/      ____
   /      /     /\
  /      /--   /__\
 /______/____ /    \
=============================================================
Leonardo Electronic Almanac                 VOLUME 9, NO. 8
                                            August, 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
=====================================================================
                           ____________
                          |            |
                          |  CONTENTS  |
                          |____________|

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

EDITORIAL

< What's in a Word: Leonardo/ISAST Obtains U.S. Trademark on the Word 
"Leonardo" >
< Special Announcement: Leonardo/ISAST Executive Director search >
by Roger Malina

FEATURED TEXTS

< Statements from the Burning Man Festival > 

LEONARDO DIGITAL REVIEWS

< The Languages of the New Media >
Reviewed by Sean Cubitt
< Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature >
Reviewed by Robert Pepperell
< Visualizations: The Nature Book of Art and Science >
Reviewed by Wilfred Niels Arnold

ANNOUNCEMENTS

< Casado and Cano Win Leonardo Award for Excellence >
< Seventh International Conference on Virtual Systems and MultiMedia >

CORRECTIONS

< David Tomas website url >
< "ArtSci2001: Catalyst for Collaboration" meeting update >

=====================================================================
                           _______________
                          |               |
                          |   EDITORIAL   |
                          |_______________|

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

< What's in a Word: Leonardo/ISAST Obtains U.S. Trademark on the Word 
"Leonardo" >
by Roger Malina


On 5 June, 2001, Leonardo/ISAST was registered as the U.S. Trademark 
holder for use of the word "Leonardo" in the following areas of 
commerce (classes 9, 16 and 42):

1) For electronic publications, including CD-ROMS, Internet-
downloadable files and CDs of musical works. The registration cites 
our first use as 1991.

2) For printed materials, including books and journals. The 
registration cites our first use as 1968.

3) For websites featuring information on the arts, sciences and 
technology. The registration cites our first web site as being 
available in 1994.

Our success in obtaining the Leonardo trademark, covering our areas 
of activity, follows on the heels of our success in defending the 
lawsuit brought against us by Transasia and Leonardo Finance.

Again, we thank the community for their sustained support, which has 
allowed the Leonardo network to defend itself. We have now confirmed 
our use of the word Leonardo in connection with our activities.

This is ironic, since we never intended to seek universal control of 
the word Leonardo, which, it seems to us, is a word that is part of 
the common heritage of mankind. It was Joseph Needham, famed 
microbiologist and historian of Chinese science and technology, who - 
in 1966 - suggested the name Leonardo as the name of a new journal of 
the arts, sciences and technology, founded by Frank Malina. The name 
was chosen in reference, of course, to Leonardo da Vinci, who is 
viewed as a prototypical creator who navigated during his career 
between the arts, sciences and technology as his fields of endeavor. 
Much of the myth of the Renaissance has been re-written by new 
historians, but the myth is perhaps in this case more important than 
the reality.

When Leonardo/OLATS was sued in court by a venture capital company 
for our use of the word Leonardo it was, as pointed out by Pierre 
Levy, a semantic battlefield with far more than symbolic content. 
Words are the icebergs of ideological and commercial struggles whose 
outcome is unknown. Science and technology are not ethically or 
ideologically neutral, but rather unfold within the context of 
societal dreams and our access to resources. 

We suspect that the Internet will have even broader societal 
ramifications than the invention of printing , the cinema and other 
communication technologies. The dot.com hysteria has seen all the 
symptoms of a new culture unfolding. We are pleased to say that the 
Leonardo network of artists, scientists and engineers has been able 
to survive this temporarily chaotic situation.

Now that we are the proud owners of the use of the word Leonardo in 
U.S. Trademark Classes 9, 16 and 42, we will be putting the letter 
"R" in a circle after our use of the word Leonardo in our projects 
including the Leonardo journal, the Leonardo Music Journal, the 
Leonardo Book Series, the Leonardo Compact Disc Series, the Leonardo 
Electronic Almanac, Leonardo On Line, the Observatoire Leonardo des 
Arts et Technosciences, the Leonardo Space Arts Working Group, the 
Leonardo Virtual Africa Project and our other projects. As all proud 
trademark owners, we will defend our trademark against all those who 
would infringe it.

We do find this situation somewhat absurd since, as we stated above, 
our use of the word Leonardo was intended as a cultural meme and was 
used by a group of people asserting new ideas and artforms 
appropriate to our age. The idea was to spread that meme as widely as 
possible and indeed, the explosion of new art-making and institution-
building in this field testifies to the success and currency of this 
cultural meme. The last thing we want to do is impede the spread of 
the ideas expressed by those in the Leonardo network. To be honest, 
we hope to expand our activities beyond the ones that are covered by 
our trademark. There are  dozens of U.S. Trademark holders of the 
word Leonardo in the U.S. (including world-famous Leonardo macaroni); 
no, we do not plan to produce macaroni  nor to infringe any of the 
other trademark holders' rights.

Our new schizophrenia requires us to defend our trademark and, if 
necessary, sue the infringers, yet at the same time disseminate as 
widely as possible the word Leonardo and the ideas behind it. Perhaps 
there is a way to open source, or "copyleft," the word Leonardo as 
part of the common heritage of mankind while allowing us to protect 
our new trademark so that no new "Leonardo Inc." can sue us in the 
future. Our lawyers are skeptical; we are open to your suggestions. 

Special Announcement: Leonardo/ISAST in San Francisco has announced 
that it is searching for an Executive Director for the organization. 
A search committee is being put in place and a job announcement will 
be issued shortly. The position will begin in Spring 2002 and will be 
open to candidates interested in either half-time or full-time 
employment. If you are interested in this position send email to 
leo@mitpress.mit.edu.

=====================================================================
                           _______________
                          |               |
                          | FEATURED      |
                          | TEXTS         |
                          |_______________|

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

< Statements from the Burning Man Festival > 

[Following are statements by artists who have participated in the 
Burning Man Festival, an annual arts/cyberculture festival in the 
Black Rock Desert of Nevada. See LEA Vol. 9, Nos. 4 and 6 for 
additional statements; more statements will be forthcoming in future 
issues.]

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

Dr. MegaVolt and the Genie in the Bottle 
By Austin Richards 

Dr. MegaVolt is a performance act that has appeared at three Burning 
Man festivals (1998--2000). It features a person in a metal mesh suit 
interacting with artificially generated lighting. The Doctor sets 
objects on fire with electricity originating from large Tesla coils, 
spars with the electric arcs and exhorts the audience to worship the 
elemental force of electricity. 

Dr. MegaVolt has its roots in my Tesla coil experiments, which began 
at age 12, when I built a coil that threw a 4-ft arc and used it in a 
Halloween show at my parent's house. The next incarnation of the coil 
made a 12-ft arc, scaring the neighbors' kids while jamming the 
reception of my parents' TV during Knott's Landing. I stepped up to 
the 10-kilowatt class of coil in graduate school, taking advantage of 
a bottomless pit of scrap material and power electronics discarded by 
the Dept. of Energy laboratory behind UC Berkeley, combined with the 
serendipity of my doctoral thesis advisor's absence while on 
sabbatical in Italy. Suddenly, I had a machine that could produce 10-
ft arcs, leading to some notoriety with the UC police and the 
homeless who roamed the campus at night. 

In 1996, members of Survival Research Laboratories built a metal cage 
in which one could stand while the cage received arcs from the 
largest Tesla coil in North America (built by San Francisco Bay Area 
resident Greg Leyh). I survived the ordeal, although a wit wired up 
the cage with hidden pyrotechnics that ignited during the show. A 
year later, I shrank the cage down to a metal body suit made of a 
bird cage, heating duct and flexible dryer duct. Dr. MegaVolt was 
born. 

The doctor came to Burning Man in 1998 at the urging of my friend, 
Chris Campbell. He brought the coil to BM '98 and set it up; I went 
up a few days later to troubleshoot. We were to be plagued with 
technical difficulties that year, but the seed had been planted and 
we now knew enough to operate coils in a desert environment. That 
year, the coil was stationary, and only about 500 people saw it 
operate. The following year, Burning Man partially funded our 
operation. Dr. MegaVolt had become a team operation, led by myself, 
John Behrens and Gunthar Hartwig, designer of the website, 
www.drmegavolt.com. We installed the Tesla coil on the roof of a 
moving van covered in black carpet, while a generator towed behind 
the van provided power to the coil. Dr. MegaVolt toured the playa 
[Ed. Note: *playa* refers to the vast salt flats that are the setting 
for the BM festival], the van creeping along at idle while arcs shot 
off the coil. We ran four straight nights, and were probably seen by 
15,000 people in total. The show culminated in a performance by John 
Behrens right next to the burn of the Burning Man. Burning Man 2000, 
however, was our magnum opus---we increased the output of my coil by 
fifty percent and built a second coil to those specs. The two coils 
were mounted on a 24-ft moving van towing a 150-horsepower generator. 
We pulled off some great shows, in spite of terrible weather and 
coil-damaging wet dust. 

Dr. MegaVolt is very, very popular at Burning Man. We are treated 
like rock stars, complete with "groupies." It has been an opportunity 
to meet many interesting folks and experience their artistic visions 
and we have been praised as original performance artists, something I 
never would have imagined when I built my first big coil. The reason 
we do this show is simple: very few people ever get to see 
electricity at close range, and to see it in that way changes one's 
life forever. 

Electricity is a humble servant, imprisoned in the copper cable 
infrastructure of the modern world; but raise the voltage high 
enough, and the genie escapes from its bottle and into the air 
itself, which becomes momentarily conductive. We cannot match the 
power of natural lightning, but we can capture the essence of it---
the truly random patterns of electrical arcs in air, the noise, the 
ozone and the lethal energy held back by paper-thin stainless steel 
mesh originally intended for industrial debris filters. During a 
show, Dr. MegaVolt becomes a sorcerer conjuring up an elemental, a 
force that, unlike the element of fire, can be put back into the 
bottle with the release of a switch. Electricity, not love, is the 
"Fifth Element." 

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

The Golden Tower 
by Susan Robb, E-mail: <goatmax1@hotmail.com>.

It is 10 AM on Monday morning. The smell of hot sugar hugs me as I 
walk past the Hostess baked goods factory in Seattle. I notice the 
sun shining into one of the factory's windows; something is causing 
the sun to splash golden waves on an inside wall. I approach the 
window and see, stacked on a desk, a little pyramid of filled urine-
specimen jars. I am instantly touched by the fact that this liquid 
was once inside people who are now injecting cream filling into 
Twinkies and squirting chocolatey topping over naked Ding-Dongs. The 
careless way the jars are left in the window for the whole world to 
see, the body taken from being personal and private to being 
inspected-for-social-offenses makes me blush (just a little). Still, 
I am thrilled by the sunÕs accidental transformation of 
social/scientific scrutiny of the body into art. I want to see more; 
I want a whole tower of pee. 

Two months later, when I learn that the theme of Burning Man 2000 is 
Òthe body,Ó I am instantly interested. I have been cooking up an idea 
that started at the Hostess factory: the Golden Tower Project, an 
eight-foot tall, four-foot diameter tower of urine collected from 
artists all over the world. Metal posts hold up 16 columns of jars, 
which are supported by half plastic tubes. Lines of 
electroluminescent wire run down the back of each column, allowing 
the piece to be enjoyed at night. 

By mid-summer, I start collecting artistsÕ urine. I figure that 
artists, like the Hostess workers, are the oneÕs who put the "creme 
filling" into life, dragging naked existance through the yummy syrup. 
I e-mail art-making friends all over the world and, very slowly, the 
pee starts trickling in. With the help of Seattle artist Jeff Miller, 
I design and build the tower structure. Unfortunately, time runs out. 
With only 1/4 of the pee we need, my posse and I head to Nevada. 

Once in the desert, once the tower structure is set up, the playa 
works its magic: people heed their inner urge to participate, get a 
jar, go behind a car (or not), and hand back the specimen for 
labeling. The pee flows in; we have too much and have to turn away 
full bladders. Without the interactive element, the Golden Tower 
Project does not exist. The fact that I am asking for a donation of 
something very personal, a part of the body, the ignored distillation 
of what keeps us alive, seems to make people want to donate all the 
more. The tower becomes part of a performance art piece, where the 
donors are the artists performing for each other. 

As more and more jars are added people, come to see ÒfamousÓ pee by 
playa "celebrities" like Dr. Megavolt. They get their picture taken 
next to his jar, as one would next to Old Faithful or the Eiffel 
Tower. Like a war memorial, people scan the tower for specimens from 
donors they know. Like an x-ray held up to the light, there is much 
speculation as to the well-being of indivual donors, what the wide 
variety of color means and who is "pissing clear." 

The sun, moving and illuminating the tower from all sides, transforms 
the jars into sparkling, amber jewels. These subtle color variations 
turn the Golden Tower Project into a minimalist monument surrounded 
an equally beautiful, sparse desert. Even the night becomes a 
participant in hue. As it grows dark, the EL wire turns on. Now, the 
tower takes on a fluorescent glow and speaks eerily of "science." The 
edges of the jars and the lines of EL wire create an illusion of 
graph-like bands of light superimposed inside each jar, making them 
perfect for scrutiny. However, unlike the Hostess workers whose 
eliminations are taken and dissected by an authority searching for 
unauthorized activities, and unlike society, who claims what is waste 
and what has value, the participants of Burning Man, the desert, and 
the sun and moon reclaim the refuse and make it art. Biking by one 
night on my way to Spacelounge, I watch a group of people form a ring 
around the tower, hold hands, skip in a circle, and sing "we love 
pee." 

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

The Plastic Chapel
by Finley Fryer, E-mail: <finleyfryer@snowcrest.net>. 
WWW: <www.snowcrest.net/finleyfryer>.

The Plastic Chapel is an architectural sculpture constructed largely 
of recycled plastic. At the front is an open stage with a black 
background and fiber-optic lighting installation. The Chapel was 
created in 1998, in collaboration with a group of friends and 
artists, in Dunsmuir, CA. It is both a monumental and intimate 
creation, lit from within at night, glowing like a giant, domed 
stained-glass cube. Its multi-purpose usage fit perfectly into the 
wide spectrum of participation that is such an integral part of the 
Burning Man festival. 

The original impetus for the chapel stems from a period when I worked 
as an itinerant stained-glass repairman. In the process of restoring 
damaged windows, I kept ending up with broken fragments of glass. At 
night in my hotel room, I would piece them together, using silicone. 
The windows grew out of this process and, over the course of my 
career, the glass gave way to plastic as the sculptures got larger 
and larger. 

I created the 11 windows installed in the chapel over a 10-year 
period. Each window has its own title and story to tell. For me, the 
five larger, arched windows hinted at something to come, which was to 
someday build a structure to house these windows, a sort of wild 
roadside attraction. But it was a dream that remained in need of a 
physical location. In 1998, on a trip to the Channel Islands, off the 
U.K., I crossed paths with a creation that would resurrect and add 
new resolve to my getting on with this dream. On the Island of 
Guernsey, there is a small, miraculous creation called the Little 
Chapel, made by a monk. Made of shells, broken ceramics and years of 
hard work, it was all I needed to get me thinking a little bit more 
seriously about my own vision. 

When a local non-profit arts organization, Shasta Mountain Playhouse, 
contemplated the creation of a stage for Burning Man 1998, it was the 
perfect catalyst. The idea that it would have to be portable, 
however, was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it freed the 
Plastic Chapel from the confines of being a permanent piece of real 
estate, but it also created a whole slew of engineering and artistic 
hurdles to overcome. 

Although the Plastic Chapel is first and foremost a work of art, it 
is also a portable venue for performance artists of all types. At 
Burning Man, the stage was used for everything from musical 
performances to weddings, poetry slams to extemporaneous contests. 
Shows ran from dusk to late into the night. The Plastic Chapel was 
not burned, and has since been exhibited across the United States. 

  
=====================================================================
             _________________________________
            |                                 |                             
            |                                 |                             
            |    LEONARDO DIGITAL REVIEWS     |
            |            2001.08              |
            |_________________________________|

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

This month's LDR includes three longish reflections on important 
strands of the debates about representation (in each sense of the 
word), along with several other reviews (notably, from Robert Coburn 
and Mike Mosher). These can be read in context, along with our other 
work, at: <http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/ldr.html>.

Michael Punt
Editor in Chief
Leonardo Digital Reviews

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

The Languages of the New Media

By Lev Manovich. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2001, 354 pp, illus. ISBN: 
0-262-13374-1. 

Reviewed by Sean Cubitt. E-mail: <seanc@waikato.ac.nz>. 

First things first; let's get this out in the open: one *medium*, 
many *media*. TV is a medium, TV and radio are media. We might agree 
to differ on whether "multimedia" is a collective noun and therefore 
takes a singular verb. But if we are to mark an epochal shift in the 
media culture of the early twenty-first century, we might do worse 
than to observe a lucid, intelligent critic, creator and teacher 
writing in California, the very belly of the beast, in a book 
published by one of the most respected publishers in the media field, 
with a chapter heading enquiring "What is New Media?" Call me old-
fashioned - you may have to - but that chapter title would have been 
a grammatical error a matter of hours ago. Is there such a thing as 
convergence? I disbelieve in any such aesthetic entity, outwith the 
synergetic corporation, and misdoubt the value of pursuing it. That 
does not alter the fact: the language is changing. "Media" is 
becoming singular, not just out of ignorance, but because "new media" 
and "multimedia" are being perceived as whole, discrete objects other 
than their constituent parts. Multimedia is now, in this English 
language, a medium. 

For a brief moment, Lev Manovich turns his attention to the modernist 
pursuit of medium specificity, intellectually and in creative 
practice. This is the nub of the change signaled by the grammatical 
shift from plural to singular. Is there a medium of multimedia, 
digital media, new media, and is it or are they possessed of a 
singular collocation of specificities? There is good reason to ask. 
Too many curricula are overburdened with literary theory, film 
history, televisual narratology and art history, and all of us 
involved in teaching new media are hungry for texts we can signal to 
our students as specific to the emergent discipline, authentic in 
their methods and direct in their applications to studio and 
laboratory practice. This book joins a select group of texts that are 
both quintessentially of the cyberculture and at the same time lucid 
enough for a reasonably articulate undergraduate to read for fun and 
profit. It is, simply, the first textbook for the next generation of 
media-makers, with  enough schematic structure to please the note-
taker. 

Chapter one enumerates five distinctive qualities of new media - 
numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and 
transcoding. Readers of Leonardo will recognize the centrality of the 
concepts, but not the originality or the clarity of explanation that 
Manovich brings to them. Meticulously disentangling the old from the 
new, Manovich argues carefully for a distinctive newness, 
discounting, among others, the "myth of interactivity." Subsequent 
chapters address the interface, long a passion of Manovich's, in 
discussion papers launched on <nettime> and Rhizome, as well as the 
operations that interfaces make most possible and the question of 
illusion and the characteristic forms of digital media, especially 
the database and the navigable 3-D space. In each case, there is 
characteristic innovation in the analysis and a freshness to the 
style of thought that justifies the book's dedication to Norman 
Klein, Peter Lunenfeld and Vivian Sobchack, three charismatic figures 
of the new media's best thinking.  

Manovich is kind to his readers. He does not expect immense cultural 
reference, kindly explaining who Bertolt Brecht and AndrŽ Bazin were 
as gently as he holds our hands while explicating the nature of 
algorithms and their centrality to vector graphics. At the same time, 
he is unforgiving in his pursuit of a genuinely new critical 
paradigm, one that does not spend all its time glancing back over its 
shoulder to compare and contrast new and old media. There is none of 
the "Computers aren't books" paranoia or triumphalism of 
narratologists and neo-luddites; no cheery or glum farewells to 
family television. Instead, the book relentlessly pursues the 
distinctive qualities of digital media, archeologizing their 
emergence from older forms, but recognizing the moments at which 
butterflies emerge from chrysalises. The care for both accuracy and 
persuasion makes those distinctions sharp and historic.  

That this is, without question, a vital work of new thinking in a new 
culture, should not however deter us from the necessity for further 
thinking: I suspect the author would be disappointed if it did. I 
cannot feel comfortable with the notion that essentialism might creep 
back into the media culture, just at the moment at which it has been 
banished from the halls of the world's art institutions. There are no 
mistakes in the argument to cling to: Manovich, typically, never 
asserts that new media are essentially binary, clearly alert to the 
possibility of a mass computing medium that no longer restricts 
itself to zeros and ones. Nor is he dismissive of the old media - 
abstract painting's turn to philosophical issues is, he recognizes, a 
noble ambition as yet undiscovered in the field of digital design. 
And yet, there is this nagging doubt: is new media, are new media, 
unified by an intrinsic quality or field of qualities? Or is it 
perhaps their very modularity, variability, transcoding, that marks 
them out as a loose aggregation without a single defining presence?  

Enough said. Manovich has given us a book - the book - we had hoped 
for. We can disagree with it. We can and will find other examples, 
different to the wonderful range of games, net.art, installations and 
movies he works with. Cinema theorists and historians will enjoy the 
claims that all of this novelty is the flowering of a potentiality 
latent in film since its first steps, or before in the 
phantasmagorias and thaumatropes of the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries. The ravishing breadth of digital reference is one of the 
book's strengths, and there is more than enough here to suggest to 
any instructor that the ideas can be debated in evolving contexts. If 
MIT Press relent in the usual practice of holding significant new 
titles in hardcover only for a year or two at a stretch, the book 
will be in every library, and students everywhere will be clutching 
it like Mao's Red Book, Diamat of the Immaterialist generation. Best 
of all, after Languages of the New Media, we can argue on our own 
terrain. The term "languages" in the title should not mislead: 
Manovich clarifies in the introduction that language is not the 
paradigm, but a metaphor, and its plural form the consequence of the 
complexity of the subject. I will cling to my grammarian propriety 
and believe these media are plural, but I will be using this book for 
myself as well as my students, because it makes that question, like 
so many others, urgent and productive. 

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

Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature

By Eric J. Chaisson. Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 
2001. 274 pp., illus. ISBN: 0-674-00342-X, $27.95.

Reviewed by Robert Pepperell. E-mail: <pepperell@cwcom.net>.

One of the most puzzling aspects of physical law is the emergence of 
pockets of order in a universe that, according to the Second Law of 
Thermodynamics, should be gradually dissipating into formless noise 
(entropy). Even more puzzling is the fact that order (in the form of 
galaxies, planets, life and societies) not only emerges but seems to 
increase in complexity over time, certainly so if the evolution of 
life on Earth is any guide. Eric Chaisson is eminently qualified both 
to set out the terms of this paradox clearly and to offer some useful 
explanations without contravening the Second Law or appealing to new 
or non-science. 

The explanation, it turns out, is relatively straightforward, 
although the mathematical proof is expressed in a way that would be 
opaque to most non-specialists. Put simply (and I hope accurately), 
the early period of cosmic time saw a universe consisting of 
essentially formless radiation that was fairly evenly distributed 
everywhere. But as the universe expanded and cooled, it gave rise to 
gradient shifts, or imbalances, in energy levels between different 
points in space, and this caused energy to flow from one place to 
another. In particular, the exertion of the gravitational force 
became increasingly decisive and eventually allowed the condensation 
of radiation into clumps of matter (galaxies, stars and planets). 
Each such shift, or concentration of energy, while generating form, 
simultaneously discharged some "noise" into the surrounding universe, 
in accordance with the Second Law. Thus the universe gives rise to 
form as it expands but at the expense of an overall increase in 
entropy. 

This much seems compelling and contributes to Chaisson's overall 
thesis of cosmic evolution. Cosmic evolution is offered here as the 
"next big idea," following on from the cybernetic, catastrophe, chaos 
and complexity theories of recent decades. The book attempts (in an 
admittedly broad-brush manner) to synthesize a grand theory that 
unites cosmology with biology, or at least contemporary theory in 
these fields. The Darwinian (actually "Neo-Darwinian") model is 
scaled up to a cosmic level whereby processes of chance and 
determinism serve to account for the development of form, i.e. parts 
of the universe that are out of equilibrium with the rest. Much of 
"Cosmic Evolution" theory rests on the application of "open-system, 
non equilibrium thermodynamics," which amounts to the study of energy 
flow in complex systems. 

This is perhaps the most original, and for me the most exciting, 
emphasis in the book. Chaisson uses his considerable scientific 
muscle to construct a cosmic view based entirely on energy flow 
(thermodynamics). He offers the concept of "free energy rate density" 
as a quantifiable measure of the amount of energy flowing through a 
system in relation to its mass. The higher the rate of energy and the 
smaller the mass, the greater the free energy rate density and, for 
Chaisson, the greater the complexity of the system. What this means, 
in practical terms, is that although the sun turns over a huge amount 
of energy compared to a bird, in proportion to the sun's much larger 
mass the bird actually has a greater level of energy flow and, hence, 
a higher degree of complexity. Using this formula, the author charts 
an historical timeline - starting just after the Big Bang and ending 
today - of a universe traveling along a "time-arrow" in the direction 
of generally increasing complexity, in which islands of "order" 
emerge at the expense of an overall increase in entropy.

While I was able to follow much of the trajectory of Chaisson's 
argument, there were a couple of strands I seriously objected to. 
First, like other writers on the subject, the author globally 
conflates, on the one hand, the concepts of low-entropy, order, non-
equilibrium, predictability and complexity and, on the other hand, 
their apparent opposites of high-entropy, disorder, equilibrium, 
randomness and simplicity. There have been many attempts to reinforce 
these oppositions, to objectively calibrate the orderliness of 
systems, and rid such measurements of any trace of human 
subjectivity. Yet all such attempts are, in my view, ultimately 
thwarted by the fact that order and disorder are relative, 
qualitative values placed upon the world by human perception, not 
intrinsic, absolute states of things in the world. At best, they can 
be defined probabilistically or statistically. Basic chaos theory has 
shown us that order and disorder lie on a continuum and are dependent 
for their appearance on viewing resolution. 

Although Chaisson's adherence to an innate concept of order does not 
distract from his general thermodynamic argument he, like other 
scientific colleagues, is unable to let go of this fundamental 
assumption, especially at the outset of the book, where he describes 
a fairly standard model of thermodynamics. However, later on (p. 128) 
we are offered a more relativistic definition of order as "an absence 
of disorder" and even later (p. 133) he acknowledges the deficiencies 
of some of the most common methods used to define order - 
"information" and "negentropy." This sets the ground for the 
introduction of his own definition which, as we have described, uses 
energy through-put in relation to mass as an objective measure of 
complexity. While this approach yields some impressive and persuasive 
results, it also leads to the rather unconvincing conclusion that a 
Pentium II chip is more complex than the human brain (p. 202). 
Strangely, this is justified on the dubious grounds that the chip can 
do calculations faster than a brain, thus ignoring the magnitude of 
complexity variance between a linear digital processor and a hyper-
parallel organic structure. This, I believe, exposes the limits of 
this latest attempt to objectively quantify order and complexity, 
powerful though the energy flow argument is in general.

Secondly, Chaisson's repeated sideswipes at mysticism and vitalism 
(pages 34, 40, 108, 122,142, 217) are unnecessary . He seems to be 
unaware, for example, of the accord between his proposals and other 
widely held spiritual beliefs such as the "unity of the cosmos" (Tao) 
and the "eternal flow of energy" (Chi). For example, his 
thermodynamic analysis of the human head, revealing that the human 
brain emits a similar amount of infrared radiation to that of a small 
light-bulb, is highly suggestive of the traditional depiction in art 
of the halos of the Buddha, Christ and Saints. His dismissal of 
vitalism (which is an extremely dirty word amongst today's 
biologists) is equally misplaced since the essence of his theory of 
life as a complex flow of organized energy is entirely sympathetic to 
the notion of an Žlan vital. 

However, to be fair, one suspects that Chaisson is taking a somewhat 
defensive posture in anticipation of a backlash against his holism 
from some more reductionist colleagues. While the author is capable 
of explaining complex ideas with great clarity, the book's structure 
leads one to question who the target audience is. The reader who 
needs to be primed in the basics of the Second Law in the 
introduction is not the same reader who will be able to follow the 
pages of hieroglyphic formulae pertaining to cosmology in chapters 
one and two. Chaisson makes no apology for this, although one might 
suspect that, again, he is trying to head off criticism that his more 
speculative ideas may be taken as "unscientific" without a prior 
demonstration of appropriate mathematical rigor. 

As a production, the volume is well supported by a summary of symbols 
used, a glossary, a comprehensive and annotated further reading list 
and a great bibliography for anyone interested in this field. The 
omission of RenŽ Thom's Structural Stability and Morphogenesis from 
this, however, was a little odd. For all this though, here is a book 
of broad vision, often free of scientific dogma, which makes a 
compelling case for interdisciplinary understanding and holism. I 
hope that the emphasis on energy flow will help to free us from the 
current orthodoxy of "informationism" and "mechanism" and open the 
way for a much more expansive and subtle view of existence.

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

Visualizations: The Nature Book of Art and Science

By Martin Kemp. Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: Univ. of California 
Press, 2000. 202 pp., illus., $35.00. ISBN: 0-520-22352-7.

Reviewed by Wilfred Niels Arnold. E-mail: <warnold@kumc.edu>.

About 4 years ago, the editor of Nature, one of the world's best 
science periodicals, declared that the magazine would explore 
perceptions shared by scientists and artists in a weekly series of 
articles, under the heading "Science and image," with Martin Kemp as 
selector and essayist. In the winter of 1998, this feature assumed a 
monthly basis. It was a happy innovation, all told, and I have made a 
habit of looking for these pieces. Their attraction for me is based 
upon the power of the picture, the single-page format, the narrative 
and the alliterative title (e.g. "Vermeer's Vision," "Basically 
Brunelleschian," "Turner's Trinity"), in that order. Professor Kemp 
is very good at selecting appropriate and eye-catching images (both 
icons and rarities) and occasionally his analyses, albeit restricted 
to 500-600 words, include novel points of view. However, a major 
aspect to their success is surely the pleasant contrast between the 
feature and the remainder of the particular issue; others might even 
call it a pleasant relief from the normal fare. This does not detract 
one iota from the editorial concept nor the skills of the 
contributor. 

Now, we have the book that includes all these pieces, up to August 
1999. It is well-produced on quality paper and is, of course, ideal 
for the coffee table and for bedtime reading; rifling through the 
pages, one is again captivated by the images. Further inspection, 
however, raises questions about the overall value of the vehicle. 
What worked beautifully as a weekly or monthly delectation for 
scientists has now become a collection - what is the goal? Is it the 
chance for readers to catch the ones that were missed in the journal? 
Is there any advantage to having free-standing originals juxtaposed 
with supposedly like items? I found myself reading a few each night, 
and now the lack of depth of the pieces began to creep up and one 
starts wondering why Kemp cannot write a little extra about this and 
that instead of being bound to the original format. I must admit that 
my reservation is probably influenced by the precedent of a related 
but much less successful collection, "The Art of the Journal of the 
American Medical Association," wherein 100 covers (photographs of the 
actual cover pages) and accompanying essays (very derivative and not 
updated) were bound together. 

"Visualizations" has a selected bibliography, a fairly well organized 
index and a list of the original Nature articles, with corresponding 
volumes and page numbers, although one wonders if those with the book 
will need to go back to the journal. Such information might have been 
better placed in each chapter. A more serious concern is the lack of 
dimensions of the artworks. Such data are important both from 
scientific and artistic viewpoints. However, the wonderful pictures 
with many messages will capture the imaginations of readers, and 
those who labor at the interface of the hard sciences and the 
humanities will certainly welcome the appearance of this volume.

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

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

< Casado and Cano Win Leonardo Award for Excellence >
Leonardo/ISAST is pleased to announce that the 2001 Leonardo Award 
for Excellence has been presented to multimedia artist Jose Carlos 
Casado and co-author Harkaitz Cano for their innovative article 
"'Reality,' Artifical Reproduction and Sexuality," published in 
Leonardo Vol. 33, No 5 (2000). The article discusses Casado's work La 
Caja de Pandora (Pandora's Box), in which digital video, 3-D 
animations and interactivity merge in a series of installations. The 
work also searches for the boundaries where belief starts, and asks 
what makes us accept what we see. (The abstract of the article 
follows below.)

THE LEONARDO AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE 
The Leonardo Award for Excellence recognizes excellence in an article 
published in the journal Leonardo. Excellence is defined as 
originality, rigor of thought, clarity of expression and effective 
presentation. The Leonardo Award for Excellence was originally 
established by chemist and inventor Myron Coler and Leonardo 
publisher Robert Maxwell. Leonardo/ISAST has continued the tradition 
of presenting the award.

Past recipients of the award include Rudolf Arnheim, Otto Piene, 
Charles Ames, Frieda Stahl, Donna Cox, George Gessert, Janet Saad-
Cook, Alvin Curran, Karen O'Rourke and Hubert Duprat with Christian 
Besson.

For more information about the Leonardo Awards Program, contact 
Leonardo/ISAST, 425 Market Street, 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA 
94105, U.S.A. E-mail: <isast@sfsu.edu>. Web site: 
<http://mitpress.mit.edu/Leonardo>.

ABSTRACT
In this article, Multimedia artist Jose Carlos Casado, with the 
assistance of writer Harkaitz Cano, discusses his work in progress, 
La Caja de Pandora ("Pandora's Box"), in which digital video, 3D 
animations, and interactivity merge in a series of installations 
about "reality," artificial reproduction and sexuality. Casado's 
study searches for the boundaries where belief starts and asks what 
makes us accept what we see. It also investigates the new 
relationship between the mind and the body, and its relation to 
technologies. 

The full article can be found in Leonardo's Digital Salon special 
issue (Vol. 33, No. 5, 2000)

ARTISTS' BIOGRAPHY
Jose Carlos Casado was born in 1971 in M‡laga, Spain. He is a 
multimedia artist currently working in New York. He has done 
individual and group exhibitions in several cities in Spain, Italy, 
Finland, Britain and the U.S. His work has been awarded with several 
prizes, grants, and honorable mentions. The project La Caja de 
Pandora is funded by Fundaci—n la Caixa de Barcelona and Fundaci—n 
Picasso de M‡laga, Spain. Harkaitz Cano is a novelist and a 
scriptwriter for radio and television. He also writes for several 
newspapers. His latest books are Telefono Kaiolatua (Ed. Irun, 1997), 
a collection of short stories, and a novel, Pasaia Blues (Ed. 
Zarautz, 1999) 

Jose Carlos Casado and Harkaitz Cano, 677 Metropolitan Ave., #7D, 
Brooklyn, NY 11211 U.S.A. E-mail: <josecasado@usa.net> www: 
<http://www2.sva.edu/~carlosc> 

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

< Seventh International Conference on Virtual Systems and MultiMedia >

The International Society on Virtual Systems and MultiMedia and the 
Center for Design Visualization, University of California, Berkeley 
is pleased to announce the Seventh International Conference on 
Virtual Systems and MultiMedia in Berkeley, California, 25-27 October 
2001. This year's conference theme is "ENHANCED REALITIES: Augmented 
and Unplugged."

At the crossroads of rapidly evolving wireless technologies and rich 
3-D authoring tools, this conference explores the technologies and 
applications of enhanced environments, with a focus on the specific 
areas of: virtual heritage, immersive art and creative technology and 
virtual design (industrial, architectural and medical), plus a 
special session on emerging virtual entertainment directions.

More information can be found on the official conference website: 
<http://www.vsmm.org/vsmm2001>.

Further information is available in the WELCOME section of the VSMM 
website: <http://www.vsmm.org/vsmm2001/welcome.cfm>.

=====================================================================
             ______________________________
            |                              |
            |        CORRECTIONS           |
            |______________________________|

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

In LEA Vol. 9:7, July 2001, David Tomas's name was misspelled and the 
url of his website was incorrect: the correct url of David Tomas's 
site is http://www.cddc.vt.edu/encodedeye/. 

In LEA Vol. 9:7, July 2001, a talk by Stephen Jay Gould and Rosamond 
Purcell was listed as the keynote for the "ArtSci2001: Catalyst for 
Collaboration" November meeting. This talk was canceled. See 
http://www.asci.org for more details on the program.

=====================================================================
  ___________________
 |                   |
 |      LEA          |
 | WORLD WIDE WEB    |
 |     ACCESS        |
 |___________________|

The LEA Word Wide Web site contains the LEA archives, including all 
back issues, the LEA Gallery, the Profiles, Feature Articles, 
Publications, Opportunities and Announcements. It is accessible using 
the following URL: <http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/>
____________________________________________________________
   _________________
  |      LEA        |
  |  PUBLISHING &   |
  |  SUBSCRIPTION   |
  |  INFORMATION    |
  |_________________|

Editorial Address:
Leonardo
425 Market St, Second Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
USA
E-mail: <leo@mitpress.mit.edu>
_____________________________________________________________

Copyright (2001), Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts,
Sciences and Technology

All Rights Reserved.

Leonardo Electronic Almanac is published by:

The MIT Press Journals
Five Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA 02142 U.S.A.

Reposting of the content of this journal is prohibited without 
permission of Leonardo/ISAST, except for the posting of news and 
events listings which have been independently received. 
Leonardo/ISAST and the MIT Press give institutions permission to 
offer access to LEA within the organization through such resources as 
restricted local gopher and mosaic services. Open access to other 
individuals and organizations is not permitted.
_____________________________________________________________

<  Ordering Information  >

Leonardo Electronic Almanac is free to Leonardo/ISAST members and to 
subscribers to the journal Leonardo for the 2001 subscription year. 
The rate for Non-Leonardo individual subscribers is $35.00, and for 
Non-Leonardo institutional subscribers the rate is $75.00. All 
subscriptions are entered for the calendar year only.

Send orders to: <journals-orders@mit.edu>

Please include full mailing address or MIT Press account number, 
telephone and fax numbers, and e-mail address. Please send 
VISA/MasterCard information as well.
_____________________________________________________________
  ________________
 |                |
 |  ADVERTISING   |
 |________________|

Individuals and institutions interested in advertising in Leonardo 
Electronic Almanac, either in the distributed text version or on the 
World Wide Web site should contact  <journals-info@mit.edu> at MIT 
Press for details.
===================================================================
< End of Leonardo Electronic Almanac 9 (08) >
===================================================================