Böcker i Leonardo-serien

Shortlisted for the 2023 Lumen Prize, a hybrid digital artistic and literary project in the form of an augmented reality book, which retells Dante’s Inferno as if it were set in pandemic-ravaged New York City.Voidopolis is a digital performance about loss and memory presented as an augmented reality (AR) book with a limited lifespan. The book loosely retells the story of Dante’s Inferno as if it were the dystopic experience of wandering through New York City during the pandemic; instead of Virgil, however, the narrator is guided through this modern hellscape by a caustic hobo named Nikita.Voidopolis is meant to culminate in loss. It features images that are created by digitally “wiping” humans from stock photography and text that is generated without the letter “e”—in homage to Oulipo author Georges Perec’s A Void, a 300-page novel written entirely without the letter—by using a modified GPT-2 text generator. The book, adapted from a series of Instagram posts that were ultimately deleted, is likewise designed to disappear: its garbled pages can only be deciphered with an AR app, and they decay at the same rate over a period of one year, after which the decay process restarts and begins again. At the end of this decay cycle, only the printed book, with its unintelligible pages, remains. Each July 1, the date the project first started on Instagram, the book resets again, beginning anew the cycle of its own vanishing.A first-of-its-kind augmented reality book from a major university press, Voidopolis is a unique and deeply affecting artwork that speaks as much to our existential moment as it does to the fragility of experience, reality, and our connection to one another.

A generously illustrated examination of the boom in luxurious, resort-style scientific laboratories and how this affects scientists' work.The past decade has seen an extraordinary laboratory-building boom. This new crop of laboratories features spectacular architecture and resort-like amenities. The buildings sprawl luxuriously on verdant campuses or sit sleekly in expensive urban neighborhoods. Designed to attract venture capital, generous philanthropy, and star scientists, these laboratories are meant to create the ideal conditions for scientific discovery. Yet there is little empirical evidence that shows if they do. Laboratory Lifestyles examines this new species of scientific laboratory from architectural, economic, social, and scientific perspectives. Generously illustrated with photographs of laboratories and scientists at work in them, the book investigates how "lifestyle science” affects actual science. Are scientists working when they stretch in a yoga class, play volleyball in the company tournament, chat in an on-site café, or show off their facilities to visiting pharmaceutical executives?The book describes, among other things, the role of beanbag chairs in the construction of science at Xerox PARC; the Southern California vibe of the RAND Corporation (Malibu), General Atomic (La Jolla), and Hughes Research Laboratories (Malibu); and Biosphere 2's "bionauts” as both scientists and scientific subjects; and interstellar laboratories. Laboratory Lifestyles (the title is an allusion to Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's influential Laboratory Life) documents a shift in what constitutes scientific practice; these laboratories and their lifestyles are as experimental as the science they cultivate.ContributorsKathleen Brandt, Russell Hughes, Tim Ivison, Sandra Kaji-O'Grady, Stuart W. Leslie, Brian Lonsway, Sean O'Halloran, Simon Sadler, Chris L. Smith, Nicole Sully, Ksenia Tatarchenko, William Taylor, Julia Tcharfas, Albena Yaneva, Stelios Zavos

Why embodied approaches to cognition are better able to address the performative dimensions of art than the dualistic conceptions fundamental to theories of digital computing.

"France's most famous unknown artist," the innovative media provocateur Fred Forest, precursor of Eduardo Kac, Jodi, the Yes Men, RT Mark, and the Guerilla Girls.

First person accounts by pioneers in the field, classic essays, and new scholarship document the collaborative and creative practices of early social media.

Redefining curatorial practice for those working with new kinds of art.As curator Steve Dietz has observed, new media art is like contemporary art—but different. New media art involves interactivity, networks, and computation and is often about process rather than objects. New media artworks are difficult to classify according to the traditional art museum categories determined by medium, geography, and chronology and present the curator with novel challenges involving interpretation, exhibition, and dissemination. This book views these challenges as opportunities to rethink curatorial practice. It helps curators of new media art develop a set of flexible tools for working in this fast-moving field, and it offers useful lessons from curators and artists for those working in such other areas of art as distributive and participatory systems.The authors, both of whom have extensive experience as curators, offer numerous examples of artworks and exhibitions to illustrate how the roles of curators and audiences can be redefined in light of new media art's characteristics. Rethinking Curating offers curators a route through the hype around platforms and autonomous zones by following the lead of current artists' practice.

A critical mapping of the multiplicities of Finnish artist and technology pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi--composer of electronic music, experimental filmmaker, inventor, collector, futurologist.

The theory and practice of networked art and activism, including mail art, sound art, telematic art, fax art, Fluxus, and assemblings.

An argument that video is not merely an intermediate stage between analog and digital but a medium in its own right; traces the theoretical genealogy of video and examines the different concepts of video seen in works by Vito Acconci, Ulrike Rosenbach, Steina and Woody Vasulka, and others.

Tracing the connections-both visual and philosophical-between new media art and classical Islamic art.

How global biotechnology is redefining "life itself."

An exploration of artworks that use weather or atmosphere as the primary medium, creating new coalitions of collective engagement with the climate crisis.In a time of climate crisis, a growing number of artists use weather or atmosphere as an artistic medium, collaborating with scientists, local communities, and climate activists. Their work mediates scientific modes of knowing and experiential knowledge of weather, probing collective anxieties and raising urgent ecological questions, oscillating between the "big picture systems view” and a ground-based perspective. In this book, Janine Randerson explores a series of meteorological art projects from the 1960s to the present that draw on sources ranging from dynamic, technological, and physical systems to indigenous cosmology. Randerson finds a precursor to today's meteorological art in 1960s artworks that were weather-driven and infused with the new sciences of chaos and indeterminacy, and she examines work from this period by artists including Hans Haacke, Fujiko Nakaya, and Aotearoa-New Zealand kinetic sculptor Len Lye. She looks at live experiences of weather in art, in particular Fluxus performance and contemporary art that makes use of meteorological data streams and software. She describes the use of meteorological instruments, including remote satellite sensors, to create affective atmospheres; online projects and participatory performances that create a new form of "social meteorology”; works that respond directly to climate change, many from the Global South; artist-activists who engage with the earth's diminishing cryosphere; and a speculative art in the form of quasi-scientific experiments. Art's current eddies of activity around the weather, Randerson writes, perturb the scientific hold on facts and offer questions of value in their place.

An examination of telepresence technologies through the lens of contemporary artistic experiments, from early video art through current "drone vision" works.

Essays on computer art and its relation to more traditional art, by a pioneering practitioner and a philosopher of artificial intelligence.In From Fingers to Digits, a practicing artist and a philosopher examine computer art and how it has been both accepted and rejected by the mainstream art world. In a series of essays, Margaret Boden, a philosopher and expert in artificial intelligence, and Ernest Edmonds, a pioneering and internationally recognized computer artist, grapple with key questions about the aesthetics of computer art. Other modern technologies—photography and film—have been accepted by critics as ways of doing art. Does the use of computers compromise computer art's aesthetic credentials in ways that the use of cameras does not? Is writing a computer program equivalent to painting with a brush?Essays by Boden identify types of computer art, describe the study of creativity in AI, and explore links between computer art and traditional views in philosophical aesthetics. Essays by Edmonds offer a practitioner's perspective, considering, among other things, how the experience of creating computer art compares to that of traditional art making. Finally, the book presents interviews in which contemporary computer artists offer a wide range of comments on the issues raised in Boden's and Edmonds's essays.

How art makes visible what had been invisible—the effects of radiation, the lives of atomic bomb survivors, and the politics of the atomic age.The effects of radiation are invisible, but art can make it and its effects visible. Artwork created in response to the events of the nuclear era allow us to see them in a different way. In Invisible Colors, Gabrielle Decamous explores the atomic age from the perspective of the arts, investigating atomic-related art inspired by the work of Marie Curie, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the disaster at Fukushima, and other episodes in nuclear history.Decamous looks at the "Radium Literature” based on the work and life of Marie Curie; "A-Bomb literature” by Hibakusha (bomb survivor) artists from Nagasaki and Hiroshima; responses to the bombings by Western artists and writers; art from the irradiated landscapes of the Cold War—nuclear test sites and uranium mines, mainly in the Pacific and some African nations; and nuclear accidents in Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island. She finds that the artistic voices of the East are often drowned out by those of the West. Hibakusha art and Japanese photographs of the bombing are little known in the West and were censored; poetry from the Marshall Islands and Moruroa is also largely unknown; Western theatrical and cinematic works focus on heroic scientists, military men, and the atomic mushroom cloud rather than the aftermath of the bombings.Emphasizing art by artists who were present at these nuclear events—the "global Hibakusha”—rather than those reacting at a distance, Decamous puts Eastern and Western art in dialogue, analyzing the aesthetics and the ethics of nuclear representation.