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Leonardo Electronic Almanac                 VOLUME 9, NO. 3

                                            2001

Roger Malina,  LEA Executive Editor
Michael Punt, LDR Editor-in-Chief
Craig Harris, LEA Guest Editor
Patrick Lambelet, LEA Managing Editor

Editorial Advisory Board:
Roy Ascott, Michael Naimark, Simon Penny, Greg Garvey,
Joan Truckenbrod

                         ISSN #1071-4391
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                           ____________
                          |            |
                          |  CONTENTS  |
                          |____________|

=====================================================================


INTRODUCTION

< The New Leonardos >
by Roger Malina

LEONARDO JOURNAL

< More Symptom than Cure---Conference Report: Moving Images: 
Technologies, Transitions, Historiographies > 
by Michael Punt

LEONARDO DIGITAL REVIEWS

< This Month's Reviews >
by Michael Punt
< OBSERVER/OBSERVED and Other Works of Video Semiology and 
Retrospective de films et de video by Takahiko Iimura >
Reviewed by Mike Leggett

ISAST NEWS

< Leonardo Virtual Africa Power and Spirit of Water Project: Miami 
Miautre >
< Leonardo/ISAST Book Series Report >

OBITUARY

< Iannis Xenakis: 1922--2001 >
by Roger Reynolds

ENDNOTE

< Your Mind Is Your Best Fool: The Human Being and the Dilemma in 
Relation to the Mental Environment and Art >
by Wolf Gowin

ANNOUNCEMENTS

< About the Center for Design Visualization, University of 
California, Berkeley >
< Archive User Survey >

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                           ________________
                          |                |
                          | INTRODUCTION   |
                          |________________|

=====================================================================

< The New Leonardos >
by Roger Malina

The editorial office of Leonardo can be compared to an astronomical 
observatory: as we receive information we become aware of emerging 
trends and patterns within our universe of the art, science and 
technology community. We receive hundreds of manuscripts, texts and 
proposals each year. As the interest and activities of this 
professional community evolve, so does the content of Leonardo.

It seems that a new trend is emerging: we are now receiving texts 
from a new generation of artist-researchers, artists very well versed 
in contemporary science or technology. It could be that some of these 
artists over the coming years will not only develop significant art--
-and art forms---for our times, but may also make very significant 
contributions to technological innovation or even to the testing of 
new ideas in science. Perhaps we will look back some day and find 
documented in the pages of this journal some of the early work and 
seminal ideas of these "New Leonardos."

A number of factors are catalyzing the new situation. Institutional 
barriers to art/science/technology work have been broken down through 
a number of innovative programs worldwide. New sponsors in 
foundations, corporations and governmental programs have begun to 
support such work as well as the establishment of hybrid art-science 
organizations. The shared language and tools of computer science have 
provided the basis for shared approaches for problem-solving, new 
collaboration environments and, ultimately, the beginnings of 
overlapping epistemologies. And this new generation of artists has 
been finding the necessary training and education to work 
productively in these new areas.

The "weak claim" for these new approaches is that, through such 
hybridization, "better" science, more rapid innovation and more 
meaningful art is being produced. There are numerous examples of such 
work both within the pages of Leonardo and elsewhere. A "strong 
claim" would be that these approaches offer the promise of carrying 
out science, making inventions and creating art that could never have 
been achieved without such symbiosis between the very different 
disciplines of art, science and engineering. If the strong claim 
proves to be valid, then indeed we will start seeing the spectacular 
work of New Leonardos.

Art, science and technology are very different disciplines and there 
is no a priori reason why the strong claim should prove to be true. 
Artists, scientists and engineers have different goals, different 
working methods and success criteria, and different time scales and 
institutional settings for the creation of work. It will take a very 
long and sustained investment to create the conditions in which the 
New Leonardos can emerge, be recognized and have their work 
supported.

The cross-fertilization of artistic, scientific and engineering 
inquiry can be enhanced through a number of mechanisms. Ideas fleshed 
out within one discipline can be intentionally transferred and tried 
in another. Certain ideas can gain prevalence in the culture at large 
and emerge simultaneously in their application in many areas---one is 
struck by how the network model of the Internet is developing such 
deep metaphorical cultural validity in so many domains. Collaborative 
teams of experts can work together for shorter or longer periods on a 
common project. Experts in one discipline can be invited in as 
"outsiders in residence" to provoke "out-of-the-box" thinking within 
institutions with more focused objectives. 

One important mechanism is the bringing together of collaborative 
teams working together for shorter or longer time periods on a common 
project. Although there have been a number of good examples of such 
work in the past 50 years, it appears that the Internet and 
associated information technologies enable new modes of effective 
collaborative work. In some cases this can lead to situations of true 
multiple authorship, situations where audiences outside the team can 
be critical to the development of the work, and even situations of 
collective creation and authorship. When "open source" approaches are 
followed, numerous individuals may contribute to a developing project 
in such a way that it becomes impossible to identify clearly the 
origin and development of particular ideas or innovations. It may be 
that the New Leonardos may not conform to the romantic/Renaissance 
model of the solitary creative genius, but rather provide a new model 
of invention and creativity in artist-driven teams and collective 
work.

It must be admitted that in all these situations, there is the 
continual danger that ideas may get diluted, rigor may suffer and 
second-rate work may be disguised in "cross-", "multi-" or "trans-" 
disciplinary clothing. Nevertheless, the emergence of New Leonardos, 
artists sufficiently well versed in science or technology to drive 
such cross-fertilization, is a new development that offers promise 
for the future.

Forty years ago, C.P. Snow decried the growing gap between the "two 
cultures." Subsequently, this journal, Leonardo, was established to 
champion work that bridged the cultural divides. At that time, the 
founder of Leonardo, Frank Malina, also laid out plans to start a 
society of artist-researchers, that is, an association of individuals 
who not only were active as professional artists (exhibiting and 
selling artwork) but also were professionally active as researchers 
(publishing scientific papers or filing technical patents). The list 
of individuals identified at that time was so short that it fit 
easily on a small paper napkin; and so Frank Malina shelved the idea 
of such an organization. Some of those unusual individuals, however, 
served and continue to serve on the editorial board of Leonardo.

Perhaps the time is ripe to re-examine the situation. Leonardo has 
been documenting the achievements of artists who work within research 
organizations, receive funding from traditional science or technology 
funding sources, exhibit their artwork in art shows while publishing 
their technical work in more scientific and technical venues, or are 
involved in long-term projects in teams whose goals are overtly 
scientific or technological. In other cases, individuals may have 
worked for a number of years in primarily scientific or research 
settings and at some point changed focus or objective and began to 
work in other settings with primarily artistic objectives. We will 
continue to make the pages of this journal available to such unusual 
individuals, while continuing to urge funding of agencies and 
organizations to identify and support the work of these New 
Leonardos.

Roger F. Malina
Executive Editor, Leonardo
E-mail: <leo@mitpress.mit.edu>

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                           _____________________
                          |                     |
                          | LEONARDO JOURNAL    |
                          |_____________________|

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< More Symptom than Cure---Conference Report: Moving Images: 
Technologies, Transitions, Historiographies >
3-5 December 2000, Department of Cinema Studies of Stockholm 
University, Sweden. 
by Michael Punt. E-mail: <mpunt@easynet.co.uk>.

The term "moving images," for most of us reading this, has a limited 
definition---it means the images that we see at the cinema and on our 
televisions. Such an obvious point is worth repeating occasionally, 
if only to remind ourselves that images also move elsewhere: in other 
trans-national media such as the Internet (GIFs and webcams), 
computer games and the like, as well as in the relatively local 
realms of home movies and videos, artworks, museum displays, teaching 
aids, street advertisements, road signs, mobile phone menus and 
scrolling text messages (of which we sent 65 billion last year). The 
number of technologies that make images move are equally huge. Film 
projectors, video players and the various digital image processors 
that are used to move the images before our eyes are the most 
identifiable, but we might also want to consider those machines that 
move our eyes before the image: escalators and travelling walkways, 
various modes of transport such as planes, boats, trains, cars, 
cycles and scooters, as well as swings, roundabouts, rollercoasters, 
to say nothing of transcendental visions and spiritualist table-
turning and all the other techno/cultural experiences that were 
supposed to prepare us for the invention of cinema. 

Given the small place that cinema and television have in this 
spectrum of moving image technology, it is perhaps surprising that a 
conference called Moving Images: Technologies, Transitions, 
Historiographies focused almost exclusively on television and cinema. 
Of course, this is easily accounted for since it took place in the 
Film Museum and was hosted by the Department of Cinema Studies at 
Stockholm University (public thanks are due to John Fullerton and 
Elaine King for making it happen). However, in view of its European 
venue, it was not entirely clear why the conference was predominantly 
concerned with those Hollywood films that manage to cross the 
Atlantic and U.S. broadcast television (which most of us  know only 
through syndicated programs and channel-zapping for a depressing half 
hour in a hotel room). But perhaps this too is to be expected as the 
globalization of audio-visual economics and the apparently 
unstoppable colonization in both academia and popular culture by the 
English language erodes cultural diversity.

The limited methodology used to analyze these extremely limited 
manifestations of moving image technology was perhaps the most 
unwelcome aspect of what transpired. The orthodoxy of "Visual 
Culture," as it was represented by high profile academics from North 
American universities, dominated the papers and subsequent 
discussions almost exclusively, even when other kinds of evidence 
such as empirical data, biographical information or discourse 
analysis underpinned the presentation. Even the most grounded 
research based on artefacts and documents fell victim to the trend to 
make judgements based on interpretations of the evidence of an image. 
Two examples come to mind immediately. A slide of a drawing of Emile 
Reynaud presenting a moving picture show at the MuseŽ Grevin in 1894 
provoked an extended discussion of contemporary DJ "jamming" as a 
moving image technology simply because (in the drawing) the frock-
coated Emile had each hand on a horizontal drum of film so that he 
vaguely looked like a DJ at a twin deck. Similarly, a painting by 
Edward Burne-Jones, a bastion of the mid-nineteenth century British 
Academy, was linked to the chronophotography of Edweard Muybridge and 
Jules Etiene Marey as well as to the 1911 Marcel Duchamp painting, 
Nude Descending a Staircase. The vast discrepancies between the 
images (small photographs, large paintings, monochrome, polychrome, 
etc.), the various channels of distribution and their reception were 
elided in a morphological resemblance of the images to the movie film 
strip, in which movement is recorded in small incremental changes 
(something of which we are inevitably unaware). Most easily masked by 
this approach were the various individuals' intentions. Duchamp's 
painting was, of course, intended as a criticism of Futurism 
(movement of the object relative to the artist) and an intervention 
in Cubism (movement of the artist relative to the object), while 
Burne-Jones' piece was intended as an endorsement of the Academy's 
ideas of craft and its repetitive teaching method in which practice 
made perfect (an artistic movement). Similarly, the great difference 
between what Muybridge intended to do with his photographs (moving 
object past a moving viewpoint for pictorial effect) and Marey's work 
(tracing the movement of the object for scientific purposes) was also 
reduced on the basis of the fact that the outcomes appeared similar. 
As with the Reynaud example, however, the basis of this judgement was 
on a visual resemblance between the images produced by various 
operators as they subsequently mediated in the presentation by way of 
35mm colored slides projected on a screen.

Visual analysis is an invaluable tool for the cultural historian and 
critic, but it is not a panacea. Throughout the last century the 
circulation of mediated images in magazines, books, newspapers, 
films, television, videotape and digital communications developed 
exponentially in Europe and America. So too did personal mobility, 
which also amplified the visual information that could be---even had 
to be---experienced and decoded. Using spectacle, narrative and the 
illusion of movement, popular entertainments such as cinema and 
television evolved ingenious ways to include a great range of visual 
information in "easy-read" formats that evoke normal perception. 
Academic routines and publishing norms, however, have tended to 
reduce the complexity of experience to the prevailing conventions of 
the mid-nineteenth century as they were ossified by the single lens 
of a photographic camera. This has been so effective that although 
the movies are seldom confused with reality in daily life, in the 
discourse of the academy an image of an image is increasingly seen as 
indistinguishable from the original. The chief casualty of these 
limitations is that the three dimensionality of the solid objects 
that comprise the material world is lost. A history of moving image 
technology that includes the determining effects of architecture, 
sculpture and the appearance and design of other machines as they 
were intended to be experienced by the mobile viewer (as for example 
in Baroque sculpture, nineteenth-century tombs or the amusement park) 
now seems almost out of reach.

Moving Images: Technologies, Transitions, Historiographies was the 
last in a series of conferences to be held in Stockholm on the topic. 
The department of cinema studies is to be congratulated in bringing 
together a group of leading scholars in the field around an issue 
that could reinvigorate a "Mid-Atlantic" film studies that seems 
increasingly deadlocked. Like all good conferences, it was productive 
in that its conclusion posed questions that need to be addressed as a 
matter of urgency. These have to do with the scope, limits and 
methodologies of critical, historical and theoretical writing about 
the cinema in response to shifts in technology since the subject was 
admitted to the academic curriculum. In the mid-twentieth century, 
the strongest social and intellectual justification for a critical 
engagement with any aspect of audio-visual history, including film 
studies, derived from the belief that the ways in which the world is 
mediated function like a cybernetic system so that the output has a 
determining effect on the input rather than the other way around. At 
times during the conference, early twenty-first century film studies 
seemed to be more a symptom of the disease it was expected to cure 
and one could only hope that this malign condition will not be 
terminal as new research conforms to dubious methods.

The challenge to film scholars and media historians presented by this 
conference is how, in our intellectual and academic maturity, we can 
manage to critically engage with the growing diversity of moving 
image technology without enforcing restrictive methodologies and 
interpretations that are blind to the determining effects of the 
media themselves. It seemed quite appropriate that, during the taxi 
ride to the airport, the driver talked non-stop about the weather. 
Instead of crisp white Swedish snow and snappy cold, there was grey 
drizzle and temperatures that made those of us clutching woolly hats 
bought especially for the trip feel rather silly. As far as the 
driver was concerned, the unusual weather was the consequence of 
global warming---yet more evidence of our contribution to nature's 
tendency to reduce diversity and chaos to similarity. Pointing to the 
"environmentally friendly" engine, he made us feel guilty about our 
own disappointment that Stockholm was beginning to look like 
everywhere else by reminding us of our own agency in resisting 
entropy.

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            |                               |
            |    LEONARDO DIGITAL REVIEWS   |
            |                       2000.02 |
            |_______________________________|

=====================================================================

Editor-in Chief: Michael Punt
Managing Editor: Bryony Dalefield
Web Coordinator: Sudhira Hay

There is something rather eerie about the major offerings in this 
month's Leonardo Digital Reviews: in various ways, there appears to 
be an underlying sense of the present delayed. For instance, there is 
Mike Leggett's review of Takahiko Iimura's OBSERVER/OBSERVED and 
other works of "video semiology," co-produced with the Banff Center 
for the Arts. This review has, for no apparent technical reason, been 
bouncing around the Internet for several months in a fragmented form. 
Fortunately for us we were, with Leggett's help, able to get all the 
copy in one place. The result is that there is now a second review of 
this work on the website, which should have preceded Fred Andersson's 
review, which we published in February. Exactly why portions of the 
text disappeared in one machine is a mystery, but there is a certain 
poetic reflection that it should happen to Iimura's 
OBSERVER/OBSERVED. Leggett's review helpfully situates the historical 
and research significance of this video/CD-ROM package in the broader 
history of representation and technology. 

Elsewhere, Frieder Nake notes a significant value in the delay in 
reviewing the International Compendium Prix Ars Electronica 1998 
after two more have taken place. Not least is that, in retrospect, 
some patterns can be recognized and conclusions drawn that may add 
clarity to our sense of contemporary "art history." Finally, as 
Robert Pepperell points out in the beginning of his discussion of 
Robosapiens: Evolution of a New Species, the future in which robots 
take over the world has also been delayed. Speaking from a "Post-
human" position, however, he sees a certain ambivalence in the 
apparent cheapness of emerging solutions to artificial human 
intelligence, and the funding resources that are making these 
possible. 

As the various coincidences and technical glitches that have 
converged in this month's LDR confirm, the past, present and future 
are never quite as separate as we claim for the sake of convenience. 
That it is the immediacy of today's communication networks that makes 
this ever more apparent is something of a paradoxical determinant 
that the historians of contemporary art will have to factor into the 
wider picture. Leggett's review, published in full below, begins to 
put these issues on the agenda. 

Michael Punt, Editor-in-Chief, Leonardo Digital Reviews
February 2001

*********************************************************************

In this month's reviews:

< Books >

Robosapiens: Evolution of a New Species by Faith D'Aluisio and Peter 
Menzel 
Reviewed by Robert Pepperell

International Compendium Prix Ars Electronica 1998.
Reviewed by Frieder Nake

< Multimedia >

Takahiko Iimura OBSERVER/OBSERVED and other works of Video Semiology, 
by Takahiko Iimura. Reviewed by Mike Leggett (see below)

Takahiko Iimura - Retrospective de films et de video SEEING catalogue 
(in French and Japanese), Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume 1999. 
Reviewed by Mike Leggett (see below)


Visit Leonardo Digital Reviews online to read these reviews in full, 
together with the latest postings, in LDR Raw as they come in. 
<http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/ldr.html> 
Your comments are welcome at <ldr@Leonardo.org>

=====================================================================
=

Takahiko Iimura
OBSERVER/OBSERVED and Other Works of Video Semiology
Video and CD-ROM (Mac & PC), conceived, directed and edited by 
Takahiko Iimura. Co-produced with the Banff Center for the Arts.

Takahiko Iimura---Retrospective de films et de video
SEEING catalog (in French and Japanese), Galerie nationale du Jeu de 
Paume, 1999. Essays by Daniel Charles, Takahiko Iimura, Nicolas 
Villodre, Christophe Charles.

Distributed by Heure Exquise! and Nuit de Chine!, 
<Exquise@nordnet.fr>. CD-ROM, 400 FF, catalog 150 FF + freight. Art 
Metropole, <artmet@interlog.com>.

Reviewed by Mike Leggett. E-mail: <legart@ozemail.com.au>.

These selected works on CD-ROM cover the period of Iimura's work from 
1975--1998. Together with the catalogue Seeing, from the 
retrospective exhibition at the Jeu du Paume in 1999, both works 
significantly cover the central core of Iimura's oeuvre. His work 
with filmmaking was first recognized at the 1963 Brussels 
International Experimental Film Festival and, by the end of the 
1960s, he had begun to produce work with video and moved easily 
between the two mediums until the 1980s and 1990s, when he completed 
only one film but thirty-two videos.

The ontological project he has consistently pursued was much admired 
by the British group of "structural/material" film-makers in the 
1970s and was described by Malcolm Legrice in his 1977 book, Abstract 
Film and Beyond, as being a "detailed examination of our perceptual 
and conceptual mechanisms." Iimura has maintained this tendency with 
contemporary projects, particularly the Observer/Observed CD-ROM.

What makes the newer medium of CD-ROM useful to Iimura's broader 
project? Clearly, analysis that sets out to define "seeing" in 
relation to sound, language and linguistics must provide the audience 
with the ability to participate in a process involving concentration 
and provide opportunity for reflection and even meditation. This work 
allows users to pace themselves through a medium that is part 
gallery, part lecture room, part catalog and part auto-analysis. 
Ingenious linking, judiciously designed, enables the user to move 
easily within a matrix of cross-referencing.

The three original video pieces---Camera, Monitor, Frame, 
Observer/Observed and Observer/Observed/Observer---are presented in 
digital format, providing a complete facsimile version of the 
original video (in itself a collector's item). In addition, this 
version goes further with the option to then enter the documentation 
of each piece and navigate between animated diagrams ("Picture 
Plan"), a storyboard ("Program") or a narrative description. These 
are linked to one of the two essays written by Iimura: "The Visuality 
of the Structure of the Japanese Language" and "A Semiology of 
Video," which can be read in extract form or complete as discrete 
pieces. Access to such varied but related knowledge makes good use of 
interactive multimedia.

When the essential elements of cognition are applied to the 
ubiquitous video/television image, the complex play ("see") between 
the subject ("I") and the object ("you") are interrogated such that 
each element (image/sound) is perceived (seen/heard) in relation to 
the video (closed) system by symbolically creating a diegesis of the 
moment(s) of recording. Spoken description ("I -- see -- you") 
extends beyond these Vertovian principles, a la revenant, and 
introduces the semantic distinctions between English and Japanese and 
the separation created by the predicate verb being placed (in 
English) between the subject and the object. The emphasis placed on 
the subject/ego in the technology of language is mirrored, but 
problematized, in the closed system of the video installation and 
that of the camera/operator.

The Observer/Observed CD-ROM was made at the same time as another, 
Interactive: AIUEONN Six Features (which is also based on a video 
piece, from 1993), and provides the extension to the reflexive 
process that the time-based work proposes, enabling a practically 
active engagement with the work rather than an intellectual non-
passivity. The work of other artists (Valie Export, Simon Biggs, 
Nigel Helyer, etc.), has also made use of this technology, but these 
have mostly been archiving projects, pulling images and text into a 
conveniently searchable and viewable form. Iimura's recent projects 
go far further in combining the rigor of earlier work with the 
accessibility and tractability of this interactive medium.

The catalogue of the Jeu du Paume retrospective is a significant 
addition to the French/Japanese bibliography on the artist and a 
useful adjunct to the CD-ROM for English readers, providing hard copy 
of the diagrams and storyboards employed and a highly detailed 
listing of biographical sources. 

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            |                                 |
            |            ISAST NEWS           |
            |_________________________________|

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< Leonardo Virtual Africa Power and Spirit of Water Project: Miami 
Miautre >

The MIAMI MIAUTRE project has recently been linked to the Leonardo 
Virtual Africa Project, The Power and Spirit of Water. See 
<http://www.olats.org> for details on the Leonardo Virtual Africa 
Project.

Miami Miautre: Mapping the Virtual City
A project by the Florida Research Ensemble---Gregory L. Ulmer, 
Barbara Jo Revelle, William Tilson, John Craig Freeman
Contact: <gulmer@english.euf.edu>

Miami Miautre is an experiment involving the following elements:

1.   The Internet.  
The Internet has been defined by Paul Virilio as the means of a 
potential "general accident"---a global catastrophe taking place 
everywhere simultaneously. The Internet is an institutionalization of 
the technology that has produced our "society of the spectacle," in 
which the image is said to have destroyed the civic sphere existing 
within the cities of modern nation-states.

2.   The EmerAgency. 
A virtual, distributed, online consultancy, initiated at the 
University of Florida in 1998. The purpose of this conceptual agency 
is to coordinate the formation of public schools into a "fifth 
estate" that would allow students at all levels of education to 
participate in public policy formation by means of the Internet. 

3.   Choragraphy.
This experiment tests a rhetoric of hypermedia formulated by Gregory 
Ulmer in his book Heuretics: The Logic Of Invention (1994). The 
rhetoric adapts for electracy the mnemotechniques central to pedagogy 
in the pre-print era of literacy. It is a hybrid of inventional 
memory palaces and chorological cartography in which plastic arts 
methods were used to map regional locales. The neologism 
"choragraphy" signals the genesis of the rhetoric out of the 
encounter of architecture with deconstruction in the collaboration of 
Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman on a folie for the Parc de la 
Vilette in Paris. In this prototype, the Miami River is the basis for 
the design of an online "chora"---a holistic category made 
operational within digital imaging.

4.   Testimonial.
The proposed virtual consulting practice. The creative photographer 
Barbara Jo Revelle lived at an Inn on the Miami River for five weeks 
in order to attune the site---to discover the mood or atmosphere of 
the river zone. "Attunement" alludes to the tradition of "Stimmung," 
from Plato's TIMAEUS (the dialogue that introduced "chora" as the 
space of generation) to Heidegger's phenomenology. Revelle's mapping 
of the zone drew upon the poetic encounter perfected by modernist 
poets in Paris from Baudelaire's tableaux through Breton's NADJA and 
Walter Benjamin's dialectical flaneur to the drifting of the 
Situationists. The new element is that the modernist epiphany is 
literalized in the photographic image. "Crossroads" evokes an inner 
experience of recognition in the consultant by means of an external 
detail of the scene. The consultant witnesses the catastrophe of the 
zone, in an image that locates a virtual border or boundary---
logical, psychological, ideological. 

5.  Interface Metaphor
The next phase of the project is to design a website that supports a 
virtual witnessing of the Miami zone (Miautre), and that is portable 
to zones in other communities. This interface between schooling and 
the Internet supportive of community witnessing of policy 
negotiations contributes to the formation of a civic sphere within 
the spectacle.	

For further information on the Miami Mautre Project, see 
<http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~gulmer/>

*********************************************************************
*****

< Leonardo/ISAST Book Series Report >

The Leonardo Book Series mission is to publish texts by artists, 
scientists, researchers and scholars that present innovative 
discourse on the convergence of art, science and technology. 
Envisioned as a catalyst for enterprise, research and creative and 
scholarly experimentation, the book series enables diverse 
intellectual communities to explore common grounds of expertise. The 
Leonardo Book Series provides for the contextualization of 
contemporary practice, ideas and frameworks represented by those 
working at the intersection of art and science. 

The Book Series continues to mature as a significant Leonardo 
publishing enterprise, the most recent book being The Language of New 
Media, by Lev Manovich. Soon to be released is Information Arts: The 
Intersection of Art, Science Technology and Theory by Steve Wilson. 
Five additional books have been recently signed: Making Cultural 
Machines, by Simon Penny; Desire to Descend Into the Image: The 
History of Virtual Art and its Future, by Oliver Grau; Visual 
Mathematics II, edited by Michele Emmer; Context Providers, edited by 
Victoria Vesna and the reprint of Linda Henderson's Fourth Dimension 
and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Developing new content 
terrain for the series is critical; therefore, a prospectus for the 
Book Series was developed to help guide identification and selection 
of authors and an advisory committee has been established that 
includes Joel Slayton, Annick Bureaud, Michael Punt, Nicolas Collins, 
Roger Malina, Pamela Grant-Ryan and Margaret Morse. Leonardo/ISAST 
will also be working closely with MIT Press to develop and market the 
Book Series. 

For more information, contact Joel Slayton, chair of the advisory 
committee, at <joel@well.com>. 

=====================================================================

             _________________________________
            |                                 |
            |             OBITUARY            |
            |                                 |
            |_________________________________|
 

=====================================================================


< Iannis Xenakis: 1922--2001 >
by Roger Reynolds

Iannis Xenakis: a musical voice without precedent. Born of Greek 
parents in Bra•la, Romania, 29 May 1922, he was sent to a boarding 
school on the island of Spetsai at the age of 10. There began the 
steeping in ancient Greek philosophy and drama which ignited and 
illuminated his creative acts throughout his life. Although he had 
early lessons in piano and music theory, his formal education 
culminated, rather, in science, at the Athens Polytechnic Institute, 
which he entered in the Fall of 1940. A year later, the impact of 
WWII was growing, and he joined the communist-led National Liberation 
Front, resisting first the German invasion, and later the British 
occupation of Greece. 

Xenakis' music embodies inferential dimensions no other composer has 
managed to harness, dimensions only knowable, I think, to one whose 
very identity was branded by the indiscriminate violence of shrapnel 
during demonstrations in Athens on the last day of 1944. Three years 
later, after he had received his engineering diploma, political 
realities forced him to flee Greece, and to relocate, illegally, in 
France. There he began an association with the master architect, Le 
Corbusier; at first as a draftsman, then gradually also as a 
contributor to the design of, notably, the convent of La Tourette 
(1955) and the fanciful, tent-like Philips Pavilion (for the 1958 
World's Fair in Brussels). Xenakis was a fiercely proud and 
egocentric being, and a dispute over what he felt was a denial of 
appropriate recognition for the design of this structure resulted in 
a rupture of his relationship with Le Corbusier (1959). Only then did 
he determine to focus his energies on composition, though 
architecture always remained, it was clear to me, an essential 
fascination for him.

His musical aspirations had been encouraged by contact with Messiaen 
in an analysis course at the Paris Conservatory (1950--52), but it 
was his own Metastaseis, for chamber orchestra (1953--54), that 
marked the emergence of a signature originality. It gave substance to 
his realization---nourished by architectural engagements---that sonic 
surfaces and masses could be *generally* asserted (as he would have 
it "out of time," which is to say as relationships not yet fixed in a 
concretization) as concatenations of straight lines, as statistical 
distributions of points (brief sounds such as string pizzicati). And 
he made these surfaces concrete not only through the unprecedented 
sonorities of Metastaseis (by webs of glissandi, tendrils of sound 
with continuously varying pitch), but also in the hyperbolic 
paraboloid surfaces of the Philips Pavilion, and, later, in the 
conception of his other "polytope" structures.

In the 1950s, Xenakis' work attracted the attention of the Swiss 
conductor Hermann Scherchen, who championed his music and also began 
publishing (in his Gravesaner BlŠtter) the dense and daunting series 
of theoretical articles---on probability, stochastic processes, 
logic, sieves, etc.---which were eventually collected in Formalized 
Music (French edition, 1963). In 1962, Xenakis had been given limited 
access to an IBM computer, and had begun exploring the first of the 
two distinctive compositional algorithms he devised: Free Stochastic 
Music [FS]. The continuing need for a research environment in which 
he could test his musical theories led him to found EMMAMu (1966), 
and this facility metamorphosed, by 1972, into the Centre  d'Etudes 
de MathŽmatique et Automatique Musicales (CEMAMu).

The particular insight that  Xenakis told me he considered his signal 
originality---that the continuous variability of all of the 
dimensions of sound could be addressed in music---manifested not only 
in the unique compilations of vibrant, implacable sonic textures that 
characterize his compositions, but in an original interfacing concept 
(the UPIC System, 1978). This device allowed him---and untrained 
school children as well---to draw directly on an electronically 
monitored surface, describing to an attached computer not only the 
variation of pitch over time, but also the wave-shape identity 
(affecting the timbre) of the sound material itself.

Xenakis' work manifests an audacious and often a supreme command of 
materials and time; it bridges the humanely intuited and the 
mathematically engendered. It asserts the comprehensive, integrative 
vision that came naturally to him, that of the architect. He 
announced and celebrated the prospect of a conceptual consonance 
between the perspectives of music, science and philosophy. But the 
result of this consonance was unexpectedly *raw*: aroused by the 
mapping of presumed-to-be-non-musical phenomena into the sonic world, 
presenting him with sonic invitations that his informed ear then 
mediated.

Notable among his more than 150 compositions are Achoripsis (1956--
57, for small ensemble), in which he established the conceptual basis 
for the computer automaticization of the ST series that followed; 
Herma (1960--61, for solo piano), written for the composer/pianist 
Yuji Takahashi, and first positing the link between the composer's 
uncompromising compositional methodologies and the performance 
athleticism that especially marked his solo writing; the flagrantly 
physical Eonta (1963--64, for solo piano and brass); Terretekthor 
(1965--66, for large orchestra), in which the audience and the 
orchestra members are interspersed; Nuits (1967--68, for 12 solo 
voices), asserted the characteristically harsh, folk-influenced 
intensity of his vocal music; a seminal work in this medium, 
Persephassa (1969, for 6 percussionists); La LŽgende d'Eer (1977) a 
46-minute, 4- or 8-channel, electroacoustic composition written for 
the Diatope construction at the opening of the Pompidou Center; the 
hallucinatory outcry of A•s (1980, for multi-registral male voice, 
percussion and orchestra); the string quartet Tetras (1983), which 
marked perhaps the apex of this composer's invention for strings; the 
texturally impish and infectiously rhythmic chamber ensemble work, 
Thalle•n (1984); GenDy3 (1992), a blistering electroacoustic piece 
which displayed the impact of his second major algorithm (Dynamic 
Stochastic Synthesis); and DŠmmershein (1993-94), the most impressive 
of his late orchestral compositions.

But whatever medium or methodology Xenakis embraced, whatever 
strategies he employed, his intent was always, clearly, both 
immediate (grippingly physical) and metaphysical (implying unnamable 
things). In commencing the argument of Formalized Music, he wrote:

	Art ... must aim through fixations that are landmarks, to draw 
[one] towards a
	total exaltation in which the individual mingles, losing his 
consciousness in a truth 
	immediate, rare, enormous and perfect.

The standard he set for himself is inimitable, the frequency with 
which he met it astonishing. He is survived not only by his musical, 
architectural and theoretical works, but by his spouse, the author 
Fran�oise (Gargouil) Xenakis and their daughter, M‰hki. There will 
not be another such voice.

Roger Reynolds,
Paris, March, 2001

=============================================================
             _________________________________
            |                                 |
            |               ENDNOTE           |
            |                                 |
            |_________________________________|

=============================================================

< Your Mind Is Your Best Fool: The Human Being and the Dilemma in 
Relation to the Mental Environment and Art >
Wolf Gowin, Kronacher Str. 33, 12309 Berlin, Germany. E-mail: 
<wolf1234@zedat.fu-berlin.de>.

The reason that understanding oneself and learning how to appreciate 
art seems so difficult is because we are not taught how to do it when 
we are young. In fact, we are usually taught exactly the opposite---
that the mental environment is a mysterious place that cannot be 
understood. As a result, we end up defining mental components in a 
haphazard fashion, without understanding either the relationship 
between the components or the relationship that these components have 
with the outside physical environment that determines how we 
experience our lives.

Beliefs, dreams, thoughts and emotions are all separate parts of the 
mental environment that interact in the same manner, at least 
conceptually, as the way in which our hands interact with our eyes, 
our fingers with our nose, or our lungs with our heart. We could 
define the mental environment as a place where sensory information 
from the physical environment is sorted, categorized, labeled, 
organized, associated and stored. Here, beliefs are formed and 
meanings are assigned. Such a definition, however, is limited---it 
eliminates mental activities generated within and excludes the brain 
as part of the mental environment, even though the activity of the 
mental environment takes place inside of the brain. 

The mental components are intangible, existing as energy. Energy does 
not occupy space in the physical environment. This "no-space" 
characteristic of energy gives it a non-dimensional quality, and the 
character of our dreams clearly illustrates this non-dimensional 
nature. The mental environment and energy also share the 
characteristic of speed. In moments, one can scroll through all one's 
experiences, regardless of how long it took to have the experiences. 
In extreme situations, one can re-experience sights, sounds, tastes, 
tactile sensations, smells, feelings and emotions of one's entire 
life in a flash. 

The most difficult concept to grasp about the nature of the mental 
environment is that it exists outside of time as we know it. To 
perceive  time, two components are needed: space and movement. Our 
physical senses lock us into perceiving an environment bounded by the 
limitations of time and three-dimensional space. We are unable to go 
backward and experience the past as it existed in the physical 
environment; once it passes, it is gone forever. Nor can we move 
ahead into the future. What does exist are seemingly endless 
sequences of "now" moments in which we experience our lives. However, 
in the mental environment there are no spatial boundaries or time 
constraints; we can think in any temporal direction: past, present or 
future. The actual sequences of moments that exist in the physical 
environment have no effect on the energy in which our memories are 
stored. Sequences of time only have an effect on the mental 
environment relative to the impact the environment is having on our 
senses in energy terms. The attempt to reconstruct the last 24 hours, 
moment for moment, from our memory always ends with failure. 
Experiences are not recorded as moments of time but are rather stored 
as charges of energy and, as such, have no relationship to the 
passing of physical clock time. Our memories are like buckets of 
energy that we may organize chronologically without any restrictions 
on the truthful passing in clock time.

Essentially, our existence simultaneously straddles two different 
dimensions. We live in and perceive three-dimensional space and our 
physical senses are subject to the limitations of linear time, 
whereas we think in a dimension where time and space as it is 
perceived in the physical environment does not exist. This creates 
some very important psychological implications.

Each of our memories makes up a part of our identity, and because 
they exist as an energy form, they have the potential to act as a 
force on our behavior.

Positive energy, in a mental component, promotes growth or learning 
by creating a sense of confidence, which in turn results in an 
openness to explore. There is a direct inverse relationship between 
how much we have allowed ourselves to learn about the nature of the 
environment and the degree of negatively charged energy in our mental 
environment. In other words, an absence of fear is a critical factor 
in determining whether or not we will make ourselves available to 
learn anything new.

Associations seem to be a natural way in which we think. We associate 
experiences or knowledge with everything that has the same 
characteristics, and we link sensory information with some event of 
the past. Associations are an automatic function of the way in which 
information gets organized in our mental system. The pitfall is that 
we can hear, see, taste or smell things that cause us to feel 
emotions and yet not know why we feel this way because we cannot 
remember connecting the extraneous sensory information with the 
primary event.

Distinctions make separations in environmental information where no 
previous separation existed. The accumulation of distinctions is a 
learning process that takes time and intellectual capacity. In any 
given moment, there is a vast difference between what each of us 
perceives and what is actually available in possible distinctions 
from the environment's perspective.

At the most basic level, the world is transformed into electrical 
impulses of energy:  energy that carries information, as well as 
feelings and emotions. Each first-time encounter creates a memory, 
distinction or association that did not exist previously. Once we 
learn something, mental energy will then act as a force on our brain 
cells to recognize in the environment what we have learned about it. 
When we perceive something, recognizing that we learned it already, 
mental energy is acting as a force on our senses, instead of the 
environment acting as a force on our senses. The meaning is already 
in us. We tend to judge all subsequent events from the quality of 
mental energy created by the primary event. What we experience of the 
outside environment is shaped from the inside, not from the outside, 
as most people would assume.

Beliefs create definitions, make distinctions and shape our 
perception of environmental information by programming our senses to 
select information that corresponds with what we believe. The belief 
controls the information coming into the mental system. The 
information that is actually perceived will be consistent with the 
belief. The course of action taken will be consistent with the 
information perceived and the subsequent experience will support and 
reinforce the validity of the belief. A belief is not a fact of 
reality, it is a belief about reality. Every belief system is a 
closed system, inhibiting the flow of information into the mental 
system. If we believe that things exist in only one, two or three 
particular ways, then our beliefs will act as a natural mechanism to 
block the acceptance of any conflicting information. In brief, what 
we experience is shaped by what is already inside of us (mental 
constructs such as memories, distinctions, associations and beliefs), 
although such constructs may not be remotely close to information 
that the environment offers us as a potentially new experience.

When we are in front of an artwork, for example, our belief system 
acts as a mental management tool. The first filter determines whether 
we will explore the work further. Then, instantaneously, without time 
and space restrictions, memories of similar color and shape 
experiences kick in and are associated with other thought systems and 
feelings. As a last step, we come to approve of or dislike the 
artwork. 

Everyone has different reasons for such a decision, based on their 
personal mental environment. Our initial experiences shape the 
meaning and determine the quality of energy connected with it, and 
once the meaning exists inside of us, it shapes our insights of the 
external world as we pick and choose information and how we feel 
about that information. This is why a group of people can all be in 
the same exhibition, be exposed to the same artworks, and then 
afterward describe the paintings/sculptures in different ways. The 
exhibition does not choose the meaning that one places upon the 
information offered; each individual creates his/her own experience 
out of the situation presented. There are many alternate experiences 
possible, each experience corresponding to the type of belief system 
one may have. Therefore, by inhibiting the flow of information into 
the mental system, beliefs do exactly what they are supposed to do---
they limit our awareness of data to avoid mental, psychological and 
spiritual overload.

A perception and an experience have to correspond, since we cannot 
experience something that we do not yet know about unless we are open 
to the possibility that what we believe is very limited in 
relationship to what the environment is offering. Refusing to 
acknowledge the existence of these possibilities would be similar to 
claiming that electricity did not exist before it was discovered. 
When we continually argue for the status quo by defending what we 
already believe we know, the environment will seem to constantly 
assault us, resulting in stress and anxiety. The outer environment 
becomes perceived as hostile because, although it offers us more to 
learn about the nature of how things exist, we simply refuse to 
learn.

Obviously, acknowledging that there is something we need to learn is 
not as easy as it sounds. Accepting that we do not know something or 
that what we do know is not very useful or effective presents us with 
one of the major paradoxes of life. The question is, How can we know 
what we do not know when what we have already learned will block our 
perception of what we have not yet learned? Once an experience 
becomes a component of our mental environment, it becomes a part of 
what is commonly believed to be our identity and is, therefore, 
beyond question. Our psychological makeup depends on this component, 
and our mind defends it.

Everyone assumes that what they have experienced and learned about 
the nature of how things exist is true and correct. The irony is that 
our version is correct by virtue of the fact that what is internal to 
us was initially experienced by our physical senses---if we saw it, 
read it, smelled it, heard it, felt it, tasted it or any combination 
thereof, we experienced it. However, not everybody's version is 
particularly useful or effective as a resource for interacting with 
the environment in a way that would lead to satisfactory outcomes. An 
even greater irony is that the more we accept the possibility that 
our version is not as effective a resource as it could be, the more 
we open ourselves to learning from the environment.

Since we cannot know what we have not yet learned and what we do know 
blocks the perception of other alternatives, we easily get caught in 
terribly unsatisfying life cycles, believing that this is all the 
world has to offer, when our predicament is merely the result of our 
inability to adapt ourselves. When we do allow ourselves to adapt, we 
learn that there are always more choices available than our beliefs 
will allow us to perceive. To adapt is to identify and actively 
change something that is already inside of us.

Learning is synonymous with change, whether we are changing something 
we already know or learning something completely new. If we refuse to 
change the inside, then we are not learning what we need to know to 
experience something different in the outer environment. If there is 
no change inside, there will be no perceived change outside, thereby 
locking us into recurring cycles of pain and dissatisfaction. We will 
continue to suffer until the pain becomes unbearable, leaving us with 
no choice other than to reassess how we go about managing our lives, 
that is, reassessing the usefulness of our beliefs.

How does all this relate to art? Art history is the greater part of 
the environment in which contemporary art exists and unfolds. 
Learning about the history of art, how we got to where we are, will 
help the person who values art as well as the artist to understand 
issues of technique, meaning (consensus of the time), concepts, 
composition, etc. What we do not understand in a work of art was 
already there before. What we have now has existed as various 
possibilities since the beginning of humankind. We are able to 
understand and appreciate even the toughest issues in life as well as 
in art by learning from the past and looking at the present. The past 
and the present will shape the environment of the future, both the 
external and internal environments.

In short, our intellectual capability is the best tool to change the 
fooling, status quo-defending mind.

=============================================================
             ______________________________
            |                              |
            |                              |
            |     ANNOUNCEMENTS            |
            |______________________________|


=============================================================

< The Center for Design Visualization, University of California, 
Berkeley >

The Center for Design Visualization <http://www.cdv.berkeley.edu/> is 
an industry/university research partnership at the University of 
California at Berkeley. Created with the support of the vice 
chancellor for research and the dean of the college of environmental 
design, the CDV is charged with fostering industry/university 
collaboration in architecture/engineering/planning, art/new media and 
archaeology/heritage. A cross-campus research facility involving 
faculty, students and others interested in the challenges of applying 
emerging visualization media in design, the Center's affiliated 
faculty range in expertise from architecture to computer science, and 
art to anthropology engineering.

For more information, see <http://www.cdv.berkeley.edu/>. 

*********************************************************************


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