Leonardo Abstracts Service: Top-rated abstracts
2nd and 3rd Quarter 2006

Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology is pleased to announce the publication of the top-rated abstracts the Leonardo Abstracts Service Databases during the 2nd and 3rd quarters of 2006.

Leonardo Abstracts Service (LABS), consisting of the English LABS database and Spanish LABS database, is a comprehensive collection of Ph.D., Masters and MFA thesis abstracts on topics in the emerging intersection of art, science and technology. Individuals receiving advanced degrees in the arts (visual, sound, performance, text), computer sciences, the sciences and/or technology that in some way investigate philosophical, historical or
critical applications of science or technology to the arts are invited to submit abstracts of their theses for consideration.

Top-rated abstracts in both the English and Spanish language databases are chosen on a quarterly basis by peer-review panels under the guidance of Sheila Pinkel and Pau Alsina and published in the Leonardo Electronic Almanac. Read their abstracts below.

The top-rated English-language LABS authors of the 2nd and 3rd quarters of 2006 are:

:: Patricia L Adams
:: Anthony Auerbach
:: Jane Evelyn McGonigal
:: Joerg Mueller
:: Andres Vaccari

The top-rated Spanish-language LABS authors of the 2nd and 3rd quarters of 2006 are:

:: Alessandra Caporale
:: Sergi Jorda

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:: The Implications for Artistic Expressions and Representations of Corporeality of
   the Experimental Techniques of Biomedical Engineering
   by Patricia L. Adams

Abstract: While biological scientists justify their research into human genetic engineering on the grounds of its "therapeutic" potential, art - particularly the genre of science fiction (whose origins can be traced to Mary Shelley's famous tale, Frankenstein) - has acted on the social through culture to alert us to the perilous repercussions of usurping the role of the "Creator of Life." Now, at the dawn of the new millennium, the scientific project of mapping human DNA seemingly complete, the plight of the genetically engineered human has become an intense focus of cultural critique. This research project can be differentiated by its focus on aesthetic inquiry into the implications for expressions and representations of corporeality in relation to contemporary biomedical engineering. It has incorporated stem cell research that entails the manipulation and redirection of adult stem cell fates. The methodology involves practical and
theoretical investigations into cellular responses, and is framed within the matrices of both an innovative collaborative art/science research model and the evolving process of practice-led arts research. The exploratory research is discursively located within the system/environment paradigm. This allows for boundaries between the philosophic and scientific disciplines of:

• epistemology
• ethics and aesthetics
• biology and technology

to become nodes in a relational network associated with:

• living and non-living
• sentience and consciousness
• conceptions of humanness

The cycle of practice-led research culminates in a body of work that began with a project entitled apoptosis, and developed into a three part quasi-scientific vital force series of installations. Each of these installations references nineteenth-century scientific experimental
processes employed in a search for the essential components of the human being itself. The series of interactive installations is discussed and the processual, pioneering research model, whereby the artist becomes the "human guinea pig" is theoretically and visually articulated. In addition, time-lapse videomicrograph image data collected through laboratory experiments is interpreted and recontextualized by the artist-researcher for representation in the vital force series of immersive installations. In these installations the implications of the issues raised by biomedical engineering processes are expressed as a very physical, tactile encounter.
The aim is that these encounters engender a multi-sensory experience for the individual viewer, who, when immersed in the aesthetic, corporeal, interactive installations becomes a participant who completes the work through engagement. Thus, the significance of the study lies in its re-privileging of the aesthetic experience of corporeality in the discourses surrounding genetic manipulation.

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:: Structural Constellations: Excursus on the Drawings of Josef Albers c. 1950–1960
   by Anthony Auerbach

The dissertation falls into three unequal sections, each exhibiting a series of documents for analysis, reflection and discussion. The arrangement and treatment of the topics functions to place historical markers, to assemble theoretical models and to unfold partial narratives, 'returning in a roundabout way to its original object.'*

I: On Constellation and Interpretation: Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno
The opening section traces the modalities of the term Konstellation as it was exchanged between the two writers in their historical-philosophical work and their personal correspondence. The study highlights the shifting ambitions and alternating spatial and temporal aspects of the concept from its evocation in Benjamin's study of German Trauerspiel (1925), through its adoption by Adorno in his programme 'Die Aktualität der Philosophie' (1931),
to its role in the epistemology of the Arcades Project (1935–40), the epistolary controversies of the same period and the legacy of this unfinished discussion in Adorno's late work up to Negative Dialektik (1966).

II: On Constellation and Drawing: the semiotics of star maps
This section proposes a semiotic 'assay' of star maps, that is: a test of their quality and purity as signs. The history of celestial cartography offers and exemplary archive of how the negotiation between knowledge and representation is mediated by drawing because, on star maps, a sharp distinction can be made between the base data (as also contained in the star
catalogues and effectively constant) and the map data (the changing information and graphic elaboration provided by the map). The graphic elaborations on star maps are constellations. The study examines moments of reform (or attempted reform) in the post-Ptolemaic tradition of celestial cartography, including a treatment of previously neglected nineteenth-century maps. The interpretation of Peirce's semiotics advanced here provides analytical tools which are of considerable value in assessing the epistemological import of operations and devices such as projection and the grid which came to occupy a visible and central role in artistic practice with the advent of perspective and became prominent again amid twentieth-century attempts to reform the Renaissance tradition.

III: On Structure and Representation: epistemological wish-images
That geometry could be both the guarantee and the abyss of representation calls for an historical as much as a structural explanation. This section (nearly twice as long as the other two) considers drawing as the site of the entanglement of art and geometry. Its ten episodes examine the changing role of drawing in geometry, the role geometry — mediated by drawing — has played in art and beyond that, what epistemological or ideological claims — mediated by geometry — have been made by or for art.

1 Geometry and Drawing
2 Dürer and Alberti: Veils
3 Monge: Descriptive Geometry
4 Farish: Isometrical Perspective
5 Haüy: Crystallography
6 Necker: An Optical Phenomenon
7 Cubism: The Gossip
8 Van Doesburg: A New Dimension
9 Lissitzky: The Constructor
10 Albers: Structural Constellations

I. Reprise: Aesthetic Theory
T he concluding pages of the dissertation pick up where Section I broke off, introducing discussion of Adorno's last work, Ästhetische Theorie. This section draws the threads of the foregoing essays together by suggesting a reading of Adorno's 'structural constellation of the conduct of aesthetics' after Albers, reflecting on the dialectical patterns deployed by the artist
and the philosopher, the work of language and the notion of 'lateness'.

*Note: 'Method is a digression. Representation as digression — such is the methodological nature of the treatise. The absence of an uninterrupted purposeful structure is its primary characteristic. Tirelessly the process of thinking makes new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object.' Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), p. 28.

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:: This Might Be a Game: Ubiquitous Play and Performance at the Turn of
   the Twenty-First Century
   by Jane Evelyn McGonigal

Abstract: This Might Be a Game examines the historical intersection of ubiquitous computing and experimental game design, circa 2001 AD. Ubiquitous computing, or ubicomp, is the emerging field of computer science that seeks to augment everyday objects and physical environments with invisible and networked computing functionality. Experimental game design is the field of interactive arts that seeks to discover new platforms and contexts for digital play. The convergence of these two fields has produced a significant body of games that challenge and expand our notions of where, when, and with whom we can play. This dissertation explores how and to what ends these playful projects reconfigure the technical, formal and social limits of games in relation to everyday life. To mark the heterogeneity of this experimental design space at the turn of the twenty-first century, I propose three distinct categories of ubiquitous play and performance. They are: ubicomp games, research prototypes that advance the scientific agenda of ubiquitous computing through game design; pervasive games, performance-based interventions that use game imagery to disrupt the normative conventions of public spaces and private technologies; and ubiquitous games, commercial entertainment projects that replicate the interactive affordances of video and computer games in the real world. I examine seminal games from each of these three categories, including Can You See Me Now? (Blast Theory/Mixed Reality Lab, 2001); the Big Urban Game (The Design Institute, 2003); and The Beast (Microsoft, 2001) respectively. My discussion draws on original gameplay media, design statements, and first-person player accounts. My critical framework is based on close readings of the play and performance values expressed in the founding ubicomp manifestos of Rich Gold and Mark Weiser. I argue that the persistent responsiveness developed by players to potential ludic interaction represents a new kind of critical gaming literacy. The gamers grow to read the real world as rich with ludic opportunity, carefully testing everyday media, objects, sites, and social
situations for the positive and negative consequences of inscribing each within the magic circle of play. I conclude by outlining a course for the future study of these categories that is based in the pre-digital games theory of Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, and Brian Sutton-Smith. I argue that as the perceived opportunities for digitally networked play become increasingly ubiquitous, game designers and researchers must attend more carefully to the insights of philosophers, anthropologists and psychologists who historically have explored play as an embodied, social and highly consequential ritual, always already grounded in the practices of everyday life.

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:: Aesthetics, Writing, Networked Computers
   by Jörg Müller

Abstract: Networked computers are ubiquitous, not just as desktop machines; they have beeniterally[sulu1]   incorporated. From cars to cell phones to clothing to implants, computers
have been spreading ever since the Information Technology Revolution took off. At the same time, aesthetic concerns abound. Fashion and product design, the media sphere and personal lifestyle, body art and plastic surgery indicate to a rising creative imperative. Authors such as Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Vilém Flusser and Wolfgang Welsch have long drawn our attention to this multi-layered processes of aestheticization. Taking these two developments as a starting point, the present thesis is an inquiry into aesthetics at the interface of networked computers. Certainly, aesthetic discourse cannot be limited to its traditional territory of art production and criticism. To the degree that information technologies have disseminated into politics, economics, and science and have become the very fabric human activity is woven into, aesthetics itself is framed by technical standards, according to Friedrich Kittler. However if information technology is the signpost of the post-human (Hayles), how should we picture the post-aesthetic? A similar question follows when considering the leading paradigm in much contemporary thought, namely that of performance. At its core there lies an *aisthetic* imperative: to bear witness to the here and now. However, what happens to the awareness of the present, to *aisthesis*once the here and now is everywhere at any time? These questions sketch the shifting landscape of aesthetics and are all the more pertinent since traditional notions of aesthetics, creativity and intuition frame in turn our critical possibilities vis-a-vis intelligent machines. Both poles, aesthetics and computers, form a problematic and uneasy relation whose principal dynamic must be traced. Drawing thus on Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, Jean Luc Nancy and Walter Benjamin, a changing, sensuous geography emerges that favors in sharp contrast to the immateriality of information the  lower senses of proximity and contact, the corporeality of touch. However, the sensitivity thereby implied is transformed from contemplative receptivity to active engagement with technology, and coding in particular.

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:: Machine Metaphysics: Descartes, the Mechanization of Life,
   and the Dawn of the Posthuman
   by Andres Vaccari

Abstract: One of the defining features of posthumanism is the problematization of the ontological boundaries between organism and machine, nature and art, the living and the technological—the metaphysical counterpart to a real world proliferation of hybrids, natural-artificial entities such as cyborgs, artificial life, and genetically modified foods and animals. Although perceived to be a recent phenomenon, the roots of posthumanism can be traced to the seventeenth century, to Descartes's introduction of the machine metaphor in the life sciences (physiology, medicine and biology) in his Traité de l'homme (first published in 1662).
Descartes is the mythical cradle of rational humanism; yet the Cartesian human is made possible by an ontological shift that can only be described as already posthuman. In Descartes's metaphysics, the immanent world of matter embraces physics, biology and technology, blurring the difference between these forms of knowledge. I trace the complex rhetorical and theatrical staging of the body-machine in L'homme through three main dimensions: ontological, disciplinary and representational / epistemological, examining the various aspects of the machine (automaton, optical illusion, object of spectacle and knowledge, among others) as it articulates Descartes' theory of life. The machine is firstly a metaphysical ploy, predicating a monistic, immanent identity across the whole of nature (or extension); this is accompanied by a concerted overturning of the ontological priority of nature
over "art." In turn, if the world is a machine, it means that it can be understood as such; the metaphysical aspect is followed by a disciplinary rearrangement in which mechanics is elevated to a new place in knowledge (as an exemplar of how geometrical / mathematical thinking can be applied to physics). Finally, there is an epistemological and representational aspect: the perceptual apparatus is conceived as a machine, and epistemology grounded on a "machine semiosis" ruling the passage of motions along mechanisms. It seems, then, that a high-order metaphysical and disciplinary shift preceded the real world integration of organisms and machines (in a wide range of industrial, scientific, and military contexts) in the centuries that followed Descartes. But although the posthumanist shift is metaphysical, the genesis of the body-machine can be traced to a dense material-cultural network of early modern technologies: automata spectacles, the microscope, perspective representation, anatomical theatres, machine treatises, engineering problems, etc. Thus, although we can speak of a
historical break or rupture, from another angle the body-machine is continuous and commensurable with its cultural and technoscientific milieu. Although my main focus is on the history of the life sciences, the Cartesian mechanization of life cuts through a number of dimensions, such as the notion of "extended" or distributed mind, uncanny simulation, the blurring of science and science fiction, anxieties about technological control, and the technological enhancement of bodily and perceptual powers. Overall, I intend here to treat Descartes as an outstanding philosopher of technology, an aspect of his thought that is not usually considered.

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Spanish Language Abstracts

:: Video Activism in the Italian Centri Sociali. A Visual Ethnography >
    by Alessandra Caporale

Abstract: Este trabajo se abre con una reflexión acerca de como la aplicación de la fotografía y el cine en la práctica etnográfica ha contribuido a estimular el desarrollo de la actual sensibilidad reflexiva en antropología. Este ¿giro reflexivo¿ consistió principalmente en el
reconocimiento y énfasis en la construcción social y en el carácter sujetivo de la representación, sea esta en forma de texto o de imagen. En este estudio etnográfico investigo la producción audiovisual de los Centri Sociali Occupati (CSO) italianos a partir del análisis de unos cien videos realizados durante los años 1991-2001. Utilizando la videocámara como herramienta metodológica, combino imágenes producidas durante la observación
participante en unos CSO romanos con fragmentos de trabajos realizados por colectivos de video artistas que tienen sus raíces en la práctica autogestionaria propia de esta cultura underground. En el marco de una sensibilidad que ve la comunicación como un nuevo territorio de experimentación, con formas ¿horizontales¿ de representación política y de afirmación cultural, los CSO se apropian de los nuevos media adaptándolos a los principios de autogestione y autoproduzione. Los usos colectivos de la radio, la fotografía, el audiovisual, la televisión comunitaria e Internet mantienen un hilo de continuidad con la ética autogestionaria. Al mismo tiempo, cada uno de los nuevos medios tecnológicos aporta unas potencialidades, a nivel de producción y difusión, que reconfiguran el imaginario y las prácticas de los CSO. De la auto-documentación militante se pasa progresivamente a un uso del video como detonador de situaciones, y a una variedad de prácticas y estilos que tienen como principio base la creación colectiva. Finalmente señalo la convergencia entre el cine etnográfico reflexivo, el videoactivismo, el cine y el video arte respecto al uso de los medios audiovisuales como instrumentos de crítica cultural. Todas estas prácticas recuperan y reinventan en cierto modo las experiencias artísticas de la avant-garde y el pensamiento crítico de los anteriores movimientos políticos y contraculturales con sus performance y dramatizaciones colectivas. Los interrogantes acerca de la relación entre forma y contenido, entre representación y agencia política, entre autor y público, están en el centro de la reflexión sobre la representación etnográfica así como de la producción artística. Del dialogo abierto entre
etnografía y prácticas artísticas emergen interesantes convergencias y diferencias que van abriendo espacios experimentales de creación y teorización.

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:: Digital Lutherie: Crafting musical computers for new musics¿ performance
   and improvisation    
   by Sergi Jorda

Abstract: Esta tesis estudia el uso del ordenador como instrumento musical, para la ejecución e improvisación de música en tiempo real. Su principal objetivo es la construcción de un marco teórico que nos permita evaluar el potencial, las posibilidades y la diversidad de estos nuevos instrumentos musicales digitales, con la esperanza de que estas ideas puedan servir de
fuente de inspiración para la construcción de nuevos y sofisticados instrumentos que nos permitan crear y escuchar nuevas músicas maravillosas, inauditas hasta ahora. El diseño de nuevos instrumentos musicales digitales es un campo muy amplio, que abarca áreas altamente tecnológicas (e.g. electrónica y tecnologías de sensores, técnicas de síntesis y de procesado
de sonido, programación informática, etc.) así como disciplinas ligadas al estudio del comportamiento humano (e.g. psicología, fisiología, ergonomía, interacción humano-computadora, etc.), con todas las conexiones posibles entre ellas. Mucha de la investigación aplicada existente, intenta solucionar partes independientes del problema. Este planteamiento, que constituye un enfoque esencial para cualquier progresión verdadera en este campo, resulta ser también, como demostraremos más adelante, claramente insuficiente. Estudios integrales, que tengan en cuenta no sólo factores ergonómicos o tecnológicos, sino también psicológicos, filosóficos, conceptuales, musicológicos, históricos, y por encima de todo, musicales, aunque no puedan ser totalmente sistemáticos, son absolutamente necesarios.
En esta tesis se aborda la idea del instrumento digital como un todo, independientemente de los componentes que lo integran y de sus características potenciales (e.g. formas de controlarlo, tipo de sonido que genera, etc.). Se investigan la esencia y los puntos fuertes de estos nuevos instrumentos digitales, así como los nuevos paradigmas de interpretación
musical y las músicas inauditas que éstos pueden aportar. Existe una compleja interrelación entre las tareas de imaginar, diseñar y construir ordenadores musicales, ejecutar e improvisar música con ellos, y analizar y comprender los resultados. Esta relación solamente se puede entender como un permanente acercamiento progresivo. Esta tesis es el resultado de quince
años de experiencia como luthier improvisador. En ese sentido, puede ser considerada como un trabajo teórico o conceptual, a la vez que experimental, aunque los experimentos que en ella se documenten transcurran a lo largo de años o décadas.

Access or post to the English-language database: http://leonardolabs.pomono.edu
Access or post to the Spanish-language database: http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/leonardolabs
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