/ ____ / / /\ / /-- /__\ /______/____ / \ _________________________________________________________________ Leonardo Electronic Almanac volume 10, number 2, february 2002 _________________________________________________________________ ISSN #1071-4391 ____________ | | | CONTENTS | |____________| _________________________________________________________________ EDITORIAL The Bridge is not the Gap: mapping new territories of media and mind. by Roy Ascott LEONARDO JOURNAL < Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 11 - Introduction > LEONARDO DIGITAL REVIEWS < Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, reviewed by Roy Behrens > < Art, Obsession and Possession: Is Freud Still Interesting? Review article by Robert Pepperell > FEATURE < Healing Cultures through Digital Art > by Fatima Lasay ISAST NEWS < Introducing two Leonardo/ISAST Board/Editorial Board members > OBITUARY < Ryszard Stanislawski > by Krzysztof Jurecki _________________________________________________________________ _______________ | | | EDITORIAL | |_______________| _________________________________________________________________ The Bridge is not the Gap: mapping new territories of media and mind. by Roy Ascott Differences between West and East are often reduced simplistically to a kind of dialectic of consciousness: on the one hand the isolated mind locked in its Cartesian box, on the other hand floating clouds of knowing. Quantum physics and ubiquitous telematics (amongst other models and methods of our non-linear era) have together ruptured this expedient dichotomy. In recent years, artists have eagerly employed the metaphors of science and the tools of advanced technology to break new ground, allowing a new culture of consciousness to grow. I call this culture "technoetic" and the concomitant changes in the way we think and perceive the world "cyberception". Technoetic is derived from the Greek techne and noetikos (mind) which have always been related in wise societies, regardless of their place in historical time or geographical space. Moreover, art has always had a spiritual dimension no matter what gloss prevailing political attitudes or cultural ideologies have forced upon it. Cyberception describes more than just the prosthetic amplification of thought or our ability to see deeper into matter and further into space: it constitutes a whole new human faculty, one which confers upon us an entirely new set of dispositions and a radically transformed behavioural repertoire. We are living on the edge, in complex mixed realties, between cyberspace and material space, between particles and pixels. I would argue that a whole new substrate of our lived experience is being formed from the technologically driven convergence of Bits, Atoms, Neurons and Genes Š the Big B.A.N.G. From the artists point of view this is creating a new media universe. The first stage of this convergence can easily be seen as the digitally dry data of the computer mixes with the wet biology of living systems, producing a kind of "moist media". The advent of nanotechnology, now moving much closer to the forefront of our material practices, brings another dimension to our constructive urge to build new worlds. This brings me to the gap which is to be bridged. Clearly this is not simply a matter of passing from one side to the other. ItÕs actually about collapsing the two sides into a whole new environment, a fluctuating field of potentiality, in which new forms of human identity, living systems, architectures, cultures and connectivities can be planted, grown and nurtured. I think one useful way of trying to describe this territory is to think of the triangulation of three different kinds of VR: Virtual Reality, Validated Reality, and Vegetal reality. The nature of the first two is pretty clear. Virtual Reality has everything to do with digital worlds, online or stand alone, which are separated from or blend into our everyday world of Validated Reality. When they blend we talk of Augmented Reality (the kind that enables the surgeon to see both the external surface of a body and a visualisation, specifically located, of the internal dynamics of the organism), or of Mixed Reality (which brings artificial and real scenarios into a navigable, phenomenologically persuasive synthesis). Validated Reality, that which is supported by the pillars of classical, Newtonian science, taught from birth and ceaselessly drummed into us as "common sense", is the reality that is authorised and reinforced in order to maintain some degree of coherence in what is actually a wholly contingent universe. It is the reality that doesnÕt bear looking at too closely. And one reason for the cultural gap between west and east has been precisely that eastern thought goes beneath the surface, recognising the fundamental flux and flow of being that has been anathema to Western ontology. Where we saw Nature as a series of objects in space, the oriental gaze has been towards processes and becomings. But cybernetics, at first crudely and then more subtly after the intervention of Heinz von Foerster (whose 1973 lecture On Constructing a Reality must rank as one of the turning points in our intellectual history), led us to a more holistic view of the world, paralleling the ideas of wholeness and inter-connectedness espoused by the Copenhagen School of quantum physics earlier in the century. It took then the proving of BellÕs theorem of non-locality to change the direction of our thinking "eastwards", just as the East was looking to the advent of telematics and global connectivity as the means of engaging more directly in the technological revolution. The admixing of materiality and metaphysics has distinguished the achievements of the twentieth century, and in my view could lead us into an enormously enriched culture of consciousness, in the 21st. This is the domain of fecund commonality that will make the need for bridges redundant! I see the spiritual in art blossoming because of technology not despite it. I see it reaching qualities of experience that Kandinsky , for example, could not have dreamed of. But I have dealt only with the beginning of this journey into new realities: the merging of the virtual and the validated. I turn now to the third axis of this triangulation, Vegetal Reality. This is perhaps first best understood in comparison to these other two VRs: Virtual Reality, dependant on interactive digital technology, is telematic and immersive. Validated Reality, dependant on reactive mechanical technology, is prosaic and Newtonian. Vegetal Reality, dependant on psychoactive plant technology, is entheogenic and spiritual Vegetal Reality is quite unfamiliar to Western praxis, despite the illuminating research of Richard Evans Schultes, Professor of Ethnobotany at Harvard, for example, or the proselytising of the late Terence McKenna, and is often viewed with fear and loathing by those entombed in Validated Reality. Vegetal Reality can be understood in the context of technoetics, as the transformation of consciousness by plant technology and the ingestion of psychoactive material. This refers to a canon of practice and insight which is archaic in its human application, known to us principally through the work of shamans (in both East and West!) largely visionary and often operating in a context of healing which is distant in the extreme from the Validated Reality of western medicine. However, frequently during the past century we have seen how the shamanÕs knowledge of plants has been appropriated, synthesised and marketed by the pharmaceutical industry. this ancient knowledge provides us with some of the more spectacular products of modern medicine. I am referring actually to the understanding and employment of DNA , the utilisation of is communicative function within and even between species that seems to be at the root of shamanic practice: the means by entheogens of tapping into the databases of nature and of oneself. I think we shall see entheogenic, telematic and technoetic aspects converge, just as bits, atoms, neurons and genes will combine, in the moistmedia art of the future. This will not simply be a bridging of cultures separated in space or time but the marking out of a whole new territory, both of material production and connective consciousness. It is in the gap between us , between paradigms of mind, and between cultural contexts, that our new world will be built just as it will be in the gap between ourselves that new forms of human identity and values will arise. © Roy Ascott 2001 For the CCA Kitakyushu Project Bridge the Gap, Kitakyushu city, Japan, July 2001. _________________________________________________________________ _____________________ | | | LEONARDO JOURNAL | |_____________________| _________________________________________________________________ < Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 11 Š Introduction > LMJ 11: Not Necessarily "English" Music: Britain's Second Golden Age By Nicolas Collins, LMJ Editor-in-Chief In the early 1960s, Britain Š its empire in tatters, its economy listing heavily Š moved into a position of musical leadership not experienced since the Golden Age of Byrd and Purcell, four centuries earlier. Alongside Spam and chewing gum, American Gis had bequeathed a legacy of jazz and blues records that were obsessively studied, learned note-by-note by young British musicians. When the flow of vinyl finally reversed, the "British Invasion" hit the U.S.A. like a bomb. Britain's cultural shift from the "small, brown, sad paintings" that artist Joe Tilson described as the art flavor of the 1950s [1] to the shiny electric guitars that symbolized the 1960s also triggered an extraordinary outburst of quirky, inventive, thoughtful experimental music. From Profumo to Thatcher, new music in the U.K. flourished in an atmosphere of inspired inclusivity and utter disregard for the niceties of critical success, popular acclaim or the historical record. Merseybeat [2] provided musicians with fame and wealth (and musicologists with handy dissertation topics), but this other "English Music" has remained strangely unacknowledged and under-documented. Back when Chuck Berry was in jail, Little Richard back in church and Buddy Holly in heaven, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles were needed to re-introduce Americans to their own music Š American musicians imitated British musicians imitating American blues. British pop bands revived the tradition of the songwriter/singer that had gotten lost between the cotton fields of Mississippi and the corridors of the Brill Building [3]. The best of the British bands offered a perfect balance of interpretation and innovation, juxtaposing a respect for diverse musical traditions with bursts of true originality (e.g. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band Š a record that could only have been put together by a band that once played "BŽsame Mucho" and "Twist and Shout" in the same set). The British experimental music that emerged in the mid-1960s owed as much to this new pop sensibility as to the dominant European modernist style Š as David Toop writes, "after all the rigorous, radical and exclusionist music theories that slugged it out during the twentieth century, English music allowed things to happen" [4]. Composers got up on stage to play, rejecting the classical distinction between creator and interpreter; they drew on musical material and ideas outside the high-art canon, including pop and "world" music; they appealed to ears raised on pop because they made use of pop instruments and pop sounds, rather than confining themselves to the acoustic orchestra; their rhythms were often closer to Bo Diddley than to Boulez; and while pop hooked you with guitar riffs, this music was built on "brain riffs," clever ideas that held your attention in a way a tone row never could. In "Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond," composer and critic Michael Nyman presents British music in the context of parallel American and European activity, and points out the influence of John Cage and Christian Wolff in particular [5]. But British music displayed idiosyncrasies that separated it from these other, better-documented movements. This music abounds with seemingly paradoxical juxtapositions: composition and improvisation; professionals and amateurs; Maoism and Merchant Ivory [6]; bloodless systems and halcyon sentimentality. In the essays presented here a handful of names keep cropping up, sometimes as "composers," sometimes as "players," sometimes as "organizers," sometimes as "critics" Š musical functions shifted fluidly in a relatively non-hierarchical musical society. Few of these composers demonstrated the stylistic tenacity of, say, LaMonte Young Š radical changes of tack seem commonplace. To quote Toop again, "this willingness to abandon a fixed sense of place or identity, within the cultural map is a legacy that remains with us today" [7]. Imaginative and witty, this second "Golden Age" was nonetheless patently uncommercial. It could not compete with pop for shock value, and was overshadowed (in the American press at least) by the easier-to-catch wave of American Minimalists such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Nyman's 1974 book (mentioned above) still stands as the best single reference. In recent years the work of Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra have been the subject of several articles and concerts. But much of the music still remains unfamiliar, even to younger British composers. In this volume of Leonardo Music Journal we aimed to document this reclusive chapter of musical history, follow up on the current activities of its original participants and trace its influence on younger British artists. Among the contributors to this issue, Michael Parsons, Eddie PrŽvost, Ranulph Glanville, Lawrence Casserley, Hugh Davies and Stuart Jones were all active participants in the emergent scene of the 1960s and 1970s; their recollections overlap one another to create a Rashomon-like portrait of the time, with each writer's denouement pointing in a different direction. Sarah Walker extends several of these tag endings to weave an overview of recent music by veterans of those earlier days. Walker's essay highlights the centrality of the piano in British experimentalism, while Matthew Sansom focuses on the role of improvisation. Cornelius Cardew emerges as a key figure in the evolution of numerous musical movements in Britain [8]. Coriœn Aharoni‡n analyzes the conflict between Cardew's radical political beliefs and his avant-garde musical background, addressing contradictions that many still find quite hard to reconcile many years after his untimely death in 1981. Alvin Lucier contributes an affectionate portrait of his former student Stuart Marshall (1949-1993). A visual artist by training, Marshall returned to England after studying with Lucier and taught for several years in art schools before shifting to video and film production. He served as a bridge between the American and British experimental traditions and between the musical and visual worlds, and exerted a subtle but profound influence on a generation of younger British artists. Robin Rimbaud (a.k.a. "Scanner"), Janek Schaefer and Joe Banks (a.k.a. "Disinformation") represent the more recent wave of British music and its obsession with the physicality of electronic media. Rimbaud's moniker derives from the public-service band scanner radio he used to eavesdrop on cellular telephone conversations in his early recordings and performances. Schaefer is an experimental DJ who has been pushing the limits of both the record-player mechanism and vinyl itself. Banks works with the sounds of non-broadcast electromagnetic signals, such as those produced by the aurora borealis, meteorites, the electrical power grid, navigation satellites and paranormal phenomena. We were very fortunate to persuade David Toop to curate the CD accompanying this issue. No single person was better placed to do so: musician, composer, writer, producer and fan, Toop has been a fixture of the British music scene since his teenage years. Through the strength of long-standing friendships and collaborations, he has managed to assemble 27 extraordinary tracks, most of which are previously unreleased or long out of print. Together with Toop's own essay and the artists' notes, they provide tangible evidence of this heady time and its continuing repercussions. "English" Music? Obviously not just. Britain is much more than England Š Wales and Scotland have strong cultures, musical and otherwise, and are loathe to rally under the flag of St. George. But the phrase "English Music" has a sonic resonance that the clinical precision of "British Music" lacks, and it carries specific and appropriate historical connotations. Since the Age of Dunstable (1400Ń1460) the term has been used to describe a peculiar "conservatism . . . strong enough to transform borrowed styles and genres until they became suitable for genuine native expression" and to "preserve old traditions even in periods of experimentation" [9]. Or, as Eddie PrŽvost puts it, "Amidst the general climate of fashionable change that is represented by 'the 1960s,' there came about a generous sense of convergence" [10]. Generosity is, by its nature, an untidy virtue. So, in the untidy spirit of generosity and convergence - "English Music." And Not Necessarily English Music. Nicolas Collins [The full text of this article, along with references and footnotes, is available in the print version of Leonardo Music Journal, Volume 11] _________________________________________________________________ _________________________________ | | | | | LEONARDO DIGITAL REVIEWS | | 2002.02 | |_________________________________| _________________________________________________________________ What's New in LDR? ------------------ Leonardo Digital Reviews' newest category is called "review articles." The existing categories of "books," "CDs," "films," "events" and "websites" appear as usual, but some links now go directly to an article by one of the review panel. This represents a move that has been anticipated in Leonardo Digital Reviews towards responses to material that synthesize, as well as analyze, the interventions in our field. Single-item reviews will continue as before and these are intended to be reactive, informative and analytical as far as possible within the terms laid down by the author or artist and to situate the material within an existing body of practice or bibliography. A review article for LDR, on the other hand, is one that normally deals with two or more items. Using these items as the primary data sources, the article will show the significance (or otherwise) of the material to the reviewer's own intellectual position and research interests relative to the Leonardo project. Initially, review articles will be subject to a process of informal review before publication on the website and it is anticipated that if this initiative takes off, then we will move to some process of peer-review, using LDR panel members. =================================================================== In this month's LDR, Mikhail S. Zalivadny's commentary on the twentieth international Educational Informatics and Sustainable Development Problems conference in St. Petersburg provides a report on an event that few would have been fortunate enough to attend. Had we been able to, we would apparently have noticed a discrepancy between what was intended by the exhibitors and how the conference was used. Meanwhile, the seven books reviewed this month are eerily connected by the theme of double vision. Following on the heels of Wilfred Niels Arnold's report last month, Roy Behrens gives us a review of the David Hockney book that has spawned a minor industry. Certainly it has revived art history as a topic of conversation in one or two art schools, but Behrens sees this intervention as a mixed blessing that can unfold either way (see review below). Wilfred Niels Arnold also detects a Janus face in "The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered States of Consciousness," a book that may not fully satisfy anyone. The first of Mike Mosher's reviews, Jyriki Siukonen's "Intellectual Stunt Flying," on the other hand, clearly satisfies its own agenda but leaves the empiricist historian wanting more (some of which can be found at www.ylem.org/artists/mmosher/f-p.html). The review concerns a much more sober and measured account of "one of the great inventors of our time" that will appeal to several different constituencies, provided they can decode the visual melange on the back cover. Finally, as if to underscore the theme of the anxieties of perpetual splitting, Robert Pepperell tackles two of the more psychologically complex artists of the early twentieth century (according to Freudian theory) - Hans Bellmer and Pablo Picasso. In a lengthy review article (also included below), Pepperell argues that the contradictions in these two artists' creative actions may be far better explained if they are left as unresolved contradictions. As with all else that we have published in Leonardo Digital Reviews this month, quite by chance the meta-claim appears to be that judging by the publishing climate of the early twenty-first century, the limits of explanation and exposition are under considerable strain: the constituency of reception, like the modern individual, can no longer be idealized as a rational unity. Finally, minor changes continue in the Leonardo Digital Reviews website. Now, along with a section of review articles, we have put all book reviews that are 6 months old and older in an archive section. This is a compromise solution, the purpose of which is to retain the extent of the work that our panel does on hand while allowing the page to load faster. We too, it seems, are not immune from the torment of competing desires. As always, all this month's reviews, as well as back issues, are available at: http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/ldr.html Michael Punt Editor-in-Chief Leonardo Digital Reviews ********************************************************************* New this month in LDR: ---------------------- Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, by David Hockney. Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered States of Consciousness, by J. Allan Hobson Reviewed by Wilfred Niels Arnold Uplifted Spirits, Earthbound Machines: Studies on Artists and the Dream of Flight 1900-1935, by Jyriki Siukonen Reviewed by Mike Mosher Bootstrapping: Douglas Englebart, Coevolution and the Origins of Personal Computing, by Thierry Bardini Reviewed by Mike Mosher Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety, by Sue Taylor and Myth and Metamorphosis: Picasso's Classical Prints of the 1930s, by Lisa Florman Reviewed by Robert Pepperell Art - Science - Technology: A New Step in St. Petersburg Reviewed by Mikhail S. Zalivadny ********************************************************************* < Book Review > Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters by David Hockney. Viking Studio, New York, NY, U.S.A., 2001. 296 pages. $60.00. ISBN: 0-670-03026-0. Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, 2022 X Avenue, Dysart, IA 52224-9767 U.S.A. ballast@netins.net Years ago, I was approached by a law firm to testify as an expert witness. They showed me a drawing and asked if I knew, simply by looking at it, if it had been traced or drawn unaided. I responded without hesitation because I believed I could easily tell. I recalled that incident as I read this book, since much of David Hockney's "evidence" for its hypothesis rests on his claim to be able to tell a drawing made freehand (by the process he calls "eyeballing" or "groping") from one that was traced using optical aids. Hockney (b.1937) is a British-born painter who became famous in the 1960s as a Pop Artist. He has since moved on to other work (notably, using Polaroid photography), has settled in California and is among the most interesting artists today. He not only creates art, but also studies it in ways that one might expect of a scholar. In this large-sized, exuberant opus, filled with breathtaking, full-color details, he argues that he, as an artist, has noticed that something is woefully wrong in the standard account of the progress of art since the 1400s. It is widely assumed, for example, that European Old Masters, beginning with the early renaissance, made drawings and paintings of models from life, freehand and unaided, meaning that whatever effects they obtained were achieved by their use of perspective, from their studies of anatomy and from a new-found attention to worldly forms. But, as Hockney demonstrates, renaissance "photorealism" emerged with amazing rapidity from Gothic innocence, which prompts him to posit an alternate cause: He thinks that artists used optical aids (simple concave mirrors at first, then lenses and cameras obscura) as early as the fifteenth century (". . . the big change occurred sometime around 1420-1430," he writes). Not all, but the bulk of his evidence comes from merely looking carefully at reproductions of paintings by Van Eyck, Holbein, Carravagio, Velasquez, Vermeer, Ingres and dozens of others. Substantial skill is required to trace with an optical instrument (even today, which Hockney confirms by attempting to draw, not very successfully, using a convex mirror and a camera lucida), so that he repeatedly cautions (contrary to what is now commonly thought) that tracing in art is not cheating, and his discovery in no way belittles the work of the Old Masters (but of course that is exactly where all of this leads). Further, he does not claim that "all artists used optics," only that in a surprisingly short time period "the lens had become so dominant that its image was now the model for all [European] painting." Assuming that Hockney's conjecture is true, a number of irksome anomalies in Old Master paintings become explainable, such as the smallness but accuracy of certain of their preparatory drawings; the precision with which they could render the folds of highly patterned cloth drapery, suits of armor and the complex surfaces of globes, lutes, and melons ("the lute of the fruit world"); the abundance of left-handed artistÕs models (right-handers, Hockney surmises, reversed by the lens of the drawing machine); and the coexistence of offset, mismatched points of view, as if key elements in the picture had been drawn separately with an optical instrument, then montaged together to form a tableau. It may even explain the dramatic juxtaposition of highlight and shadow in the paintings of Caravaggio, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Georges de la Tour and others. I should explain that for many years, long before this book began, there was little doubt among art historians that some artists had experimented with drawing devices (Vermeer, for example, is said to have used a camera obscura); we know that because there are pictures of these by Leonardo, Durer and others, even Van Gogh. So the real contribution of Hockney (whose unsung collaborator on this project was a physics professor named Charles Falco) may be largely a matter of quantity, in the sense that he may have discovered that these kinds of devices were used earlier and to a greater and wider degree than anyone would have guessed. If this book is picked up and adopted as fact (which is very likely, given HockneyÕs skills as a publicist), it may mean the end of the spurious myth that artists must always draw unassisted, or freehand. Unfortunately, it is also likely to convince lay audiences of the equally wrongful assumption that there is no such thing as freehand drawing, and that artists are incapable of drawing "realistically" except by resorting to optical aids. (Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review 17, No. 2, Winter 2001-2002.) ********************************************************************* < Review Article > Art, Obsession and Possession: Is Freud Still Interesting? by Robert Pepperell Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety By Sue Taylor. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2000, 310 pp., illus. ISBN: 0-262-20130-5. and Myth and Metamorphosis: Picasso's Classical Prints of the 1930s By Lisa Florman. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2000, 243 pp., illus. ISBN: 0-262-06213-5. (A full version of this article can be found at: http://www.postdigital.org) Hans Bellmer and Pablo Picasso were artists who have been characterized, in professional and personal terms, as both possessive and obsessive. If "possession" and "obsession" have a suitably Freudian ring, it is because they chime with much contemporary scholarship seeking to treat artistic works as objects through which to construct the (absent) artist as subject through psychoanalytic analysis. The two examples of such methodology by Sue Taylor and Lisa Florman, considered here, both attempt to reassert the explanatory power of Freudian theory at a time when it seems in wider decline; one could even be forgiven for thinking that orthodox psychoanalysis had retreated from medical science into the highly subjective realm of art criticism. So, what can psychoanalytic theories contribute to our appreciation of art and our understanding of artists? For Taylor, the art of Hans Bellmer is a psychoanalytic gold mine yielding rich nuggets of classic Freudianism: the Oedipal complex, the castration complex, fetishism, etc. are apparently all vividly (almost diagrammatically) represented in Bellmer's oeuvre. Much is made, for example, of the artist's relationship (or lack of) with his distant and authoritarian father, the compensatory over-affection for his mother and the obsessive attachment to his young female cousin. Using available biographical data and the artist's works as evidence, Taylor probes deep into the psyche of this complex, paranoid and highly articulate man in order to make a number of claims about his unconscious motives and desires. One such claim is made fairly tentatively early in the introduction: "I propose here that [Bellmer's] impassioned expressions of father hatred might work to cover over a repressed homosexual attachment, an hypothesis that runs counter to other psychoanalytic accounts of his oeuvre" (p. 13). To some, this would seem an extravagant assertion since there is very little evidence of homoeroticism in Bellmer's art; yet by the end of the book it has become an almost indisputable fact: " . . . Bellmer sought punishment for his own deeply repressed homoerotic desires and murderous oedipal wishes through fantasmatic violence displaced onto the female body." (p. 198). This diagnosis may be consistent with Freudian theory, but less convincing to anyone neutral, under-informed or critical about orthodox psychoanalytic doctrines. However, if the standard Freudian explanations of Bellmer through his work remain dependent on questionable theories, Taylor's excavation of less familiar Freudian territory throws up more productive ideas. In the sections of the book dealing with the sensation of the "uncanny," a passage of Freud is quoted that draws magic back into the realm of civilization through the agency of art: "In only a single field of our civilization has the omnipotence of thoughts been retained, and that is in the field of art. . . People speak with justice of the 'magic of art' and compare artists to magicians. But the comparison is perhaps more significant than it claims to be" (p. 54). Perhaps Freud's familiarity with non-Western beliefs left open in his mind the possibility that occult phenomena may exert real force, at least through art. Certainly the suggestions of occultism in Bellmer's work are pronounced, although Taylor does not mention them explicitly. Take, for example, the mystical belief in the possessive power of effigies (dolls, masks and fetishes) containing living forces or the figure of the Androgyne, a staple of occult ideas and a recurrent image in Bellmer. The Androgyne, both male and female, symbolized a concept largely alien to Western empiricist logic - the co-presence of opposites without contradiction or cancellation. Yet psychoanalysis is itself full of such paradoxes, and Taylor marshals several examples in her favor. She cites Donald Kuspit's post-Freudian definition of the fetish as "the illusory comfort of union with the mother and simultaneous disengagement, detachment, disidentification from her" (p. 60). The enigmatic suggestions of Freud in "Totem and Taboo" combine with some elementary occult ideas and Bellmer's obsessive libido to concoct a heady brew of art, magic and desire. Bellmer's overriding need to possess in graphical form something of the female that always remains elusive, and thereby ever more desirable, leads him into a state of demonic possession - possessed and repulsed by that which he wants to own, and through owning to become part of. It is these revelations in "The Anatomy of Anxiety" that I find most exciting and which I believe offer the most original interpretation of Bellmer's work, indeed much surrealist art and perhaps even the "magical" evocations of art in general. To my mind, this makes a far more gripping story than any amount of imaginary lost penises or speculative homosexual attachments. As with Sue Taylor's book, Lisa Florman's revaluation of Picasso's classicist prints of the 1930s is deeply indebted to the concepts of Freud. Frequent reference is made to the notion of "overdetermination," originally expounded in "The Interpretation of Dreams" (1900), which identifies a kind of simultaneous condensation and extension of connected images or thoughts, particularly prevalent in dreams. Florman uses this in her discussion of Picasso's etchings to map out the matrix of interlinked symbols and references that bind together pictorial elements in the "Vollard Suite" and the "Minotauromachy" (p. 181). She contends that this gives the apparently diverse series of prints, produced over some seven years, an "astonishing coherence" and intimate inter-relatedness that adds to the richness of possible associations and interpretations. Florman goes so far as to suggest that some plates of the "Vollard Suite" in particular "offer themselves as a kind of structural analogue of the Freudian unconscious, and that the patterns of viewing they encourage likewise resemble the desire-driven operations of the primary process" (p. 136). While one set of plates is closely identified with the technical Freudian concept of the primary process, another is identified with its complement, the secondary process. For example, one section of the 100 or so prints produced by Picasso for the dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard is titled "The Sculptor's Studio" and depicts classical gods and nymphs, sculptors and models, in Elysian interiors gazing seductively at each other, or sculptures of each other, from reclining postures. For Florman, this series is exceptional within the suite as a whole in that it is made of images "whose subject itself concerns the repression or sublimation of desire in the quiescent contemplation of art" (p. 137). Technically speaking, repression here is the mechanism whereby the primary process "is directed towards securing the free discharge of quantities of excitation, while the second system, by means of the cathexes emanating from it, succeeds in inhibiting this discharge and in transforming the cathexis into an aquiescent one" (Freud, quoted p. 137). For myself, such close correlation between a technical medical theory and the interpretation of a series of etchings does offer something that enriches our appreciation of the images themselves. As Florman wishes to suggest, the view that classical art is somehow free-floating, disembodied and desire-less is successfully challenged by Picasso's skilful inscriptions of sublime erotic presence in "quiescent contemplation." The word "cathexis," which Freud uses in reference to concentrations of psychic energy, derives from the Greek word meaning "to hold fast" or "to possess." Fascinatingly, in what seems to be a fortuitous case of over-determination, the notion of possession discussed earlier in respect to Bellmer finds resonance in Florman's citation of the critic Leo Steinberg, who argued that "to Picasso, drawing was a form of 'possession' or 'inhabitation'" (p. 116). Picasso himself that claimed art was, both in conception and reception, "actual lovemaking," and Florman proposes that his multi-viewed distortions of the female form are: "the visual equivalent of an embrace" (p. 116) Š an attempt to consume, enter into or become continuous with the object in view. This is one way in which, as Florman says in the preface, these images "force the recognition that we can no longer separate subject and object . . . in quite the way we might have once thought we could. The 'Vollard Suite' in turn suggests that all such negotiations between subject and object, self and something external, are intimately associated with the workings of desire" (p. xvii). This proposed continuity between subject and object is a fundamentally mystical proposition and returns us to the occultism we spoke of in relation to Bellmer. Much more could be said of the suggestions made here, but what is clear already is that orthodox Freudian analysis of art objects can offer useful insights into their creation and subsequent meaning. To project further into the depths of the artist's psyche, I would argue, carries great risks and Florman's book wins out over Taylor's to the extent that she limits her focus to the picture plane while avoiding excessive reliance on disputed theories. But what I think emerges from these two studies is a more interesting occult resonance of Freud's ideas, perhaps less easily digested by his orthodox subscribers. The close analyses of two oeuvres, Bellmer's fetishistic constructions and Picasso's deceptively simple line drawings, has exposed, for myself at least, the inherently magical operation of art and the sorcerous powers of artists. _________________________________________________________________ ______________________________ | | | FEATURE | |______________________________| _________________________________________________________________ < Healing Cultures through Digital Art > by Fatima Lasay, How Wounded is the World? "Healing Cultures," a collection of digital artworks by students at the University of the Philippines, is a reflex, a creative reaction to the tragedies of the past few months, which have culminated in war between differing beliefs and cultures, especially in Afghanistan. Using this as a starting point, I encouraged my students to look inward and work with keywords such as: "culture," "healing," "diversity," "ritual," "blood," "tolerance," "understanding." From these big words, we contemplated specific instances of wounding and asked, What needs healing? What are the wounded bodies and souls for? Each work also bears the artist's portrait, making it a personal imprint, an offering of the self to the world for healing. It was the beginning of the semester and just a month since air attacks had been launched in Afghanistan when my students were learning to use digital image capture and editing software and hardware for the first time. In order for our experience to be memorable, our subject must be meaningful, so we would talk about the wounds of the world. In order for us to be careful with our work, our own bodies would have to be there. A number of the resulting works came to express the pain of children, the innocent victims of war, from the womb (as in Amor Baria's "Deliverance") to the war zone (as in Corona Dolot's "Innocent Minds"). A. Ghani Madueno, however, presents the child's willingness to learn as the more powerful form of healing in "Grown-ups Know, Children Learn . . . Which One's Better?" In "Siwang No. 1", Jesse Alegre makes a montage of his photographs to express that "it is sad [that] in our times, we still need to be reminded that children have rights," as Tician Frianeza tackles child prostitution with a visually arresting composition of a child's body inside a Romance perfume bottle in "Innocence Lost." The roles of women as healers and the many wounds inflicted on women throughout history were also significant expressions in these works. The theme of Halina Santiago's "Woman" is drawn from the edict that "the witch's body should be burned to ashes to prevent ill effects arising from her blood." Santiago translates this into "the wrong ideals and discriminating acts against women should be burned to prevent ill effects that have plagued our culture and society continuously." In Gene Gozum's "History," the artist presents herself as if in a cave painting, with the tattoos of the ancient Pintados on one side of the face and the markings for cosmetic surgery on the other side, stressing that historical understanding is key to self-healing. In "(Lack of) Spirituality," Gian Gianan offers herself in prayer with her prayer written as a mantra on her forehead: "amend my life" stressing her own need to be healed. These works also contemplated technology and modern living, as students realized how detached they must be from such immanent wounds. Ryan Roberto uses digital art to remind himself not to be hindered by the comforts of modern living from recognizing and addressing the wounds of others in "Be Blinded Not," while Guia Salumbides, in "Urban/Minorities," warns that the technologically endowed may actually be the ones in the dark, describing technology's "blinding ease." Eliza Garalde's work, which shows a photo of a child isolated in a metal crib wearing a straightjacket, stresses the interconnectedness of people, no matter how diverse or far apart their lives may be, stating that only by recognizing this connection can healing begin. Some students looked at the world's wounds through the eyes of nature, as best articulated by Mark Fernando, who formed a montage of one of his own images and that of the Philippine eagle in "Through His Eyes." Fernando believes that we would have to see things differently from how we see them today in order for healing to take place. Isabela Pilapil's work looks into the cycles of creation to search for how what has already been destroyed could be healed, while Cristine Villamiel uses AIDS as symbolic of mankind's cry for healing. In the "Equation for the Cure," Reybert Ramos visualizes what he perceives as a formula for healing: (Equality - Arrogance) x Understanding _______________________________________ = The Cure Hope - Greed In all, some 50 works were produced, all presenting different voices and expressions of healing, some even in disagreement. Discussing the concept and the finished works as a class raised new insights and became itself a form of healing, for indeed, healing and change must first come from within. The works in "Healing Cultures" are by third and fourth year students from the University of the Philippines, College of Fine Arts, from both the Department of Visual Communication (major in advertising and industrial design) and the Department of Studio Arts (major in painting and sculpture). The elective classes are Introduction to Computer Art and Advanced Graphic Workshop - Hypermedia, conducted by Fatima Lasay. All 50 works are documented at is an artist, researcher and assistant professor of digital media and industrial design at the University of the Philippines. _________________________________________________________________ ______________________________ | | | ISAST NEWS | |______________________________| _________________________________________________________________ This month, we include brief biographical statements introducing two of Leonardo/ISAST's Board and Editorial Board members, Rich Gold and Thomas Linehan. < Leonardo/ISAST Board Member Rich Gold > Rich Gold is a composer, inventor, cartoonist, lecturer and researcher who, in the 1970s, co-founded the "League of Automatic Music Composers", the first network computer band. As an artist, he invented the field of Algorithmic Symbolism, an example of which was featured in Scientific American. He was head of the sound and music department of Sega USA's coin-op video game division and the inventor of the award-winning "Little Computer People" (Activision), the first fully autonomous, commercially available, computerized person. For five years, he headed the electronic and computer toy research group at Mattel Toys and was the manager of, among other interactive toys, the Mattel PowerGlove. He also worked on Captain Power, the first interactive broadcast TV show and ICVD, an early CD-based video system. After working as a consultant in virtual reality, he joined Xerox PARC, where he was a primary researcher in Ubiquitous Computing, the study of invisible, embedded and tacit computation. He was a co-designer of the PARC Tab, helped launch the LiveBoard project and was the inventor or co-inventor on ten patents. In 1992, he created the PARC artist-in-residence program (PAIR), which paired fine artists and scientists based on shared technologies (the book "Art and Innovation," from MIT Press, describes the project). He created and managed the multi-disciplinary laboratory, RED (Research in Experimental Documents), which looked at the creation of new document genres by merging art, design, science and engineering. One of RED's projects, called "Experiments in the Future of Reading", was featured at the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation and is now touring the United States, after winning the Gold and Silver awards for interactive design from I.D. Magazine. These reading experiments, presented as fully readable interactive devices, were based on the concepts of "Total Writing", an anti-convergent theory where the media itself becomes authorable. Gold is a fellow at The World Economic Forum, a regent's lecturer at U.C. Berkeley and, as an applied cartoonist and provocative speaker, gives talks all over the world on his work, the pragmatics of knowledge art, the patterns of contemporary innovation and how to build Evocative Knowledge Objects (EKOs). --------------------------------------------------------------------- < Editorial Board Member Tom Linehan > Tlinehan@utdallas.edu Dr. Thomas E. Linehan recently joined the University of Texas at Dallas faculty as a professor of Aesthetic Studies in the School of Arts and Humanities and, as of January 2002, directs the newly-formed Institute for Arts and Technology. The Institute is jointly created by the schools of arts and humanities and engineering and computer science. Dr. Linehan was selected after an international search due to his experience in developing premiere degree programs in media arts technology. (Ohio State University's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, Texas A & M University's Visualization Laboratory and The Ringling School of Art and Design's Computer Animation Program.) Each of these programs provides an advanced computing environment in support of an industry-relevant education. Hundreds of Linehan's graduates from these programs are working today in the gaming, special effects and entertainment industries. Linehan has a background in both corporate management and educational administration. He has served as a college president, a corporate vice president, an associate dean, a research laboratory director, a professor and a public school teacher. Linehan created Ohio State University's Research Partners Program, where university faculty, graduate students and corporations form ongoing research partnerships to study digital communications technologies. He firmly believes that education must become a true collaboration between industry leaders and educators. _________________________________________________________________ ______________________________ | | | OBITUARY | |______________________________| _________________________________________________________________ < Ryszard Stanislawski > Prepared by Krzysztof Jurecki, Dept. of Photography and Visual Art, Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland. Ryszard Stanislawski (1921-2002) was an important Polish critic and historian of art. He studied history of art at the Sorbonne and the Ecole du Louvre in Paris and at Warsaw University. From 1966 to 1991, Stanislawski was the director of the Muzeum Sztuki w £odzi [the Museum of Art in Lodz] and organized a number of important exhibitions of Polish modern and avant-garde art in museums around the world. His first important international show, "Constructivism in Poland, Blok, Prasens, a.r.," was presented at the Folkwang Museum in Essen and at Rijksmuseum Kršller-MŸller in Otterlo in 1973. Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Muzeum Sztuki prepared many exhibitions, with two being of particular significance in the promotion of Polish art - "PrŽsences polonaises Š L'art vivant autour du MusŽe de £—d Witkiewicz, constructivisme, les contemporains," at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1983) and "Europa, Europa," at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn (1994). _________________________________________________________________ ___________________ | | | | | CREDITS | | | |___________________| Nisar Keshvani: LEA Editor-in-Chief Michael Punt: LDR Editor-in-Chief Patrick Lambelet: LEA Managing Editor Kylie Johnston: Asst Editor Andre Ho: Web Concept & Design Consultant Roger Malina: Leonardo Executive Editor Stephen Wilson: Chair, Leonardo/ISAST Web Committee Editorial Advisory Board: Roy Ascott, Michael Naimark, Craig Harris, Paul Brown, Julianne Pierce, Seah Hock Soon fAf-LEA corresponding editors; Ricardo Dal Farra, Young Hae-Chang, Fatima Lasay, Jose-Carlos Mariategui, Marcus Neusetter, Fion Ng and Marc Voge _________________________________________________________________ ___________________ | | | LEA | | WORLD WIDE WEB | | ACCESS | |___________________| The LEA Word Wide Web site contains the LEA archives, including all back issues, the LEA Gallery, the Profiles, Feature Articles, Publications, Opportunities and Announcements. It is accessible using the following URL: ____________________________________________________________ _________________ | LEA | | PUBLISHING & | | SUBSCRIPTION | | INFORMATION | |_________________| Editorial Address: Leonardo 425 Market St., Second Floor San Francisco, CA 94105 USA E-mail: _____________________________________________________________ Copyright (2001), 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. 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