{"title":"Luminous skins: Costume as a central element of a swarm-based scenography","authors":"Iztok Hrga","doi":"10.1162/leon_a_02449","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02449","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Luminous skins are interactive light-costume hybrids that reimagine the boundaries of the performers’ physical bodies, broadcast their feelings and alter environment. They are the central element of a performance that requires no stage space, no fixed lighting, no wall outlets and no lighting technicians. The performers manage to dance through the darkness with the light they wear. The costumes are equipped with sensors and actuators and communicate wirelessly and in real time with other scenographic elements. Together, they form a swarm-based scenography that involves close coordination between the performers and responsive technology to create visually dynamic and immersive atmospheres.","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"132 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80013486","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Urban Intonation: Listening to the Rats of New York City","authors":"B. House","doi":"10.1162/leon_a_02448","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02448","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 From urbanization to biomedical science, rats can be found in the foundations of modernity. Communicating ultrasonically above the ∼20 kHz limit of human hearing, rats are also well-adapted for the human-built environment and its anthropogenic noise. For the sound installation Urban Intonation, the author recorded rats on the streets of New York City with an ultrasonic microphone and resampled and remixed the audio for playback over a human public address system, repositioning the voices of rats in order for us to reconsider our relationship to our oft-reviled nonhuman cohabitants.","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"10 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73290451","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Life in the Posthuman Condition: Critical Responses to the Anthropocene","authors":"Jacob Thompson-Bell","doi":"10.1162/leon_r_02438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02438","url":null,"abstract":"for instance the old-style difference between liberal versus mechanic arts or the more recent distinction between fine arts and applied arts. The very existence of different types of art, all of them now institutionalized as separate disciplines, and their struggle for cultural prominence (we should not forget that the Renaissance term of paragone means less “comparison” than “struggle” between the arts), have not ended with the post-Romantic desire to obtain the fusion of all arts in a Gesamtkunstwerk or the contemporary tendencies toward intermediality, transmediality, interdisciplinarity, deskilling, collective and collaborative production, or the renewed dialogue with longtime “non-art” forms of creation such as science. This book by Steven Brown is an attempt to build a new single theoretical framework aiming at a better understanding of what all arts have in common. Deeply rooted in cognitive perspectives and maintaining a permanent although very critical dialogue with biological and Darwinian takes on art, the novelty of this approach can be situated at three levels. First, Brown shifts the focus of the investigation from specific works of arts to art in general. While certainly giving many examples throughout the whole book, the author defends a very general and quite abstract approach that tends to supersede all that is too specific or contextual—hence also the strong critique of the cultural, that is Western, biases of much biological reading of art as implicitly framed by typically Western objects and practices. Second, he also introduces a definition of art that is quite different from what we usually understand by that word. Indeed, the author abandons the conventional definitions of art as (1) an object, (2) a quality of beauty in an object, or (3) an indicator of craftsmanship or creativity. Instead, art is defined here as “a process of performance,” with special reference to public display, group participation, and “specialized public performances and group rituals” (p. 4). This is of course a very radical and, at first sight, somewhat counterintuitive reduction of what is understood by the notion of art, but for Brown it is the best possible way to grasp what arts have in common from a biological and evolutionary point of view: The forms and functions of art, which all have to do with expression but also with creation and communication not only in personal or individual terms but also at the level of the group and in terms of collectivity building, can only become visible thanks to this particular methodological and conceptual framing, which accepts leaving aside our spontaneous ways of thinking on art. Third, the unifying approach defended by Brown is not at all an attempt to produce a one-size-fits-all structure. The author acknowledges fundamental differences between art forms, most importantly those between re-creation and coordination, the former referring to the “inherently narrative and symbolic nature of the arts” (p. 37)","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"5 1","pages":"543-545"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75639962","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alejandro Albornoz Rojas, Rogério Bordini, Cândida Luiza Borges da Silva, A. Crawshaw, Yuxiang Dong, Majli af Ekenstam, Cornelia Erdmann, Nicolas Holt, Rebecca Mott, Mikhel Proulx, Ana Rewakowicz, B. Vandeput, Weidi Zhang, M. Zolotova
{"title":"Top-Rated LABS Abstracts 2022","authors":"Alejandro Albornoz Rojas, Rogério Bordini, Cândida Luiza Borges da Silva, A. Crawshaw, Yuxiang Dong, Majli af Ekenstam, Cornelia Erdmann, Nicolas Holt, Rebecca Mott, Mikhel Proulx, Ana Rewakowicz, B. Vandeput, Weidi Zhang, M. Zolotova","doi":"10.1162/leon_a_02435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02435","url":null,"abstract":"This thesis presents practice-based research, where voice and poetry both are inspiration and material. It includes a portfolio of acousmatic compositions and a text, a compositional rationale based on Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro’s aesthetics called Creacionismo , which aims to create artistic works by combining materials from reality through an equilibrium between rationality and intuition. To examine how this rationale operates within the compositions, an analytical methodology is applied using poietic and neutral analyses of the tripartite model proposed by Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1990) and Stéphane Roy (2004). The first describes the author’s creative process, and the second details the pieces’ constitutive elements considering Pierre Schaeffer’s sound objects (1966), Denis Smalley’s spectromorphology (1997), levels of spatial function by Annette Vande Gorne (2010), and two original analyses developed by the author: voice type and speech-sound type. The analyses show the pieces’ structure, and consequently how Huidobro’s theory has been applied successfully to acousmatic composition, generating the notion of acousmatic-creationist. The main outcome of this thesis is a new artistic strategy balancing rationality and intuition within acousmatic composition and placing poetry as a driving force in the use of voice, merging artistic practice and theory in a recursive action.","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"5 1","pages":"527-533"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81577930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson","authors":"Amy Ione","doi":"10.1162/leon_r_02442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02442","url":null,"abstract":"and provide larger space for compassion. Thus, instead of waiting for the next Godot-like technological leap to solve its worries, humanity needs to move into a more realistic perspective of what is sustainable and what is not in terms of technological expectations, as Smil suggests in Chapter 5, devoted to “Techno-optimism, Exaggerations, and Realistic Expectations.” Smil reminds readers of the costs and consumption involved with the society we live in (e.g. 370 million tons of plastic per year, 150 million tons of ammonia, 1.8 billion tons of steel, and 4.5 billion tons of cement). One certainty is unshakable for the author: To tackle any problem efficiently, we need to know the facts and start with data accompanied by the exploration of their underlining principles and the macro-systems within which they emerge. Such exploration could move us to be either surprised, indignant, or confident, but the need remains to be continuously and timely informed and aware. This book is an educative overview of the overpromises that too frequently accompany claims about technology, from new cures for diseases to AI, about which the author is definitely impatient:","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"22 1","pages":"549-552"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87640561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Envisioning Rhythm: Exploring the Visual Dimension of Natural Ecosystems through Digital Media","authors":"Pai-Ling Chang, Peng Li","doi":"10.1162/leon_a_02434","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02434","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract For the study described here the authors combined digital technology with 3D printing to explore the feasibility of visualizing the rhythm of natural ecosystems. The achievements of this study were nine pieces of 3D-printed works. The authors discussed the Chinese Taoist view on ecological philosophy, aesthetics, and ecofeminism; probed the spiritual meaning of nature; and adopted technologies to visualize the rhythm of nature. By doing so, the authors aimed to reveal a new form of dialogue between humans and nature, disclose the visual signs of the vital rhythm of nature, and propose a new form of artistic creation based on biotechnology.","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"45 1","pages":"455-462"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89269516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
N. Kuhlmann, Jennifer Lécuyer, A. Thomas, S. Blain-Moraes
{"title":"Piece of Mind: Mobilizing Scientific and Experiential Knowledge of Dementia through the Arts","authors":"N. Kuhlmann, Jennifer Lécuyer, A. Thomas, S. Blain-Moraes","doi":"10.1162/leon_a_02372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02372","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract While peer-reviewed articles and conferences are appropriate for disseminating research findings within academia, they are less effective for translating scientific knowledge into meaningful and practical applications. Moreover, exchanging knowledge with nonacademic stakeholders is a crucial yet often overlooked step in ensuring that research aligns with the needs and reality of knowledge users. This is particularly problematic in dementia and Alzheimer’s disease research, where social stigma and the reliance on quantitative and self-report methods hamper meaningful dialogue between academic researchers, nonacademic stakeholders, and the broader community. The authors’ project Piece of Mind uses performing arts to create common ground for knowledge exchange, facilitate empathy through creative collaboration, and improve public awareness of dementia.","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"69 1","pages":"463-470"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86833655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}