{"title":"Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control","authors":"Jennifer Ferng","doi":"10.1162/leon_r_02345","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02345","url":null,"abstract":"book such as itself (which does not exist) and is thus, though expensive, essential reading for those who might learn, by a kind of osmosis, more about the science. When Alfred Jarry’s (anti-?) hero Dr. Faustroll (Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, written in 1898) set off in a sieve-like skiff across a psychogeographic sea, it was in the company of a bailiff and a dog(or arse-) faced baboon, Bosse-de-Nage. This latter could only say one thing: “Ha.” And it was not joking. We can choose to imagine that one ha is a parody of the other ha. Bosse-deNage could just have said “Ha,” but chose (or had) to say it twice. Umberto Eco wrote that “for the ultimate perfection of ’Pataphysics, it must be transformed from a science of imaginary solutions into a science of unimaginable solutions.” This as he knew is pataphysically improbable, a professional foul, but needed to be written. A fortiori the book under review. It has succeeded in demonstrating that the parody and the parodied are one, a useful, if one dare say so, contribution to pataphysical experience. QED. Ha!","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"35 1","pages":"211-212"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76792471","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":"Terra Forma: A Book of Speculative Maps","authors":"J. Parikka","doi":"10.1162/leon_r_02348","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02348","url":null,"abstract":"the coherence of the collection. (For some reason “Q” and “X” have been snubbed, although there are plenty of objects that could fit the agenda). Each of the 85 essays has at least one key image of the “object” and gives some account as to why it is no longer as prevalent as it once was. There is an introductory essay by the editors intended to outline the argument of the book. Largely this is based on correlation rather than causality, and indeed inasmuch as extinction is a condition that prevails after the death of the last individual specimen it is difficult to reconcile this with the continued existence and indeed functioning of many of the examples that have been chosen. The idea of extinction might have had more purchase if Williams’s distinction between technological systems and technological devices had been factored in. However, overall the critical framework of the introduction invokes much of the sentiment of the authors cited at the beginning of this review, but the argument is slippery, and at times there is a sense that technology studies has been somewhat reimagined away from the literature. There is also a sense of a cargo cult in the way that many of the key images appear as perfectly crafted product photographs. Rather like an auction catalogue in that they reveal precise detail in ways that are purposely deprived of meaning. Similarly, most of the essays are straightforward and have great charm, and the book is great fun to dip in and out of. The standout essays are of course by Edgerton. Nothing could be more resonant of misapplied endeavor than a huge plane pretending to be a boat. But as his careful study of the flying boat makes clear, when the capital costs of infrastructure (i.e. runways) are devolved to the carrier, landing on open water is possibly the only sensible option for long haul heavy payloads. Moreover, he points out that the history of the flying boat is not quite over, since they are still built and used in some circumstances. It seems that Howard Hughes’s infamous Spruce Goose is not quite the exorbitant vanity project that Hollywood suggests. Many of the essays are more personal, and Richard Wentworth’s piece on the slotted screwdriver is one of the more heartfelt. He reflects on his own relationship with the demise of the slothead screw in favor of the crosshead version which, as his son points out, is becoming dominant in the building trade because they speed up the process. For many years it has been clear in fabrication that connecting a star shaped driver is quicker and requires less precision than aligning a flat bladed screwdriver with a slot. The new screws may be expensive, but they are fast, self-countersinking, made of hardened steel, and do not shear. They may not be the best technical solution, but technological form, in the main, prioritizes production imperatives over consumer needs. This new screw needs a special star driver, so good luck trying to take them out after twenty years when they ","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"18 1","pages":"215-217"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77506852","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":"Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry","authors":"Jan Baetens.","doi":"10.1162/leon_r_02342","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02342","url":null,"abstract":"Scale is part of everyone’s daily experience, and not all these experiences are as dramatic a mix of fear and awe as Pascal’s positioning of mankind between the infinitely large and the infinitely small. After all, to review a book is a scale experience, since the reviewer is no longer dealing with words, sentences, and paragraphs, which are the object of an actual reading, but with totally different units, ideas, claims, and hypotheses (and the reader of a review will obviously go through something similar when entering the book itself—which, by the way, I can strongly recommend). Although we are all permanently aware of the presence and importance of scale, our understanding of it remains elementary, not only because we are so used to it that we neglect to scrutinize its significance, but also because we frame it in the wrong way. Differences of scale are generally envisaged not only from a single viewpoint—that of a given discipline, separated from most other ways of looking and understanding—but also that of “our” Homo sapiens viewpoint, which brings everything back to a kind of “this scale” or “meter scale”—Joshua DiCaglio uses these words to suggest that we tend to express “nonhuman” scales by comparing them with our natural measuring systems. Moreover, we also believe that there exists a kind of analogy between what we observe via our human scale and what we observe on other scales, be they microscopic or telescopic, a way of naturalizing and normalizing scale differences that DiCaglio rightly describes as a way of nonscalar interpretation of scale (the body as a mere collection of cells, for instance, or the universe as a simple collection of stars). These mistakes are human, all too human, but they miss the real meaning of scale, which some of us experience in certain circumstances and which DiCaglio links with the impression of a fusion with the whole of being, a complete fading out of the boundaries between subject and object, I and the world, body and mind, etc. The author groups these experiences as “mystical,” while also insisting that it would be a mistake to consider all of them as religious in the traditional sense of the word (the religious experience is just one of the possible forms that a deep scalar experience can take and it is certainly not the universal key to a good understanding of what happens in the encounter that DiCaglio eventually labels as the coincidence of the I and the Cosmos). Scale, in other words, is not something that exists. It must be seen as a force that changes both subject and object and above all the relationship between them. To grasp what scale actually “does” and to avoid the traditional mistakes in our experience of scale, all of them being nonscalar interpretations of scalar facts, we need a real theory of scale, not a theory of scaling techniques and apparatuses or scaled objects but a general, nondisciplinary approach that can be applied to any scale experience. This is the ambition of DiCaglio","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"13 1","pages":"205-206"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80858753","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":"La bande dessinée en France à la Belle époque. 1880–1914","authors":"Jan Baetens.","doi":"10.1162/leon_r_02349","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02349","url":null,"abstract":"retical insights—not supplementary, not explicatory, but parallel strands of visual arguments, points of tension and intensity. Such diagramimages are operational in the sense of not depicting a stable reality but becomings involved in the surfacing of dynamic spatialization: We speak of space but in the trajectories and potentials of its transformation. On the surface of the diagram, a plethora of earth forces emerge as they carve out a space of problematics. As the authors write, “Each model considers a specific question, a problem that it unfolds in space, sometimes in time, using a borrowed and inflected archetypal figure: the globe is turned inside out like a glove, the grid of coordinates of Euclidian geometry deforms and evolves depending on the actors who cross its space, while the division of urban time bends into spirals of space-time” (p. 17). Variation becomes primary, fixity an aftereffect, implying how the authors try to move beyond the subject-object freeze-frames to a more ecological dynamic, asking thus also what this ecological dynamic means for architecture, design, and visual composition of such worlds— or more accurately, in such worlds. The book functions as a very convenient manual, useful for teaching and the already voiced connection between theory and design. It prompts consideration of other locations, other situations, other geographies that could be modeled in this vein. In a manner like some other (speculative) designers such as Design Earth (for example, their Geostories book and various exhibition projects), Terra Forma’s pedagogically useful and discursively interesting take resonates with several educational and research-driven design approaches of recent years. Here, the most obvious to mention is the Terraforming program that ran at the Strelka Institute (2022), as well as the Politics of Atmospheres studio by Elise Misao Hunchuck, Marco Ferrari, and Jingru (Cyan) Cheng that ran for three years within the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art and was also invited to participate in the Critical Zones project led by Latour and Peter Weibel. Now translated into English a couple of years after the original French edition, Terra Forma is a great reference point for particular kinds of environmental humanities that work with architectural and design methods. It also establishes further bridges in this sort of an expanded humanities alongside questions of experimental practices of “data visualization.”","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"5 1","pages":"217-218"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82141556","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}
Yu-xin Zhang, Fan Tang, Weiming Dong, T. Le, Changsheng Xu, Tong-Yee Lee
{"title":"Portrait Map Art Generation By Asymmetric Image-to-Image Translation","authors":"Yu-xin Zhang, Fan Tang, Weiming Dong, T. Le, Changsheng Xu, Tong-Yee Lee","doi":"10.1162/leon_a_02323","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02323","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The authors propose a deep neural network–based algorithm to automatically generate portrait map art (PMA), a modern art form created by British portrait artist Ed Fairburn. The authors formulate the generation of PMA as an adaptive dual-to-single image translation problem. The authors’ proposed model analyzes the appearance of one portrait and one map image using two encoder networks and utilizes their hidden encodings as representations of the portrait and map image to generate new PMA using a decoder network. An adaptive style harmonization module is proposed to fuse the two hidden encodings. Optimized by cycle-consistency constraint, the model can produce new PMA images without baselines.","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"111 1","pages":"28-36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88061228","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":"Invisible Accelerators","authors":"Diana Ayton-Shenker","doi":"10.1162/leon_e_02320","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_e_02320","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article is a reflection on a journey of transdisciplinary partners from two different and unusually paired “sets” of disciplines: photography art (Silvio Wolf, SW) and cross-pollinated research in the fields of applied clinical neuroscience and psychoanalysis (Inna Rozentsvit, IR). This relationship originated in examining the “beholder’s share” phenomenon and moved on to further collaboration on the topics of “thresholds” and “visible/invisible,” as they relate to these two individuals’ personal and professional beings.","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"1 1","pages":"2-2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79551957","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":"Frederik Ruysch and his Thesaurus Anatomicus: A Morbid Guide","authors":"Robert Maddox-Harle","doi":"10.1162/leon_r_02343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02343","url":null,"abstract":"hegemonic idea of science as merely objective and blinded by empirical research. Instead, he insists on science’s rootedness and amazement and hypothetical reasoning—two forms of fundamental modesty–and thus its possible links with what is at stake in the human experience of scale. For Scale Theory, scale is essentially transformative. Part One of the book explains the major aspects of this transformation with the help of some scalar daily life experiences, which are then enlarged via a certain number of thought experiments. First, scale reconfigures what we observe: What appears on scale A becomes invisible on scale B, which can be bigger or smaller than A, and vice versa. The difference in resolution between these domains is marked by what the authors calls thresholds of observation (a typical mistake of nonscalar reading of scale differences appears for example when we directly link what we observe on scale A with what we observe on scale B). To reveal the transformative power of scale an object or a singular unit must be fundamentally differentiated: The objects we observe are also part of smaller as well as larger objects we do not observe at the same time, but which are not nonexistent for that reason. Second, the differentiated view of the objects does not relate to the object itself (when we look from further away and no longer see the trees of a forest, that does not mean that the trees themselves have changed) but to the distance between the observing eye or the observing apparatuses and the object: “Scale is created only by the relationship between . . . two very different perspectives” (p. 29). Technically speaking, “scale is the relation between one ‘over there’ and another ‘over here’ ” (p. 32). This difference has major consequences for the experiencing subject, who ceases to be a single unit; the “I” can no longer identify with one of the two scalar perspectives; instead, the “I” must identify with both (if not, the scalar experience degenerates into a nonscalar one). Third, the scalar experience also has a powerful cognitive dimension that helps move beyond the limited range of the single Homo sapiens experience. The scale experience can be scaled itself, so to speak; it produces forms of knowledge that can be stored, memorized, taught, interpreted, and so on, and therefore supersede any immediate empirical observation, scalar or nonscalar. The result of this cognitive dimension of the scale experience further complicates the possible relationships between object(s) and subject(s). Part Two of the book covers a more philosophical approach to the basic notions of scale theory: subject, object, and of course the shifting relations between them. Quite logically, given the nondual horizon of his scalar thinking, DiCaglio relies here and in other parts of the book as much on non-Western as on Western concepts and ways of thinking, which he not only confronts and contrasts, but brings together in such a way that their differences becom","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"13 1","pages":"206-207"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85397920","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":"Measuring Is Making: The Radical Indeterminacy of Music","authors":"Matthew Lovett","doi":"10.1162/leon_a_02300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02300","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In Meeting the Universe Halfway, the feminist theorist Karen Barad explores the indeterminate nature of measurement. Drawing on empirical research into quantum entanglement, they develop an axiomatic approach to configuring the fundamental interconnections between processes of measurement and making. This article builds on this aspect of Barad’s work and uses it to consider how an indeterminate measuring-as-making process might manifest in music. By staging an encounter between the composer John Cage’s investigations of indeterminacy and two contemporary pieces of music—Space Golf by Hen Ogledd and Wildfires by SAULT—the author considers how a Baradian theory of measuring-as-making can be used to offer new perspectives on musical creativity.","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"53 1","pages":"194-198"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84262529","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":"The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies","authors":"A. Enns","doi":"10.1162/leon_r_02346","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02346","url":null,"abstract":"instance, are featured in the fourth chapter. She expands upon the definition of metabolism to explore the “smooth circulation of energy, transportation, and information through the urban infrastructures” to the “pathways that circulate oxygen, blood, nutrients” (p. 109). Furuhata employs Kurokawa Kishō as a central historical actor to weave together capsule architecture and contemporary critiques of petrochemicals and geoengineering. Metabolism’s capsules strike a particular ecological dilemma given their reliance on plastics. She employs Marx to focus on the political economy of production and the ecological footprint of the Metabolist architects. Furuhata concentrates on the Chisso Corporation’s nitrogenbased fertilizers that were spreading Minamata disease among the public, a form of methylmercury poisoning resulting from industrial pollution (p. 116). Metabolist architects were deeply implicated in the industry of plastics manufacturing and the resulting effects of environmental pollution. As part of the “substrata of advanced capitalism,” capsule architecture derived from plastics remains closely connected to the climatic challenges of environmental waste. In fact, the oil economy that financed Kurokawa and other Metabolists’ projects embraced domestic comfort and convenience through the dual logic of security and survival through containment (p. 117). The 1973 oil crisis halted the flow of oil into Japan, marking the decline of domestic financing for the Tange Lab and Metabolist built projects. Despite this crisis, Kenzo Tange continued designing a monumental stadium in Riyadh and temporary accommodations for pilgrims visiting Mecca. Kurokawa’s capsules later appeared in Iraq (1972). Such entanglements with the fossil fuels and petroleum industries point to the architectural experiments by the Metabolists as being contradictory. Their very existence colored by architects’ ecological interests and hope for the sustainable development of cities, they were closely tied to an economic dependency on fossil fuels and petrochemical industries, whose effects undermine the very idea of sustainability. The inevitable rise of surveillance systems and smart urbanism feature in the fifth chapter, which introduces tear gas as an elemental component of climatic media. Norbert Weiner’s connections to Japanese cyberneticians and architects foreground how tear gas was “not only immersive but communicative” (p. 137). Police use of tear gas in Japan as a form of urban governance responded to moments of crisis in civic order. Furuhata reads the correspondence between Ikehara Shikao and Weiner to supplement scholarship by Peter Galison and others who have addressed cybernetic logic and wartime geopolitics. Furuhata articulates how Tange Lab architects positioned the city as a self-regulating cybernetic organization. Optimization and organization underlying Arata Isozaki’s Festival Plaza for Expo ’70 allowed two giant robots with control rooms to modulate ambien","PeriodicalId":93330,"journal":{"name":"Leonardo (Oxford, England)","volume":"26 1","pages":"212-213"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81191949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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