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Leonardo Electronic Almanac       volume 10,   number 12,   December 2002
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ISSN #1071-4391

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EDITORIAL
---------
by Nisar Keshvani

FEATURE
-------
< Myth, Mind and Meaning in New Media >
by Fatima Lasay

LEONARDO DIGITAL REVIEWS
-------------------------
< What Is It To Be Human? What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us > 
Reviewed by Robert Pepperell

< The Judgement of the Eye: The Metamorphoses of Geometry >
Reviewed by Amy Ione

< Designing Sociable Robots >
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen

< International Festival of Experimental Arts >
Reviewed by Mikhail S. Zalivadny 

ISAST NEWS
----------
< Ed Payne elected to Leonardo/ISAST Board of Directors >
< New Leonardo/ISAST Assistant to the Board >

ANNOUNCEMENTS
-------------
< LEA Call for Papers 2003 >
< Leonardo Book Series : Uncanny Networks by Geert Lovink &
Virtual Art by Oliver Grau >
< OLATS NEWS 008: 17/12/2002 >

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                           |   EDITORIAL   |
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How time flies - we've arrived to the last issue for the year!

Highlights in this edition include Fatima Lasay giving us insight
into the discussions of myth and new media. And in LDR, Robert
Pepperell reports on 'What Is It To Be Human?', Amy Ione reviews
'The Judgement of the Eye: The Metamorphoses of Geometry', and
more ...

From LEA, we'd like to thank all our team based across the globe
for their continued dedication, especially our corresponding
editors for their tireless energy, and board of advisors for
their strategic input. Special thanks to our managing editor
patrick lambelet, assistant editor beth rainbow, and designer
andre ho for their dedication.

Here's wishing all our readers a very merry christmas, and a
glorious upcoming 2003! Happy holidays, and more excitement from
LEA next year.

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                    |           FEATURE            |
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< Myth, Mind and Meaning in New Media >
by Fatima Lasay, fats@up.edu.ph

The Mythical Mind

A myth is a traditional story with supernatural elements, often
explaining the origins of certain psychological, physical and
natural phenomena. Their details and meanings allow people to see
and perhaps understand the nuances and complexities of life.
Myths also reveal to us how the imagination could bring together
existential form and abstract form into a single reality of
separate orders. Today's human conditions are highly mediated and
the ubiquity of our technological devices ferries us between
spectacle and reason, between aesthetics and intellection. In
engaging this distance, both our imagination and positive
knowledge turn again to myth.

In *The Story of Lynx,* Claude Levi-Strauss points to myth as the
earliest science of speculating the origins and maturation of the
world, and how today, scientific breakthroughs and their
limitations spur our dialogue with science to make mythological
thinking actual again. In *Artful Science,* Barbara Stafford
suggests putting the Enlightenment's demonstration of pleasurable
learning back into thinking with images, calling for a
"democratic hermeneutics of pattern recognition and visual
design" in the face of turmoil in visuality, the tension between
truth and deception and "the artist as cheating in the production
of well-crafted work." As a twenty-first century re-enlightenment
offers fresh ideas for those caught in the eclipse of modern
visual culture, I see a parallel approach by turning to our
"primitive" mythological way of thinking.

I started looking at new media through the conceptual world of
myths and their meanings upon observing the pattern of how new
media is used to create new imaginative worlds of meaning. As an
artist, the use of myths themselves figures prominently in my
work and collaborations with other people. It was through this
practice that I began to appreciate the significance of
myth-making and the archetype as critical concepts that may be
used in apprehending new media and new-media art practices.

The Internet Soul

"Gimokud, The Melting Soul" is the title of a web-based
exhibition of collaborative digital works by 32 artists
visualizing the souls of 23 participants from 10 different
countries. The on-line exhibition, completed 14 February, 2001,
presents 52 digital works, each one a visualization of the
ancient Philippine myth of the interrupted existence of the soul.
According to this myth, the soul, or gimokud, goes about its
customary existence at night, and at the rising of the sun,
plucks a leaf, twists it into a vessel suggesting the form of a
boat and seats itself upon it, waiting until the hot rays of the
sun dissolve it into water. Only when darkness spreads over the
land of the dead does the gimokud resume its active existence. In
"Gimokud," participants uploaded their souls, digital images of
their existence, and digital images of objects that they would
bring with them if they were to travel as a gimokud. The
recipient of their images would then create the leaf vessel upon
which their gimokud would reside.

I call the "Gimokud" an "Internet soul project" because first, it
was conducted entirely through the Internet - the exchange of
texts, images and ideas were done through Internet e-mail and
web-based forms; and, second, because "Gimokud" is a project that
investigates the dynamics of identity, the avatar, in virtual
space.

The project, with the soul as its center, required trust and
mutual cooperation between the participants for its completion.
The participants in the project would have to put their souls
into the hands of strangers from across virtual space to craft
the leaf vessels of their interrupted existence. In "Gimokud,"
cyberspace may well be the "Great Country" - a "mythical
situation quite in accordance with the common primitive concepts
touching the souls" of humans, animals and inanimate objects. In
"Gimokud," we see how closely myth and the Internet flow into
each other and how myths play out their avatars untiringly in
cyberspace.

The binaries of existence in the virtual and physical world put
new media and myth closely together. Many operations in the
virtual world are extensions of our physical apprehension of
objects and processes. In *The Power of Myth,* Joseph Campbell
holds that myth is the power of metaphor and poetry; the myth
itself, while literally false, is metaphorically true. Our
navigation in virtual space is rooted in a shared mythology, a
universal archetypal stream from collective human experience that
enables the metaphor to serve its functions. The tactile
cognitive and graphical interfaces of our technological devices
are all metaphors of our mundane physical world existence; these
interfaces are the veils behind which the machine and its
machinic language operate.

The Electronic Shaman: Post-humanist

This relationship between matter and insensible prototypes is
explored in another web-based new media work entitled
*Ethermorph: The Shaman Acquires Her Powers through Initiation.*
The web installation derives from a physical exhibition entitled
"Machinelanguage." In *Ethermorph,* digital photographs of guests
at the opening of the exhibition were taken and transformed into
digital depictions of shamanic initiation rites, mostly an
image-morphing technique. The process of morphing the person with
his or her mirror image is also a symbol of self-absorption,
typical of shamanic initiations. The results were 15 digital
images of the invisible made visible, presented as a web-based
installation.

In *The Truth and Life of Myth: An Essay in Essential
Autobiography,* Robert Duncan describes the myth-teller muttering
against his willful lips a story that forces his telling. Duncan
describes the shaman, who takes the universe to be alive, as a
mystic and a paranoiac; a totally informed being whose world is a
world of meanings. In *Ethermorph,* the shaman is archetype for
the wired man in the electronic age, perhaps the man whose
central nervous system, as Marshall McLuhan offers in his
*Agenbite of Outwit,* is extended across the globe. The idolatry
of technology, the enchantment without intellection, renders a
psychic numbness, unless we acquire the powers of the shaman, the
psychotic, the healer of ancient societies, to reveal to us, as
in the words of McLuhan, "ways of living with new technology
without destroying earlier forms and achievements."

I see this today as a kind of new humanism, as pointed out by
David Cave in *Mircea Eliade's Vision for a New Humanism.* The
"modern" person, Cave holds, when informed by exemplary models
and archetypes, will constitute a modern culture of a plural,
universal, holistic and cosmic presence in the world. Social
fragmentation and individual alienation are too often seen in tow
with our advancing technologies, with our dazzling graphic
displays, such that only through a syncretist mythological basis
can we bring about the structure and meaning we seek in our
highly mediated and fractured world.

Archetypes for a Wired Humanity

The electronic age has given us tools by which information can be
visualized in a variety of ways that make sense to us. These
tools act as bridges between disciplines that seem completely
unrelated. Thus, the accessibility of our technologies opens the
potential for cross-disciplinary work in the arts more than ever
before.

In a new media project entitled *Geocentricity: The Earth as
Center,* seven Filipino artists engaged with the geological
sciences and new media technologies. *Geocentricity* was
commissioned and hosted by *fineArt forum* and is now being
exhibited part of the Leonardo Gallery. In the web-based
exhibition, the artists presented 13 visions of earth phenomena
and island folklore, interpreting their visions using scientific
and cultural data. Meeting with scientists at the Philippine
Institute of Volcanology and Seismology provided both art and
science practitioners a cross-examination of the various
methodologies required in the completion of the project.
Laboratory-type experiments that visualize and predict natural
phenomena serve as the ground for discovery, creativity,
synthesis, representation and the apprehension of invisible or
inaccessible phenomena. In such experiments, the art-science
relationship becomes obvious.

As the most seemingly disparate disciplines continue to melt into
each other via the transcoding of information in new media, we
need to turn to mythological thinking if we are to approach these
developments with imaginal receptivity. For instance, in the
design of electronic interfaces or the construction of web-based
installations, my interest is in how access to reality is
conducted when sensible form and immaterial nuances are addressed
by new media. Alternatively, we can approach this, as stated by
Ananda Coomaraswamy, by "seeing in things material and sensible a
formal likeness to spiritual prototypes of which the senses can
give no direct report." In *The Door in the Sky,* Coomaraswamy
holds that the practice of an art is not traditionally a secular
activity nor a matter of affective "inspiration," but rather a
metaphysical rite. Thus, as he draws no distance between art and
contemplation, "it is not only the first images that are formally
of superhuman origin." Further, Coomaraswamy defines the
judgement of an image as a contemplation "and as such [the image]
can only be consummated in an assimilation. A transformation of
our nature is required."

As mythical constructs immediately generate their opposites, this
transformation through assimilation may be seen in the archetype
of the "divided child." In Philippine Ifugao culture, there is a
myth that speaks of this "divided child," the offspring of
parents from heaven and earth. When the day finally comes for
this child, named Ovug, to return to the skyworld, the people of
the earth refuse to give up the child. And so the child's father,
the god Dumagid, takes a knife and divides the child into equal
parts - one part for the heavens and the other for the earth.
Both parts receive new life, thus accounting for lightning in the
sky and thunder rolling across the earth - this magnificent light
and sound display is the orchestration of the divided child.

This is the myth and tradition by which I see the process of
collaboration and the role of the artist as a cross-disciplinary
and cross-cultural worker - as Ovug, the divided child. There is
a critical metempsychosis, the splitting and transmigration of
souls, in Ovug, as he is conceived from both sky and earth and is
split bodily into two separate beings. Similarly, in the artist's
movement from individual to collaborator, the identity is divided
and whatever constitutes a personality is transfigured or
relinquished. Furthermore, both entities must, like thunder and
lightning, act as a single symposium of light and sound.

For the 2002 Philippine Digital Media Festival, I invited visual
artists Noell Farol and Roberto Feleo to collaborate on an
archaeology-new-media installation entitled *Artifact
Reassembly.* We thought of the new media and archaeology link
with the view that as human cognition is inferred from lithic
industries, human evolution became linked with cultural and
technological evolution in what is seen as a biocultural feedback
system. In a highly mediated and numbing culture, it becomes more
challenging to develop sensitivity to what accounts for stability
and patterns of change in society. This situation is true to the
complex narrative of the myth of the divided child, which does
not begin and end in a mere "sever and multiply" affair. For
instance, on his first return to the skyworld, Dumagid was forced
to bring along his wife, Dugai, and leave their child as security
for their return. It meant to surrender Ovug and to sacrifice
Dugai, as no human can bear the path to the skyworld. Creative
collaboration can also be so goal-blind as to make that
uncalculated risk, consuming the Eros and exigency in the
creative process; cross-study in the arts may mean threading
unfamiliar terrain and a surrender of inherited powers. In
"resurrecting Dugai" through *Artifact Reassembly,* we found that
we needed to be acutely aware of foreign mass-media bombardment
and be selective of the influences that we use in the
installation - both the corporeal and the incorporeal. A kind of
mythical thinking allows for a critical re-contextualization and
informed analysis in the creative use of new media.

The Turn to the Power of Myth

The myth of the divided child is not a single bolt of lightning
or clap of thunder, not a game or story that ends in the sky. As
Claude Levi-Strauss said in *The Story of Lynx,* we should not
think that myths can only offer us already-played-out-games.
Myths are untiring; they begin a new game each time they are
retold or read, enacted or seen. Through the "primitive" eyes of
myth, there is more than logic or tradition along which art is
daily creating new meanings, more than parallels to modern
technological breakthroughs, or synthetic philosophical
reflection.

Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" was published in 1945, just
after the Second World War, and it introduced a conceptual device
- "Memex" - supposedly the first of what were called "pacific
instruments," which American scientists claimed to be their
primary objective upon emerging from their destructive work
during the war. Today's "Memex," being thus modeled after "the
way we think," has created an overwhelming world of new meanings
and situations such that our discussions of them open altogether
new didactic and epistemological problems.

In her book *Artful Science,* Barbara Stafford paints an age of
"automatic simulations and mechanized knack" in late
twentieth-century developments; she paints a Western world's
eclipse in visuality in the face of their orientalized
technology. Here, Stafford calls for the need to re-associate
visual technologies with common rituals and public concerns. I
think this could be, more than a transit to the past, an inner
turn to mythological thinking.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BILL, MAX, *The Mathematical Approach in Contemporary Art,*
<http://www.solo.com/studio/a-m/tmacia-all.html>.

BUSH, VANNEVAR, "As We May Think." *The Atlantic Monthly,* Vol.
176, No. 1, July 1945.

COOMARASWAMY, ANANDA K., *The Door in the Sky: Coomaraswamy on
Myth and Meaning.* Selected and with a preface by Rama P.
Coomaraswamy.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.

DEMETRIO, FRANCISCO R., GILDA CORDERO-FERNANDO, and FERNANDO N.
ZIALCITA. *The Soul Book.* Quezon City: GCF Books, 1991.

DUNCAN, ROBERT, *The Truth and Life of Myth: An Essay in
Essential Autobiography.* Freemont, MI: Sumac, 1968.

FAROL, NOELL EL, ROBERTO B. FELEO and FATIMA J. LASAY, *Meeting
at the Electronic Interface: Artifact Reassembly through New
Media Art* <http://digitalmedia.upd.edu.ph/artifact_dmf.html>.

GEORGES, JEAN, Signs, *Symbols and Ciphers, Decoding the
Message.* London: Thames and Hudson, 1998.

KUSPIT, DONALD, "The Problem of Art in the Age of Glamour," in
*Art Criticism,* Vol. 6, No. 1, 1989.

LASAY, FATIMA J. *An Internet Soul Project.* February 2001.
<http://digitalmedia.upd.edu.ph/digiteer/internet_soul.html> __.
*Ethermorph: The Shaman Acquires Her Powers through Initiation,*
June 2001.
<http://digitalmedia.upd.edu.ph/digiteer/ethermorph/ethermorph.html>.
__. "Geocentricity: The Earth as Center." *Leonardo,* Vol. 35,
No. 3 2002. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. __. "The Myth of the
Divided Child", *Leonardo Electronic Almanac* and LEA Archive,
Vol. 10 No. 5. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
<http://mitpress.mit.edu/LEA>.

LEVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE, *The Story of Lynx,* Trans. Catherine
Tihanyi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

MCLUHAN, MARSHALL, *The Agenbite of Outwit.* McLuhan Studies,
Issue 2, 1996. Francesco Guardiani and Eric McLuhan (Eds).
<http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss2/1_2art6.htm>

STAFFORD, BARBARA MARIA, *Artful Science, Enlightenment
Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education.* Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1994.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fatima Lasay is an artist, writer, researcher and assistant
professor of new media art at the University of the Philippines
College of Fine Arts. She obtained her BFA in Industrial Design
and MFA at the University of the Philippines. In 1995, Lasay
developed the digital media art courses for the Studio Arts and
Visual Communications Departments of the UP College of Fine Arts.
 Lasay's new media projects include *Manipulation* (2000, Galeri
Situ, Manila), *Geocentricity* and *Gimokud the Melting Soul*
(2001, on-line), *Healing Cultures through Digital Art* (2002,
on-line) and the Digital Media Festival 2000-2002 (Corredor
Gallery, Manila).

Lasay may be contacted by e-mail <fats@up.edu.ph> or through the
College of Fine Arts, Bartlett Hall, E. Jacinto Str., University
of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City 1101, Philippines. Her
website is at <http://digitalmedia.upd.edu.ph/digiteer/>.

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                 |    LEONARDO DIGITAL REVIEWS     |
                 |            2002.12              |
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This month, Leonardo Digital Reviews returns to its normal format
in *Leonardo Electronic Almanac* with a brief introduction to the
postings this month. As the conference season starts, Robert
Pepperell offers us his views on Creativity and Cognition 4:
Processes and Artefacts - Art, Technology and Science, held at
Loughborough University, in the  U.K. In addition, he reviews
*Body and World,* by Samuel Todes. He finds that this book,
pitched at the specialist reader, offers a refreshing revision
away from idealism towards a view of the subject as active in a
body and a world.

Pepperell's final contribution this month is a reflection on What
Is It To Be Human?, a debate presented by the Institute of Ideas
at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature (Cheltenham, U.K.) and
*What Is It To Be Human? What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us,* by
Kenan Malik, a contribution he finds problematic - at least in as
far as the topic is announced in the title. Amy Ione reviews
JŸrgen Weber's *The Judgement of the Eye: The Metamorphoses of
Geometry,* finding it to be an outstanding contribution to the
field of consciousness studies. It comes from an art/science
position and, despite a significant omission, receives her
recommendation.

Finally, Stefaan van Ryssen, a relative newcomer to the panel,
offers a review of *Designing Sociable Robots,* by Cynthia L.
Breazeal. Drawing on his own creative practice, van Ryssen
acknowledges the contribution of the modeling of social robots
not only to robotics, but also to the debates on sociability and
consciousness.

These reviews, together with complete listings for September and
October (which were glossed in the previous LEA/LDR "specials"),
can be read at:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/ldr.html,  along with
reviews for the last 12 months.

Michael Punt
Editor-in-Chief
Leonardo Digital Reviews

.........................................................................

Creativity and Cognition 4: Processes and Artefacts: 
Art, Technology and Science (conference) 
Reviewed by Robert Pepperell

Body and World, by Samuel Todes 
Reviewed by Robert Pepperell

What Is It To Be Human? (debate) and What Is It To Be Human? 
What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us, by Kenan Malik. 
Reviewed by Robert Pepperell

The Judgement of the Eye: The Metamorphoses of Geometry, by JŸrgen Weber 
Reviewed by Amy Ione

Designing Sociable Robots, by Cynthia L. Breazeal 
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen

City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary 
Photography in Interwar
Paris, by Ian Walker 
Reviewed By Susan Taylor

.........................................................................

< What Is It To Be Human? > 
Debate presented by the Institute of Ideas at the Cheltenham
Festival of Literature, Cheltenham, U.K., 11 October, 2002

and

< What Is It To Be Human? What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us >
By Kenan Malik, 
London, Academy of Ideas, 2001. 
ISBN: 1-904025-00-5, trade, 53 pp.

Reviewed by Robert Pepperell, 
pepperell@ntlworld.com

This panel discussion, chaired by Tony Gilland of the
London-based Institute of Ideas, brought together four writers to
discuss aspects of the question, "What is it to be human?" _ the
same question that titles a collection of essays published by the
Institute in 2001. The publicity blurb for the event couched the
question of our indeterminate humanity in terms of genetic
science and posthumanism, and the various panel members
responded, at least initially, by addressing our biological
nature.

Steve Jones, the eminent geneticist and author of *The Language
of Genes,* pointed out with his usual good humor that it was not
useful to define humans in terms of their genetic makeup. Besides
the fact that humans and mice both have approximately 30,000
genes, we share 40 percent of our genes with bananas. Launching
an immediate attack on the discipline of sociobiology, which
understands current human behavior as a consequence of our
evolutionary past, he dismissed the enterprise as "the ponderous
affirmation of the bleedin' obvious". At best, he pointed out,
sociobiology is able to tell us that older men are often
attracted to younger women; at worst, it introduces the concept
of "duck rape" to account for certain sexual behavior among
ducks. In fact, he went on, biology, and genetics in particular,
can tell us very little about what it is to be human, concluding
"what makes us humans is that we are not animals."

Sue Blackmore, author of *The Meme Machine,* addressed the
question of what makes humans unique by reaffirming her thesis of
imitation. For her, what defines us is our "copying machinery;"
that is, our capacity to imitate the behavior of others, which
allows behavioral practices to spread amongst communities or
species. As is well-known, she regards such imitative behavior in
memetic terms, as quasi-evolutionary replicating units, following
the introduction of the concept by Richard Dawkins. Humans, she
said, are unique in being able to harbor and spread memes, and
our complex social organizations are a consequence. She then went
on to expound the other thesis for which she is well-known, the
"illusion of self," which follows from the ideas of Daniel
Dennett. For Blackmore, the idea that we have a specific,
centralized sense of our own existence, or even a consciousness,
is a delusion, partly caused by our acquisition of memes. These
delusions do not mean, she went on when challenged later, that we
do not have a self or a conscious life, but simply that these
things are "not what they seem". She concluded with the admission
that she is "utterly baffled" by what it means to be human.

Kenan Malik, who wrote *Man, Beast and Zombie,* as well as making
the main contribution the *What Is It To Be Human?* book, offered
a more humanitarian and philosophical view. He rejected what he
saw as the recent conceptual shift that stresses the continuities
between humans and the natural world. He argued that the
rejection of the idea of humans as something special made for bad
science and bad politics. Humans, he maintained, are in the
special position of being able to make moral decisions; in effect
we are "self-conscious moral agents." Further, we are uniquely
subjects and objects who can shape our own destiny. If we follow
the pessimism inherent in "anti-humanism" (by which he may have
meant posthumanism), we will lose many of the valuable social
impulses that drive progressive science and politics.

Novelist Maggie Gee disagreed with Steve Jones' assertion that we
are not animals. Gee was keen to insist on the primacy of our
animal nature, and was then led to ask, "What is the nature of
the human animal?" For her, humans are "intelligent, dexterous
and dangerous." We are inherently dissatisfied with the
limitations of our physical bodies, and this causes us, with our
capacity for intelligence, to act on the world so as to make
lasting changes. She characterized the human condition as an
ongoing and ever-repeating banana-skin joke - we are always
tripping up. She pointed to the vulnerability of humankind,
saying that we are apt to get things wrong and make mistakes on a
global scale. We specialize in "mad, blinkered obsessions," the
example of U.S. policy of pre-emptive self-defense being, in her
view, a case of "mad reason."

During questions from the audience, Sue Blackmore's memetic ideas
came under scrutiny, not least because they imply a lack of
personal responsibility if, as she claims, we are just
"replicating machines" in which memes largely determine our
behavior. Steve Jones offered the most authoritative and damning
indictment of the memetic thesis, at the same time pursuing one
of his "few remaining pleasures" - that of "annoying Richard
Dawkins." He cited an occasion when he looked up the term "meme"
on the Google search engine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there were a
large number of hits. But when he did an equivalent search on the
Web of Science, the global index of scientific papers, it
revealed just 37 hits, of which only two referred directly to the
"biological meme" theory.

"What Is It To Be Human?" was one in a series of debates staged
by the Institute of Ideas in response to the eponymous
publication, which includes contributions from Matt Ridley, Kevin
Warwick, Maggie Gee, and Anthony O'Hear. A previous event at
Institute of Education in London, called "A Posthuman Future,"
featured Francis Fukuyama and Gregory Stock discussing the
implications of Fukuyama's recent publication of a similar title,
"Our Posthuman Future." But despite the event's title, and the
publicity blurb for the event in Cheltenham, there was virtually
no mention of the word "posthuman" from the panel members, the
chair or the audience at either debate. One suspects that,
regrettably, posthumanism is possibly being employed by some as a
sexy promotional tag without much serious consideration of its
ramifications. I, for one, regret this appropriation, and hope
that posthumanism will not be reduced to a general anxiety about
one aspect of biological research.

.........................................................................

< The Judgement of the Eye: The Metamorphoses of Geometry >
by JŸrgen Weber
Springer Wein, New York, 2002. 200 pp., illus. 
Trade,  $29.95 / Eur 29.00. ISBN: 3-211-83768-X.

Review by Amy Ione
ione@diatrope.com

Of the many books that have recently explored relationships among
art, perception and geometry, JŸrgen Weber's book, *Judgement of
the Eye: The Metamorphoses of Geometry,* stands out among them.
In this recently published work, Weber effectively brings his
background in science together with his life as a sculptor,
painter and art educator. The book acquaints the reader with the
extensive research program that evolved as he studied a number of
questions of interest to him. As he explains at the beginning,
the book is "essentially about what forms say to us, what
information they convey about their very existence, how we
understand their language. How does their expression come about?"

To its credit, the book offers a good survey of visual perception
and an adequate sense of how one might balance art,
neurophysiology and perceptual psychology. Weber has obviously
studied a number of areas related to vision and art and the way
he uses several neurological case studies in the beginning of the
book to set the stage for his inquiry into expression and
perception is most impressive. He also clearly presents gestalt
("form") psychology and the work of a number of gestalt
psychologists, surveying the work of figures such as Kšhler,
Koffka and Arnheim to convey the history and distinctions of this
movement. As he explains, these psychologists were the first to
state that geometric forms played a decisive role in visual
perception and recognition. Weber's efforts to relate gestalt
psychology to the Lie Transformation theory, however, are a bit
hard to follow. Nonetheless, he does convey that this second
movement followed a completely different path: essentially, those
who worked with the Lie Theory of continual transformation groups
(e.g., Hoffman, Dodwell) attempted to relate the simple
geometrical forms produced by the visual cortex with
environmental phenomena.

Perhaps Weber's greatest contribution to the work of the gestalt
psychologists and Lie theorists is the experiments he conducted
with his students. Some mentioned in this book include asking
students to respond to basic shapes and drawings, to reproduce
from memory as well as identification, and to perform tasks that
include 2-D, 3-D, and rotated shapes and surfaces. Weber,
moreover, does not restrict his work to static shapes. He also
asks about movement and how Euclidean forms might undergo a
geometric metamorphosis. This allows him to compare historical
art and traditions, such as Egyptian and Greek art.

Several aspects of this book, however, undermine its
effectiveness. Although much of the discussion encourages the
reader to look closely and thus aids perceptual understanding,
the format of the book works against it. The carefully chosen
images effectively illustrate ideas about shape, memory, how we
see and how art is made. Yet it is difficult to interrelate the
text and images, due to the book's structure of relegating the
images to a separate section at the back. The 83 pages of 501
primarily black-and-white images could easily have been
integrated into the body of the text. In my opinion, the decision
to print these images separately makes them difficult to use,
particularly since each page contains six to eight pictures of
various shapes and sizes. Indeed, the need to keep turning pages
to locate the appropriate images is distracting and, about
halfway into the book, I found I had lost patience when I needed
to search through a page full of images to find the number
mentioned in the text. I would have also liked a longer index and
a more extensive bibliography. Hoffman, for example, is mentioned
frequently throughout the book, but I failed to find a single
text by him listed in the bibliography.

In summary, Weber impressively brings his work as an artist and
art educator together with a number of disciplines outside his
field. Asking how we see, why we do not see what appears on the
retina, and how we see additional information such as the mood
contained within a facial expression (among other things), Weber
effectively asks good, important, questions about perception. He
ably succeeds in aiding the reader to look closely at what is
seen. The book, as a result, is successful in extending
scientific theories into the world of practice and expression.

.........................................................................

< Designing Sociable Robots >

by Cynthia L. Breazeal, 
Bradford Books, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2002. 263 pp., 
illus. (includes CD-ROM). Trade, $49.95. ISBN: 0-262-02510-8.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

The field of robotics began to come of age in the last decade of
the twentieth century, with the creation of highly specialized
machines that perform all kinds of tasks in very different and
sometimes hazardous environments: from roving the surface of a
nearby planet to cleaning the endless corridors of hospitals,
from replacing the hand of a surgeon to keeping lonely children
happy. In fiction, movies, science-fiction and comics, robots
have outshone human protagonists: who does not remember HAL 2000
in Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, *2001: A Space Odyssey,*
Commander Data in *Star Trek, The Next Generation,* Asimov's
helpful and sometimes troubled robots or *Star Wars'* R2D2 and
C-3PO? Yet, there remains a big gap between our imagination and
the machines that are actually built. It is not hard to see where
the difficulty is: the robots around us are slow learners, bad
communicators, only responsive in a limited way and by no means
empathic. They can be smart and skilful, but they are just no
good to go out with or to chat with about the weather, soccer or
the pains of growing up.

Cynthia L. Breazeal, Assistant Professor of Media Arts and
Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, has taken a first step towards
building a robot that understands what we say and mean,
communicates and interacts with us, learns and grows along the
way and might eventually become more of an assistant and a
companion. It is a first step, but a very important one. In this
very well-written and clearly structured book, she defines the
key components of social intelligence for these machines. Drawing
from a very wide range of sciences - from psychology to
linguistics, from engineering to artificial intelligence - she
has actually built a robot that acts and communicates at levels
of complexity of a human infant. "Call me Kismet," it might say -
and you might be delighted to see it smile, turn its head away if
you come too close or angrily snarl at you when you offer it a
toy instead of your face to look at.

Breazeal originally wanted to build a learning robot as much as a
social robot, but she soon realized that the machine should have
an interface that allows humans to monitor its learning
processes. To make encouraging actions meaningful, the human
tutor should get an almost instantaneous response expressing the
positive result of the action. Learning, it seems, is a
regulatory process for both participants. Building on the results
of developmental psychology and human-computer interaction,
Breazeal chose to tackle the communication and interaction levels
first, before fully concentrating on the learning capabilities of
the robot.

*Designing Sociable Robots* is much more than an endearing
description of a toy: the author gives detailed descriptions of
the physical robot, the vision system, auditory, motivation and
behavior systems, the facial animation and expression space and
the expressive vocalization system. Each chapter clearly states
the problem and underlying theoretical principles and explains
how the features are implemented, down to the level of the actual
equations and parameters used.

In a final chapter, Breazeal sums up the "Grand Challenges of
Building Sociable Robots." Among them are the problems of how to
endow sociable robots with a rich personality, how to give them
the ability to reflect upon themselves, how to design them so
they can learn in very different and unpredictable social
situations and many more.

Having once designed an interactive improvising computer and a
"moody" software program myself, I can fully appreciate the
complexity of the challenge to build a machine that shows the
full range of emotions and interactions of an infant. Kismet and
its siblings still have a long way to go, certainly as far as
learning and understanding are concerned. But one thing is clear:
if we really want to understand what it means to be a social
being, a conscious being and an active being, building sociable
and interactive robots is one of the most promising paths.

You actually have to see Kismet to get an idea of its power and
life-like quality. Go to:
www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/kismet/kismet.html.

.........................................................................

Note: The following review was submitted directly to LEA, not to
Leonardo Digital Reviews, and thus is not actually a part of LDR.
However, we felt that it would compliment this month's LDR
reviews and have therefore included it here. - Ed.

< International Festival of Experimental Arts >

Mange Hall, St.Petersburg, Russia, 21-25 August 2002 Reviewed by
Mikhail S. Zalivadny, Russia Conservatory, St. Petersburg, Russia

This year marked the fourth annual International Festival of
Experimental Arts and Performance in St. Petersburg. In
comparison to previous festivals, the festival appeared very
modest, both in terms of time (4 1/2 days) and space (it was
almost entirely on the ground floor of the Hall building). It was
(seemingly, at least) also "quiet" with respect to ingenuity,
without any daring innovations or striking indications of
eccentricity. Nevertheless, many exhibits and performances were
certainly noteworthy, owing to the more central role of
electronic technologies in conceiving and implementing the works.

The festival program included a number of works of notable
artistic quality, including an interactive video installation
(with characteristic "droning" and "wailing" electronic sounds);
*The Lost Souls,* by Vassily Tsereteli (Russia), dedicated to the
memory of the victims of the 11 September, 2001 attacks in the
U.S.; the *Nikikon,* a "chaotic" object ensemble created by Niki
Constantinou (Greece) and including "abstract" photos, flickering
lights and a pleasant non-commercial pop-music kaleidoscope; a
"blindfold volunteers theatre," under the direction of Luc
Boisclair (Canada), with smell and touch components of action and
video projections addressed to the spectators; an
electro-acoustic performance given by Adrian Palka (Great
Britain) and his assistants, during which various sounds of
"steel music equipment" (a roof-iron plate and several barrels)
were amplified and transformed by means of electronic and
computer devices; a "fairy-tale cave" (made from theater and
concert-hall materials) with flashing lights, electronic sounds
and interactive pyrotechnical effects (authors: Andrey Melnik and
the Luzhaika [Grass-plot] group, Russia) and *The Suprematic
Meal,* an installation by Russian artist Anna Koleichuk, with
alternating geometrical figures inspired by the paintings of
Kazimir Malevich.

_________________________________________________________________________

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                    |                              |
                    |           ISAST NEWS         |
                    |______________________________|

_________________________________________________________________________

< Ed Payne elected to Leonardo/ISAST Board of Directors >

We are pleased to announce that Ed Payne has been elected to the
Leonardo/ISAST Governing Board of Directors. Ed Payne is President and a
co-founder of Albathion Software, Inc. In his work over the last 25 years as
a senior executive, founder of three startups, consultant, and researcher,
he has always been guided by a core principle -- the development of
innovative technology that enhances the life of the end-user and the broader
social needs of the community. He believes strongly in public service, and
has done pro-bono work for a number of educational and environmental
organizations including The Nature Conservancy, The Environmental Defense
Fund, and The San Francisco Exploratorium. Payne has served on the boards of
Liss Fain Dance (board chair), The San Francisco ChildrenŠös Art Center
(development chair), and Goddard College (exec, academic affairs chair,
chair of presidential search).

.........................................................................

< New Leonardo/ISAST Assistant to the Board >

We are pleased to announce that the position of Assistant to the
Board for LEONARDO/ISAST has been filled. Please join us in
welcoming Melinda Klayman to the LEONARDO staff. Melinda comes to
LEONARDO after a 6-month cyber-adventure in Singapore and brings
with her considerable experience in the digital arts as well as
in art curating. She previously served as Assistant to the
Executive Director of the College Art Association in New York.

Melinda's cv is on-line at:

http://melinda@klayperson.com/bio/mk%20resume.htm

We look forward to working with Melinda as LEONARDO continues to
move forward into the future!

_________________________________________________________________________

                     ______________________________
                    |                              |
                    |         ANNOUNCEMENTS        |
                    |______________________________|

_________________________________________________________________________

< LEA 2003: Open call for papers >

The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (ISSN No: 1071-4391) is inviting
an open call for papers to be published in 2003. The LEA
Editorial Board seeks proposals for:

* Theoretical Discussions: *Original* essays documenting
research, critical commentary in areas of discussion such as
nanotechnology, cyberart, cyberfeminism, hypertext, robotics,
bio-art, artifical life, genetics. This list is by no means
exhaustive, and proposals need not be limited to these areas.

* Artists Statements / Gallery Commissions: International artists
are encouraged to submit statements or proposals for *original*
for exhibiting new media artwork. Curators are welcome to propose
thematic exhibitions.

LEA encourages international artists / academics / researchers /
students to submit their proposal for consideration. We
particularly encourage authors outside north america and europe
to send proposals for articles.

Proposals should include:-

- a 150 - 300 word abstract / synopsis detailing subject matter -
a brief bio (and prior works for reference). - names of
collaborators (if suggesting a thematic issue / curated gallery)
- any related URLs - contact details

Please send proposals or queries to:
Nisar Keshvani
Editor-in-Chief
Leonardo Electronic Almanac
http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA
lea@mitpress.mit.edu

by 15 January 2003. (Pls note - Response to proposals may take
upto 4 weeks)

.........................................................................

< Leonardo Book Series : Uncanny Networks by Geert Lovink &
Virtual Art by Oliver Grau >

The Leonardo Book Series and MIT Press are pleased to announce
the release of two new books: *Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with
the Virtual Intelligentsia,* by Geert Lovink, and *Virtual Art:
From Illusion to Immersion,* by Oliver Grau.

*Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia* by
Geert Lovink

For Geert Lovink, interviews are imaginative texts that can help
to create global, networked discourses not only among different
professions but also among different cultures and social groups.
Conducting interviews online, over a period of weeks or months,
allows the participants to compose documents of depth and
breadth, rather than simply snapshots of timely references.

The interviews collected in this book are with artists, critics
and theorists who are intimately involved in building the
content, interfaces and architectures of new media. The topics
discussed include digital aesthetics, sound art, navigating deep
audio space, European media philosophy, the Internet in Eastern
Europe, the mixing of old and new in India, critical media
studies in the Asia-Pacific region, Japanese techno tribes,
hybrid identities, the storage of social movements, theory of the
virtual class, virtual and urban spaces, corporate takeover of
the Internet and the role of cyberspace in the rise of
non-governmental organizations.

Interviewees include Norbert Bolz, Paulina Borsook, Luchezar
Boyadjiev, Kuan-Hsing Chen, C"lin Dan, Mike Davis, Mark Dery,
Kodwo Eshun, Susan George, Boris Groys, Frank Hartmann, Michael
Heim, Dietmar Kamper, Zina Kaye, Tom Keenan, Arthur Kroker, Bruno
Latour, Marita Liulia, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Peter Lunenfeld, Lev
Manovich, Mongrel, Edi Muka, Jonathan Peizer, Saskia Sassen,
Herbert Schiller, Gayatri Spivak, János Sugár, Ravi Sundaram,
Toshiya Ueno, Tjebbe van Tijen, McKenzie Wark, Hartmut Winkler
and Slavoj Zizek.


*Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion* by Oliver Grau

Although many people view virtual reality as a totally new
phenomenon, it has its foundations in an unrecognized history of
immersive images. Indeed, the search for illusionary visual space
can be traced back to antiquity. In this book, Oliver Grau shows
how virtual art fits into the art history of illusion and
immersion. He describes the metamorphosis of the concepts of art
and the image and relates those concepts to interactive art,
interface design, agents, telepresence and image evolution. Grau
retells art history as media history, helping us to understand
the phenomenon of virtual reality beyond the hype.

Grau shows how each epoch has used the technical means available
to produce maximum illusion. He discusses frescoes such as those
in the Villa dei Misteri in Pompeii and the gardens of the Villa
Livia near Primaporta, Renaissance and Baroque illusion spaces
and panoramas, which were the most developed form of illusion
achieved through traditional methods of painting and the
mass-image medium before film. Through a detailed analysis of
perhaps the most important German panorama, Anton von Werner's
1883 *The Battle of Sedan,* Grau shows how immersion produced
emotional responses. He traces immersive cinema through Cinerama,
Sensorama, Expanded Cinema, 3-D, Omnimax and IMAX, and the
Head-Mounted Display with its military origins. He also examines
those characteristics of virtual reality that distinguish it from
earlier forms of illusionary art. His analysis draws on the work
of contemporary artists and groups ART+COM, Maurice Benayoun,
Charlotte Davies, Monika Fleischmann, Ken Goldberg, Agnes
Hegedues, Eduardo Kac, Knowbotic Research, Laurent Mignonneau,
Michael Naimark, Simon Penny, Daniela Plewe, Paul Sermon, Jeffrey
Shaw, Karl Sims, Christa Sommerer and Wolfgang Strauss. Grau
offers not just a history of illusionary space but also a
theoretical framework for analyzing its phenomenologies,
functions and strategies throughout history and into the future

Other books in the series:

*Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and
Technology,* by Steve Wilson *The Language of New Media,* by Lev
Manovich *Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes
Over,* by Ollivier Dyens

For more detailed submission guidelines: 
http://mitpress.mit.edu/authors/ms-submission.html 

Inquiries and proposals can be submitted to: 
Joel Slayton
Chair Leonardo Book Series Committee
c/o LEONARDO 
425 Market Street, 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105 
U.S.A.

or

Doug Sery 
MIT Press Books 
5 Cambridge Center 
Cambridge, MA 02142 
U.S.A. 
E-mail: leonardobooks@mitpress.mit.edu

Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2002 11:46:35 +0100
From: Annick Bureaud <annickb@altern.org>
Reply-To: annickb@altern.org
X-Accept-Language: en
To: Bureaud <annickb@altern.org>
Subject: Olats News nĄ8, December 17th 2002
X-RCPT-TO: <nisar@keshvani.com>
Status: U

.........................................................................

< OLATS NEWS 008 - 17/12/2002 >

This is the last Olats News of year 2002. The Leonardo/Olats team
wishes you a Merry Christmas and a wonderful year 2003. See you
next year !

1. DAVID BYRNE writes seriously about PLEASURE
http://www.leonardo.info/lmj

Read David Byrne on northern european Blip Hop music and other
composers in LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL special issue no 12. on the
theme of PLEASURE. Orders from journals-orders@mit.edu for Table
of Contents see http://www.leonardo.info/lmj. The accompanying CD
features experimental music from EASTERN EUROPE curated by
Christian Scheib and Susanna Niedermayr.

2. New on the Palatnik web site : the opening of a virtual
gallery http://www.olats.org/setF6.html

Organized in a chronological way, the gallery holds circa 40
artworks, and shows the main phases of Palatnik's creation (from
1959 to 2002). Sketches reveal how the artist gave shape to his
cinechromatic machines. A part from the gallery, visitors may now
consult a monography of the artist gathering biographical
information, an anthology of critical studies,  bibliographic
lists, and many other information about an artist who has been
considered as one of the most important leaders in the Brazilian
Kinetic art.

_________________________________________________________________________
   ___________________
  |                   |
  |                   |
  |      CREDITS      |
  |                   |
  |___________________|


Nisar Keshvani: LEA Editor-in-Chief
Michael Punt: LDR Editor-in-Chief
Patrick Lambelet: LEA Managing Editor
Beth Rainbow: Assistant Editor
Andre Ho: Web Concept and 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 World 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: <http://mitpress2.mit.edu/LEA>

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

Editorial Address:
Leonardo Electronic Almanac
P O Box 850
Robinson Road
Singapore 901650

E-mail: <lea@mitpress.mit.edu>
_________________________________________________________________________

Copyright (2002), 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
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Leonardo/ISAST and the MIT Press give institutions permission to
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access to other individuals and organizations is not permitted.

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< Ordering Information >

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=4&tid=27&mode=p

Leonardo Electronic Almanac is free to Leonardo/ISAST members and
to subscribers to the journal Leonardo for the 2002 subscription
year. The rate for Non-Leonardo individual subscribers is $35.00,
and for Non-Leonardo institutional subscribers the rate is
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All orders must be prepaid by check (must be drawn against U.S.
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Individuals and institutions interested in advertising in
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version or on the World Wide Web site should contact
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< End of Leonardo Electronic Almanac 10 (12) >
_________________________________________________________________________