. 95). This chapter also
discusses how Oliver Sacks' approach to motor function in
reptiles helps us understand neurological modification and
development in human beings.

My only criticism of this book apart from being rather slim
(126 pages) is that developmental psychology and the work of
researchers, such as Andy Clark, *Being There: Putting Brain,
Body and World Together Again*, are not given enough
consideration. Clark's "feedback loops" from brain to peripheral
nervous system, for example, seem to me to be especially
relevant to Wilson's thesis. Yet some of Freud's questionable,
outdated theories are given perhaps too much discussion. As an
example, Freud's notion of excessive masturbation and/or *coitus
interruptus* being implicated in "neurasthenic melancholia" and
"somatic weakness" does nothing to help Wilson's argument. A
reference to Oriental medicine and the vast experience of the
Chinese in this regard could have been a worthwhile inclusion.

This is an important book because it moves positively towards
bringing about a balance between the extremist views of the
antibiologist ranting of certain second-wave feminist theories
and the myopic view of absolute biological determinism.

_____________________________

TELEVISION AFTER TV: ESSAYS ON A MEDIUM IN TRANSITION
by Lynn Spigel, Ed. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2005.
480 pp., illus. Paper. ISBN: 0-8223-3393-7.

Reviewed by Kathleen Quillian
kathleen [@] dprojx [dot] org


Undoubtedly the Internet has changed the nature of mass
communication from a centralized one-way model to a de-
centralized multi-directional model. How this will affect the
industry of broadcast media has yet to be fully decided. While
producers are falling over themselves to try to figure out how
to successfully negotiate the media landscape in the age of the
Internet, scholars are building upon their cache of expertise to
develop a new dialogue of communications studies. In an attempt
to give this new era some kind of identifiable form, Lynn Spigel
has brought together the perspectives of several leading
television scholars in *Television After TV: Essays on a Medium
in Transition*.

It seems that while the dialogue is still developing around the
new nature of mass communication, so too is the language.
Throughout the collection, no less than a dozen different terms
are given in the attempt to identify the scope of contemporary
media communications - terms ranging from "omnimedia" (Martha
Stewart's term for her own media empire) to "post-broadcasting"
to "the neo-network era." The book is divided into four sections
which, broadly speaking, focus on: changes in the television
industry in the age of the Internet, television's social context
in the larger scope of culture, how television defines or re-
defines community and the educational potential of television
studies.

Aside from two essays devoted specifically to European
television (lifestyle programming in Britain and the
introduction of television in Sweden, respectively) and a look
at the development of Hong Kong as a media capital, the majority
of the book is devoted to the many ways that the industry of
(U.S.) commercial television has evolved and how it influences,
or is influenced by, the Internet. To those of us who cannot
conceive of life without the all-pervasive influence of
commercial television, this collection of essays certainly gives
one pause to think as we work our way through the next
generation of mass media.

One of the more interesting angles on this is given in
*Flexible Microcasting: Gender, Generation, and Television-
Internet Convergence* by Lisa Parks, in which the author
surmises how the rise and popularity of television game shows
foreshadowed the interactivity of the Internet. She then goes on
to address how certain forward-thinking big-budget television
producers have successfully (or unsuccessfully) negotiated the
territory between television and the Internet with programs
designed to encourage the involvement of women and youth while
still maintaining the dominant ideologies perpetuated by
commercial television.

The "flow" of the book (referencing a term coined by early
television scholar Raymond Williams - mentioned consistently
throughout this collection of essays) moves from a rather
focused look at new forms of marketing in the television
industry to a broader look at the influence of television on
culture and society. Two notable contributions presented toward
the latter end of the flow are by Anna McCarthy and Lynn Spigel
whose respective essays give two very different spins on power
and broadcast media.

In *The Rhythms of the Reception Area: Crisis, Capitalism, and
the Waiting Room TV* Anna McCarthy discusses how the market of
closed-circuit television programs both manifests and
perpetuates certain social and economic strata in relation to
the measurement of time in public waiting areas. Spigel's own
contribution to this collection *Television, the Housewife, and
the Museum of Modern Art* chronicles a lesser-known and
otherwise short-lived era in the early days of television when
the Museum of Modern Art experimented with the potential gains
offered by the new, avant-garde medium. In this essay, Spigel
weaves an interesting narrative around leisure time, niche
marketing and the clash between "high" and "low" culture in post-
war America. An image of Barbara Streisand posing while singing
in the museum gallery, wearing a designer gown similar to the
modernist paintings on the wall next to her, illustrates this
essay quite well.

In the attempt to position so many ideas in one conversation
however, inevitably, some parts of the discussion get left out.
In this case, it seems that while much thought is developed
around the industry of commercial television and the social
consequences of the medium in the age of the Internet, the roles
of journalists and media activists - those individuals who
negotiate and shape the media landscape on a daily basis - were
overlooked altogether. The few times the news media is given
attention in this collection is only in terms of its absence.
Anna Everett's essay *Double Click: The Million Woman March on
Television and the Internet* describes how the organizers of the
Million Woman March utilized the resources of the Internet to
fill in the gaps that were left in the coverage of this event by
mainstream media. Similarly, in *Pocho.com <http://Pocho.com>: Reimagining
Television on the Internet*, Priscilla Pena Ovalle discusses the
lack of media attention directed towards the Hispanic community
and how one website in particular succeeds in shaping an
alternative community by subverting mainstream media. The
discussion of television in the age of the Internet would
greatly benefit from a focused look at independent media
organizations such as the Independent Media Center, Democracy
Now! and MoveOn.org who are forced to find their way through and
around the tightly-regulated confines of broadcast media to
bring alternative perspectives to the table. These organizations
largely rely on the power of the Internet as well as what little
room is left in public access and public-sponsored media
channels to develop dialogues which are sorely lacking in
corporate-controlled, mainstream media. We could learn a thing
or two from their experiences of communicating through new and
alternative avenues in broadcast media.

This collection of essays comes at a critical time, when we are
looking at not just a change in media, but a change in form,
practice and consequence. Whether television producers succeed
in steering the market in their favor, governments succeed in
maintaining the hegemony through regulation, or citizens succeed
in claiming their rightful territory within the new terrain of
mass communications really only comes down to who figures things
out first. By revisiting the history of television in terms of
the new media landscape, we may be able to pick up some valuable
clues as to how to go about shaping some kind of acceptable
future for broadcast communications.

_____________________________

THE NICK OF TIME: POLITICS, EVOLUTION, AND THE UNTIMELY

by Elizabeth Grosz
Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2004
336 pp. Trade, $79.95; paper, $22.95
ISBN: 0-8223-3400-3; ISBN: 0-8223-3397-x.

Reviewed by Rob Harle
Australia
Harle [@] dodo [dot] com [dot] au

It is a brave philosopher that dares to go where many other
philosophers have feared to tread. In her latest book - *The
Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely*, Elizabeth
Grosz not only tackles the illusive concept of time head-on but
does so with scholarly rigor and an engaging confidence.

The book is well written, meticulously researched and like
Elizabeth Wilson's recent book - *Psychosomatic: Feminism and
the Neurological Body* (see Leonardo Reviews, June 2005) is like
a breath of fresh air in the areas of cultural and feminist
studies. Both these books recognize the importance of
corporeality to feminist critique and attempt to regain some
sort of holistic balance; Wilson through neurology and biology -
Grosz through evolution, temporality and corporeality, "…we need
to turn again, with careful discernment, to those discourses,
once rejected by feminists and political activists, that place
the body in the larger cosmological and biological orders in
which it always finds itself" (p. 3).

Grosz's work outlines a new theory of becoming, "…to replace
the prevailing ontologies of being in social, political and
biological discourse". What makes this book all the more daring
and provocative is her analysis of three of the seemingly
strangest bedfellows - Darwin, Nietzsche and Bergson. The
relationship of these three major thinkers is not as disparate
as one may first think. Grosz brings to life some of the more
obscure and little appreciated aspects of their philosophies and
discusses these, drawing on the work of Luce Irigaray and Gilles
Deleuze.

The book has an Introduction, Three Parts (each with three
chapters), Conclusion, Notes, and an excellent Bibliography and
Index. Part I - Darwin and Evolution looks at Life, Force and
Change; Biological Difference; and Evolution of Sex and Race.
Part II - Nietzsche and Overcoming discusses Nietzsche's
concerns about Darwinism; History and the Untimely; and the
Eternal Return and The Overman. Part III - Bergson and Becoming
analyzes Bergsonian Difference; The Philosophy of Life; and
Intuition and the Virtual.

Grosz insists that this work is "…very much an initial
exploration" and whilst the body is integral to her discussion,
the object of investigation is "…time: its modalities, its
forms, its effects on both inorganic and organic materiality"
(p. 4). To her credit, Grosz admits in previous work she
underestimated the importance of the biological body. "Without
some reconfigured concept of the biological body, models of
subject-inscription, production, or constitution lack material
force; paradoxically, they lack corporeality" (p. 4).

This book is very much a critique and analysis of time from a
Western philosophical perspective or position. That is, time,
whilst not seen perhaps as strictly linear, still "moves
forward" (p. 247) from past to present to future. There is no
detailed consideration of the Eastern philosophical notion of
time being literally "cyclic". This is an important omission
because it directly relates to the seemingly teleological aspect
of Darwinian evolution (which Darwin himself did not endorse).
Whilst material evolution seems to move from simple to ever more
complex forms this is an illusion of time itself. And further,
it is our human construction of time in the first place that
creates the illusion.

Grosz discusses the concepts of past, present and future quite
extensively but fails to mention what the Eastern philosophers
discovered a millennium ago, that the only time that exists or
is real is the "eternal present". Time, that is, an elapsed
period from one state to another, is very much a condition of
mind. Our contemporary Western notion of time is heavily
influenced by the introduction of the Town Clock, invented by
monks in the Middle Ages.

Whilst I believe a discussion of time as cyclic would have
enhanced and added balance to Grosz's reappraisal of time, the
body and evolution, it does not detract from the importance of
her work, especially as it relates to feminist critique and
cultural/political investigation. This is an important book,
written in a lively, vibrant style, unusual in such complex
philosophical discourse. I recommend it as essential reading for
all interested in philosophy, feminist critique and the new wave
of holistic humanities studies.

_____________________________

EMPATHIC VISION: AFFECT, TRAUMA AND CONTEMPORARY ART

by Jill Bennett
Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2005
208 pp., illus. 23 b/w. Trade, $49.50; paper, $19.95
ISBN: 0-8047-5074-2; ISBN: 0-8047-5171-4.

Reviewed by Alex Rotas
Bristol, UK
alex [dot] rotas [@] bluyeonder [dot] co [dot] uk

This is an insightful, timely book. The common notion that the
particular experience of looking at art provides access to
broader truths is a vague adage that doesn't take us very far.
It needs opening up; just how does this leap from an embodied,
aesthetic experience to thought occur? Bennett describes this as
the link between affect and cognition in the visual arts, and
this is the issue she explores.

Art, she argues (drawing from Deleuze), has "unique capacities"
to trigger an empathic response from the viewer which, far from
being an end in itself, ideally leads to thought and critical
enquiry. The affective power of the visual is particularly
demonstrated in the case of art that draws from trauma, which as
she observes, is traditionally defined as being beyond both
language and representation. Nonetheless, traumatic experience
such as child sexual abuse, the tyrannies of war, civil war and
political oppression, the Holocaust, and the events of "9/11"
have provided artists with opportunities to engage visually and
conceptually in difficult and painful arenas. In particular, she
charts the emergence of the thematic category of 'trauma art'
since the late 1990s. Interweaving theory drawn from trauma
studies, literary studies, art history, visual culture and
cultural studies with detailed case-histories, she examines how
contemporary art can "engage trauma in a way that respects and
contributes to its politics."

Her interest, however, is more than with a specific grouping of
works and with a particular politics. Her illuminating treatment
of the artworks that form her case-studies are already reason
enough to buy the book but Bennett has a more ambitious aim. As
a contemporary art historian, she sees her remit not as writing
about the artworks that form the focus of her inquiry or with
demonstrating what they mean, or what trauma is depicted. It is
how they work that interests her. How does the particular
'affective imagery' of art drawn from trauma engage us, she
asks, and where does it take us? Unlike narrative film, visual
art doesn't draw us into an emotional response with a
traumatized subject. Equally, it does not elicit a specific
'moral' response, although there are plenty of worthy artworks
around that, in telling us what to think, certainly set out to
do just that. Yet it is art's affective component, she argues,
that paradoxically leads to critical thought just as it is
through relinquishing any moral position that a particular piece
can enable ethical inquiry.

This is a book aimed at a theoretically fluent constituency.
Bennett's analysis embraces theoretical discussions of memory,
testimony, subjectivity, pain, trauma, and loss plus victim and
stranger discourses as well as more art-related issues of
representation and the relationship between visual and cognitive
processes. It will, therefore, delight a broad, if
sophisticated, readership. Nonetheless its primary audience will
be readers from art-theory/visual culture/cultural studies
backgrounds together with those interested in trauma studies or
post-colonial theory. Innovative, courageous and unashamedly
attempting to push "the analysis of culture onto new ground",
Bennett makes a powerful case for her central thesis that visual
arts practice is generative rather than representative. Theory,
she sets out to demonstrate, can be derived from visual domains
and not just applied to them.

The ambitious remit of the book, however, is both its strength
and its weakness. It is indeed, as the back-cover proclaims,
"written at the highest level" but this implies a readership
that can keep up with dense yet often economically argued prose.
Bennett covers a lot of ground in this slim volume. Rather
surprisingly, the central notion of 'affect' is never defined
(or even discussed) and we are left wondering if the 'affective
experience' is synonymous with the 'aesthetic experience', as
Bennett herself implies towards the end. If so, of course, what
exactly does this mean? And though keen to emphasize the open-
ended nature of the empathic response, she does assume that when
she enjoys the affective element in an artwork, we all will;
with the gloriously named Gordon Bennett's work, for example,
much as I was fascinated by her analysis, it just didn't happen
for me (poor illustrations didn't help).

Nonetheless, these are quibbles. This is an exciting read that
more than repays the efforts that Bennett demands. Thought-
provoking and at times startling, Empathic Vision opens up new
ideas that stay with you long after you have closed its covers.
And it deals with issues that are now relevant to us all; as
Bennett observes, since "9/11", trauma has become a globalized
phenomenon.

_____________________________

IN SENGHOR'S SHADOW: ART, POLITICS AND THE AVANT-GARDE IN
SENEGAL, 1960-1995

by Elizabeth Harney
Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2004
344 pp., illus. 78 b/w, 14 col. Paper, $26.95
ISBN: 9-8223-3395-3.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University
Mosher [@] svsu [dot] edu

Among the former French colonies of West Africa, Senegal had
the advantage that the French colonial government assiduously
trained a managerial and governing class before independence.
Yet Senegal was also unique in that the new nation had an
aesthetic vision behind it. A post-colonial artistic modernism
was proposed and promoted by Léopold Sédar Senghor (1905-2001),
independent Senegal's first president, in power from 1960 until
1980.

Negritude, a call and strategy for black artists from European
colonies to celebrate their blackness, was first articulated in
the 1930s by the poet Aimé Césaire of Martinique. Like Senghor,
Césaire had studied in the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s where
Caribbean, African, Asian and African American students all met.
Césaire noted the city's enthusiasm for black artistry, as
African artworks and motifs were influencing European artists,
poets, dancers and composers (much as the Harlem Renaissance
invigorated culture in New York). Senghor, an accomplished poet,
was a major theorist of Negritude but with an African variant;
his Africanité looked to the African continent's past more than
Césaire did. While the Caribbean cosmopolite celebrated the
diversity of black people, their experiences and creativity, the
Senegalese African romanticized the essentialism of their unique
"emotive" and "rhythmic" souls to contrast to dry European
Cartesianism and the West.

Upon independence, this Africanist aesthetic served a
nationalist function, energizing local artists and
intellectuals, promoting unity and establishing a relationship
between the new nation and the colonialist powers that were the
capitals of the art market. The new nation offered support for
artists, and president Senghor devoted 25-percent of the state
budget to culture. He established art schools, a national
museum, festivals and touring exhibitions. Africanité was
agreeable to Pan-Africanism, and in 1966 the World Festival of
Black Arts was held in Senegal's capital city Dakar. At the new
École de Dakar, professor Iba N'Diaye emphasized technical
training and was skeptical that emphasis on Africanness wouldn't
lead to dismissal of African artists as "noble savages". His
colleague Papa Ibra Tall, though himself Paris-educated,
discouraged all European influences on his students. Tall
founded Senegal's national tapestry school, where works were
produced by Badara Camara, Moussa Samb, Ibou Diouf, Samba Balde,
Bakary Dieme, Amadou Dédé and Modou Niang.

Senghor's aesthetic philosophy also had its critics, including
celebrated filmmaker Osumane Sembene (who also criticized his
repression of political opponents). Some artists disliked the
president's patronizing attitude - he called artists his cher
enfants - as he bestowed patronage. Younger artists chafed under
Senghor's definitions of acceptable art and found them
reactionary. In the 1970s meetings among actors and artists at
Dakar's Café Terrasse birthed the Laboratoire Agit-Art. Its
leader, Issa Ramangelissa Samb, favored mixed media sculptures
assemblages, studied and adopted ideas by Europeans Georgi
Plekhanov and Anonin Artaud, and cited political events in
Southeast Asia and Latin America beyond Mother Africa. The
Laboratoire Agit-Art deconstructed and restaged one epic Senghor
poem as a comedy, as well as a Césaire work. They favored a
street-level pop sensibility, works created with trash and
commercial packing materials or bottle caps found in the
marketplace. This American reviewer is reminded of New Yorkers,
Claes Oldenburg and his Store in the early 1960s, and Jean-
Michel Basquiat in the 1980s. Among Samb's graffiti-like
painting was a Che Guevara portrait evincing black bloodlines
and a confused expression.

El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy often sold his paintings like stage
backdrops on jute sacking material for the price of a full sack
of rice. Sy created painted figurate "Skites" kites. Sy used his
own footprint as a painting motif, much as did California
painter Mike Henderson. To compare the Senegalese artists to
American ones is not to say they are unfavorably derivative: It
is to acknowledge that the Africans became full participants in
a global dialogue. Sy and his friends, sculptor Aly Traoré and
painter Moussa Tine, squatted in an abandoned military camp in
downtown Dakar in 1977. Soon joined by actors and other
performers, musicians, photographers, they named the camp
Village des Arts. Sy established a gallery and meeting place
there and called it TENQ, the Wolof word for articulation.
Suspicious government officials began visiting in preparation
for reclaiming the base, offering an unsuitable building in a
suburb Colobane where some artists had settled. In September
1983 the Village des Arts was attacked by troops in tanks, the
residents were evicted and many artworks and the Village
archives destroyed.

Under president Diop the World Bank imposed strictures in the
early 1980s that caused Senegal to cut support of health care,
education, and street cleaning, diminishing the quality of life
for most of the citizenry. Inspired by Youssou N'Dour's song
*Set*, and a Wolof word for clean and proper, an urban mural
squad called *Set Setal* flourished in 1988 and 1989. Many of
their painted walls resemble urban murals in the United States
in the 1960s and early 1970s, imagery of power and resistance to
slaveries, whether economic or spiritual. *Set Setal* murals
depicted nationalist or historic content (including the slave
trade at Gorée), civic campaigns combatting AIDS, diarrhoea,
dysentery and malaria, and portraits of Senghor or the second
president Abdou Diouf. They also painted Mao and Lenin,
religious figure Cheikh Amadou Bamba, prizefighters Assane Diouf
and Manga 11, and Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, Mickey Mouse and
Tintin. Critics of Senghor's cultural policies saw *Set Setal*
murals as evidence that the younger generation were happy to
incorporate world influences with African ones. The French
Cultural Center, where Sy has painted a mural, was another
enthusiastic supporter of *Set Setal*.

In the 1990s there have been impressive sculptures in wood and
metal by Gubril André Diop (whose treelike *Ecology Sculpture*
of 1995 employed recycled beverage cans) and Moustapha Dimé, who
reconciles Islam with figuration in his studio in Gorée. There
have been mixed media works by Djibril N'Diaye, figurative
paintings by Sedou Barry and Ousmane Faye, and non-
representational paintings of Kan Si and Viyé Diba. Alpha
Wouallid Diallo created history paintings from photographs of
battles and events in the founding of the nation of Senegal. Pre-
independence traditions of sous-verré glass painting have been
revived by Germaine Anta Gaye. She has combined glass painting
with wood or gold leaf, and used it to boldly celebrate
signares, African women who had intercourse (business or sexual)
with Portuguese traders in the 15th century.

International notice came early to Senegal's artists, and in
the 1960s France's Minister of Culture André Malraux said the
best of them "match the greatest European artists for stature".
Mor Faye, a painter who died at 37 in 1984, was celebrated by
New York critics as the great outsider, "a poor black Picasso,"
"a solitary medicine man". Sy, Samb and Souleyman Keita showed
in London in 1995. Dak'Art, the international art bienniale, has
been held in Dakar for over a decade.

This reviewer studied with the Africanist Perkins Foss (the
first grad student of Robert Farris Thompson) and hungers for
more investigations of contemporary African culture.

*In Senghor's Shadow* is a subtle exploration of Senegal's
artists, their motivations and their relations to the
government's cultural policies. Elizabeth Harney presents the
political contradictions inherent in national cultural policy,
between encouragement of raw and provincial local talent versus
rigorous training to world-class standards designed for the
discourse of the world's cultural capitals. The book deals with
the question of authenticity in a globalist age, the
contradictions of the artists' support system, both private
patronage and that of the former colonizer. The author has
provided us with a satisfying study of one nation's cultural
aims and artistic achievements.

________________________________________________________________

ISAST NEWS
________________________________________________________________

LYNNE CARSTARPHEN NAMED COORDINATING EDITOR OF *LEONARDO*

Lynne Carstarphen has been promoted to Coordinating Editor of
*Leonardo*. In her new capacity she will be taking over from
Managing Editor Pamela Grant-Ryan much of the responsibility for
coordinating and editing manuscripts for the print journal.

Lynne has been involved with *Leonardo* since September 2002,
first as Editorial Assistant, then as Associate Editor. She has
a background in art history and Internet cataloging, and holds a
master's degree in writing.

_____________________________

*LEONARDO* LAUNCHES YASMIN DISCUSSION LIST

*Leonardo* and the YASMIN Group are pleased to announce the
launching of the YASMIN mailing and discussion list, hosted by
the University of Athens. It is a collaborative project by a
consortium of organizations and individuals around the
Mediterranean Rim and region.

YASMIN is a network of artists, scientists, engineers,
theoreticians and institutions promoting communication and
collaboration in art, science and technology around the
Mediterranean Rim.

YASMIN welcomes information on events, artists' works and
organizations' programs, projects and initiatives as well as
discussions and critical analysis.

YASMIN aims to identify the players and to facilitate
cooperation within the Mediterranean Rim. All postings should be
relevant to the YASMIN mandate.

The official language of the YASMIN list is English. However,
posts in the other languages mastered by the moderators are
allowed as long as a summary of the post in English is provided.
Those languages are currently: Arabic, Catalan, French, Greek,
Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.

We welcome everyone to subscribe to the list at:
http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin/.

The list is currently moderated by the following team: Julien
Knebusch, Samirah Alkassim, Ahmed Hassouna, Pau Alsina, Dimitris
Charitos, Neora Berger and Nina Czegledy. They form the YASMIN
Group, together with Roger Malina, Jaco Du Toit, Annick Bureaud
and Andreas Giannakoulopoulos.

The YASMIN mailing list, co-sponsored by the DigiArts Programme
of UNESCO, was made possible thanks to the Internet Society
(ISOC), the Rockefeller Foundation, Leonardo/OLATS, The
University of Athens, Artnodes-UOC Barcelona and all the
coordinators of the YASMIN Group.

_____________________________

SPECTOR AND LARSON JOIN GOVERNING BOARD

The Leonardo/ISAST Governing Board of Directors welcomes Tami
Spector and Larry Larson as two of its newest members.

Tami Spector is a professor of organic chemistry at the
University of San Francisco. She received her B.A. from Bard
College and her Ph.D. from Dartmouth College and was a
postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota. She is
trained as a physical organic chemist; her experimental research
interests are focused on the transformations of strained ring
organics, the design and synthesis of organic selective ion
transport systems, and spectroscopic analysis of intramolecular
hydrogen bonding. In addition, she has published in the field of
computational chemistry with an emphasis on molecular dynamics
and free energy calculations of biomolecular systems. She also
has a strong interest in aesthetics and chemistry and has
published and presented work on the molecular aesthetics of
disease, John Dalton and the aesthetics of molecular
representation, and the visual image of chemistry.

Larry R. Larson, principal of Larry Larson and Associates, is a
consultant working with arts organizations seeking to use
technology to create new ways of reaching and serving audiences.
He has specialized in helping these groups use databases and
dynamic web sites to realize ambitious programmatic and
administrative goals. Larson's current or recent clients include
Laurie Anderson, Minnesota Public Radio, Nonesuch Records, the
John Cage Trust and the American Music Center. Notably, Larson
and his associates recently completed and launched
MusicVista.org, a joint web/database development project for a
consortium of major American music service organizations. Prior
to launching his consulting practice, Larson was Director of
Grant Programs for the California Arts Council and was a member
of the original National Endowment for the Arts National
Information Systems Project (NISP), the first such project of
its type. He has also served in senior administrative positions
at the San Francisco and Houston symphonies, and has been an
advisor on musical and technical matters to the William and
Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and many others.
Larson also serves on the boards of the Kronos Quartet and the
American Music Center.

For more information about the Leonardo/ISAST Governing Board,
see www.leonardo.info <http://www.leonardo.info>>

_____________________________

LEONARDO BOOK SERIES ACTIVITIES

The past year found the Leonardo Book Series brimming with
activity. We are pleased to announce the publication of five new
titles in the series: *At A Distance: Precursors to Art and
Activism on the Internet*, edited by Annmarie Chandler and Norie
Neumark; *Visual Mind II*, edited by Michele Emmer; *CODE:
Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy*, edited by
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh; *The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics
and Culture* by Eugene Thacker; and *Media Ecologies:
Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture* by Matthew Fuller
- with several more soon to be released.

In May 2005, the Math Science Research Institute, Berkeley, CA,
hosted a book-signing party for Michele Emmer to celebrate the
release of *Visual Mind II*.

Visit http://www.lbs.mit.edu for more information.
Leonardo/ISAST members receive a 20% discount on Leonardo Books;
visit http:www.leonardo.info/members.html<http://www.leonardo.info/members.html>for
more information.

_____________________________

LEONARDO/OLATS AND SPACE STUDY

The European Space Agency has awarded a consortium led by the
Arts Catalyst, and which includes Leonardo/OLATS, a contract to
carry out a 6-month study of possible cultural utilization of
the International Space Station. The European Space Agency is
interested in opening the Space Station to a new community of
artistic and cultural users. The study sets out to focus the
interest of the cultural world on the Space Station, to generate
a policy for involving cultural users in the Space Station
program in the longer term, and to develop a representative set
of ready-to-implement demonstrator projects in arts, culture and
media.

Under the lead of the Arts Catalyst (London, U.K.), the study
team includes Leonardo/OLATS (Paris, France), Delta Utec
(Leiden, Netherlands) and the MIR Network, a group of European
arts organizations in Slovenia, Germany, Spain, Netherlands,
U.K. and France. Artists and cultural practitioners across
Europe are being consulted on features of the Space Station and
its ground-based support facilities - including launch sites,
astronaut training facilities and national user support centers.

To become involved or receive further information about this
study, e-mail the study leader, Nicola Triscott, at iss [@]
artscatalyst [dot] org.

The European Space Agency press release about the study can be
found at: http://www.esa.int/esaCP/Pr_p_EN.html. The German and
French translations can also be accessed from this URL.

_____________________________

LEONARDO REACHES OUT TO EDUCATIONAL COMMUNITY

As part of an ongoing effort to reach out to the educational
community, Leonardo/ISAST has instituted several initiatives
under the Leonardo Educators and Students Program. These include
participation in the annual College Art Association (CAA)
Conference, Leonardo Abstracts Service (LABS), the Leonardo
International Faculty Alerts list (LIFA) and special discounts
on student memberships.

Students working in or interested in art, science and
engineering are invited to join the Leonardo community with an
annual associate membership to Leonardo/ISAST at the special
student rate of $48. Benefits include associate membership in
the organization, discounts on books and invitations to join us
at conferences and symposia, including the College Art
Association Conference, SIGGRAPH and the 2006 Pacific Rim New
Media Summit and ISEA 2006 Festival and Symposium.

Leonardo/ISAST is also interested in connecting with
educational organizations and organizations with similar goals
and interests through the Leonardo Organizational Membership
Program, which was initiated in 2004. Through the program,
Leonardo/ISAST connects members of the Leonardo network and
organizations, faculty and students who are working at the
confluence of art, science and technology.

Leonardo/ISAST is pleased to include Intel, the San Francisco
Art Institute, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Rhode
Island School of Design, the University of Texas and the
University of Plymouth among the current members in the
organizational membership program.

For more information about student or organizational
memberships, please visit the members page of Leonardo On-Line
http://www.leonardo.info/members.html

_____________________________

LEONARDO EDUCATORS FORUM

The Leonardo Educators Forum (formerly known as the
Leonardo/CAA Working Group) is soliciting input from students
about their interests and needs to help develop programs and
activities that could benefit their professional development.

One of the focuses of the Leonardo Educators Forum is to
provide opportunities and resources in a mentoring capacity for
students and emerging professionals in areas relating to the
intersection of art, science and technology. Current activities
include a mentorship panel at the CAA annual meeting and ongoing
mentorship resources provided on the Leonardo On-Line web site
and through the Leonardo Educators Forum listserv and blog
http://www.leocaa.blogspot.com.

Students and emerging professionals are encouraged to offer
their ideas and comments about how the Leonardo Educators Forum
can assist them in the development of the next generation of
art/science/technology researchers and practitioners.

Some of the many areas to address include: writing across the
disciplines; collaboration between
artists/scientists/technologists; essential
connections/historical considerations; negotiating the job
market; and teaching art/science/technology: working inside and
outside of academia.

Please submit comments or questions to gharp [@] umich [dot] edu.

LEONARDO NETWORK NEWS COORDINATOR: Kathleen Quillian
isast [@] leonardo [dot] info

_____________________________

THE PACIFIC RIM NEW MEDIA SUMMIT (PRNMS)
A PRE-SYMPOSIUM TO ISEA2006
7-8 August 2006, San Jose, California

The ISEA2006 Symposium is being held in conjunction with the
first biennial ZeroOne San Jose Global Festival for Art on the
Edge in San Jose, California, 5--13 August 2006. As part of the
ISEA2006 Symposium, the CADRE Laboratory for New Media at San
Jose State University will host a 2-day pre-symposium entitled
the *Pacific Rim New Media Summit*, co-sponsored by Leonardo.

With a purview encompassing all states and nations that border
the Pacific Ocean, the Pacific Rim New Media Summit is intended
to explore and build interpretive bridges between institutional,
corporate, social and cultural enterprises, with an emphasis on
the emergence of new media arts programs.

In preparation for the summit, seven working groups are
currently laying the groundwork for the main areas of
investigation to be pursued in depth at the summit: Creative
Community, Curatorial, Education, Directory, Eco-Social
Activism, Mobile Computing and Urbanity, and Latin American-
Pacific/Asia New Media.

Following is another statement from one of the working group
chairs, in the continuation of our ongoing series as a build-up
to the conference.

_____________________________

PRNMS WORKING GROUP ON CONTAINER CULTURE

SCOPE AND OBJECTIVES

The Pacific Rim Curatorial Workgroup is developing a pan-
Pacific Rim exhibition, *Container Culture*, as part of the
overarching Pacific Rim New Media Summit for the ISEA2006
Symposium in San Jose, California, August 5-13, 2006. The
exhibition will feature work by artists in the "catch basin" of
the port city where the curator is located or working. It will
use standardized shipping containers for presentation of this
work. The shipping container is an index of the economic
relationships that exist among otherwise culturally diverse
Pacific Rim countries and will become a temporary zone of
quotidian "white cube" galleries for unstable media placed in
the very public context of the central Plaza Cesar Chavez in San
Jose.

GROUP MEMBERS

Steve Dietz (San Jose)
stevedietz [@] yproductions [dot] com
ZeroOne, co-chair

Zhang Ga (Shanghai/New York)
z [@] apiece [dot] net

Alice Ming Wai Jim (Vancouver)
alice [dot] jim [@] centrea [dot] org
Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
(Centre A)

Deborah Lawler-Dormer (Auckland)
deborah [@] mic [dot] org [dot] nz
Centre for Moving Image

Guna Nadarajan (Singapore)
pups2320 [@] pacific [dot] net [dot] sg
Co-chair

Ellen Pau (Hong Kong)
ellenpau [@] hkstar [dot] com
Videotaage

Johan Pijnappel (Mumbai)
pijnappel [@] hotmail [dot] com
Indian Video Archive

________________________________________________________________

BYTES
________________________________________________________________

***** CALL FOR PAPERS *****

LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL 16 (2006)
NOISES OFF - SOUND BEYOND MUSIC

These days sound is more than just music. Museums, galleries
and artists' studios are getting noisier: it's not that there is
so much more "Sound Art," but rather that so much more art has
sound. Cellphone ringtones generated four billion dollars in
sales worldwide in 2004. Incoming email and outgoing popcorn
announce themselves with plops and gongs and boops and beeps -
the emerging field of "sonification" addresses this
proliferation of all these "earcons" and other representational
uses of sound. Sound design is a vital part of Hollywood films
and computer games. While CD sales shrink with the proliferation
of peer-to-peer file exchange, the creative use of sound is
expanding in almost every other part of our lives.

For the next issue of Leonardo Music Journal we invite papers
on the expanded role of sound in art, science, business and
everyday life. Topics could include (but are not limited to):
audio art, radio art, phonography; sound design for video, film,
and gaming; the role of sound in performance art, theatre,
dance; sonificitation; architectural acoustics; instrument
design.

DEADLINES

15 October 2005 - Rough proposals, queries
1 January 2006 - Submission of finished article

Address inquiries to Nicolas Collins, Editor-in-Chief, at:
ncollins [@] artic [dot] edu.

Finished articles should be sent to the LMJ Editorial Office at
lmj [@] leonardo [dot] info.

Editorial guidelines and information for authors can be found
on our Information for Authors page.

Note: LMJ is a peer-reviewed journal. All manuscripts are
reviewed by LMJ editors, editorial board members and/or members
of the LMJ community prior to acceptance.

_____________________________


SCHOOL OF ART INSTITUTE CHICAGO
FACULTY POSITION IN FILM, VIDEO AND NEW MEDIA

The Department of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago invites applications from artists
working in video to teach and expand an innovative curriculum in
moving image media. We are looking for artists who work with
various applications of video/digital media, experimental
narrative and non-fiction forms, installation, video
performance, interactive environments and web-based work.
Candidates should have a strong conceptual and historical grasp
of contemporary issues in the intersecting worlds of independent
video production, experimental filmmaking, and new media. The
department is committed to alternative forms and practices that
emphasize experimentation, innovation, and the hybridization of
existing media and modes of presentation. Candidates should
demonstrate the ability and desire to participate in curricular
initiatives; should be able to work with undergraduate and
graduate students in an interdisciplinary, fine arts context;
and should have advanced proficiency in one or more areas of the
media arts. Applicants must have an active professional creative
practice. Teaching experience preferred. The position is full-
time, tenure-track and begins in the fall of 2006. Rank and
salary are commensurate with experience.

Please send a letter of application, curriculum vitae, artist's
statement, teaching philosophy, portfolio samples which may
include CD-Rom, DVD, VHS, mini-DV, and/or website URLs, names
and contact information for three references, and an SASE (if
you wish to have the materials returned) by November 15, 2005
for priority consideration to:

FVNM Search/LEA
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Office of Deans and Division Chairs
37 South Wabash Avenue
Chicago, IL 60603

For more information on the School and its programs, available
faculty positions, and details regarding application, consult
www.artic.edu/saic/public/jobs <http://www.artic.edu/saic/public/jobs>. For
additional assistance,
questions may be directed to Shanna Linn at slinn at artic.edu,
312.899-7472.

________________________________________________________________

___________________
| |
| |
| CREDITS |
| |
|___________________|

Nisar Keshvani: LEA Editor-in-Chief
Natra Haniff: LEA Editor
Michael Punt: LR Editor-in-Chief
Andre Ho: Web Concept and Design Consultant
Roger Malina: Leonardo Executive Editor
Stephen Wilson: Chair, Leonardo/ISAST Web Committee
Craig Harris: Founding Editor

Editorial Advisory Board:
Irina Aristarkhova, Roy Ascott, Craig Harris, Fatima Lasay,
Michael Naimark, Julianne Pierce

Gallery Advisory Board:
Mark Amerika, Paul Brown, Choy Kok Kee, Steve Dietz, Kim Machan

fAf-LEA Corresponding Editors:
Lee Weng Choy, Ricardo Dal Farra, Elga Ferreira, Young Hae-
Chang, Fatima Lasay, Jose-Carlos Mariategui, Marcus Neustetter,
Elaine Ng, Marc Voge

________________________________________________________________

_________________
| LEA |
| PUBLISHING |
| INFORMATION |
|_________________|

Editorial Address:
Leonardo Electronic Almanac
PO Box 850
Robinson Road
Singapore 901650
lea [@] mitpress [dot] mit [dot] edu

________________________________________________________________

Copyright (2005), Leonardo, the International Society for the
Arts, Sciences and Technology
All Rights Reserved.

Leonardo Electronic Almanac is published by:
The MIT Press Journals, Five Cambridge Center,
Cambridge, MA 02142
U.S.A.

Re-posting of the content of this journal is prohibited without
permission of Leonardo/ISAST, except for the posting of news and
events listings which have been independently received.
Leonardo/ISAST and the MIT Press give institutions permission to
offer access to LEA within the organization through such
resources as restricted local gopher and mosaic services. Open
access to other individuals and organizations is not permitted.

________________________________________________________________

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Leonardo Electronic Almanac is free to Leonardo/ISAST members
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