Search

In this article, the authors explore the sensuous and material dimensions of artworks inspired by biological science. They use Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “flesh” to reflect upon the embodied processes of understanding that unfold during a viewer’s initial encounter with an artwork. Using Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and the work of selected artists based in India who engage with biology and botany the authors locate the sensing body in a reciprocal relationship with these artists’ works.

The author addresses the place of visual representation in his body of work, focusing on the genesis of his interest in digital imaging and the relationship between digital imaging and photography. He also discusses the connection between photography and collage/montage, the extended imagination enabled by digital imaging, human-machine collaboration and the design of narrative structures, both of which are guided by the interplay between certainty and uncertainty. In addition, the author presents aspects of his creative and research processes, referring to some of his artworks and conceptual concerns. Using a retrospective and personal approach, the author’s analysis is unavoidably incomplete.

Liverpool LASER talks encourage artists, researchers and the public to question the work carried out by artists and scientists in transdisciplinary art-science spaces by recognizing shared aims, examining processes and constructing a shared language. In this paper, the authors reflect upon their first year as LASER hosts and propose that Liverpool LASER events—supported by an accessible network of leading artists and scientists—act as community “studio-laboratories,” spaces where speakers and publics engage in two-way conversations, present and gain confidence in their ideas, gather feedback on new concepts and outputs, and facilitate knowledge transfer.

Technology can translocate traditional art into interactive, immersive experiences. At the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the authors transformed Tibetan Buddhist mandalas into a 3D virtual reality mandala installation. Furthering this project, they externalized an analog of the meditative experience by recording electroencephalograms that dynamically modulated the visual scene. The use of neurofeedback allowed fluctuations in the alpha power to drive the intensity of the fog obscuring the mandala. This aimed to give a sense of clearing the fog with one’s mind in a meditation-like state. The collaboration demonstrated how technology intended for scientific use may be adapted to an artistic installation that enriches the visitor experience.

The authors present an automated, rule-based system for converting piano compositions into paintings. Using a color-note association scale presented by Edward Maryon in 1919, which correlates a 12-tone scale with 12 hues of the color circle, the authors present a simple approach for extracting colors associated with each note played in a piano composition. The authors also describe the color extraction and art generation process in detail, as well as the process for creating “moving art,” which imitates the progression of a musical piece in real time. They share and discuss artworks generated for four well-known piano compositions.

The authors present a system built to generate arrangements of threedimensional models for aesthetic evaluation, with the aim being to support an artist in their creative process. The authors explore how this system can automatically generate aesthetically pleasing content for use in the media and design industry, based on standards originally developed in master artworks. They then demonstrate the effectiveness of their process in the context of paintings using a collection of images inspired by the work of the artist Giorgio Morandi (Bologna, 1890–1964). Finally, they compare the results of their system with the results of a well-known Generative Adversarial Network (GAN).

The use of empty space (ES) is ubiquitous in Asian art. The authors use a computational method to quantitatively assess the amount of ES in Chinese landscape painting (CLP). The data show that 56.8% of ancient CLPs contain mostly ES, while only 9.4% from modern times do. ES reached its peak during the Yuan dynasty (1271–-1368) and its lowest point in the 1960s. Chan culture, literati ink play, the “exhibition hall effect,” and Maoist politics, as well as other social factors, may have had an impact on this shift. This empirical study indicates that art keeps abreast of current developments: The philosophy, culture, politics and general education of a specific era influence artists’ perception, aesthetics and creative output.

Although virtual reality (VR) is largely associated with a dependency on realist imagery award-winning visual effects professional Kevin Mack and oil painter Jane LaFarge Hamill use VR to produce abstract works. Abstract art and early abstract film reveal the importance of such experimentation to each medium’s latent potential and how early oddities, in due course, enter the mainstream. The author examines Mack and Hamill’s respective works to propose that experimenting with abstraction in virtual reality is crucial to its unfolding as a creative medium.

Recent developments in neurotechnology raise the possibility of directly reading out—or sending input into—perceptual awareness. Using Marshall McLuhan's statement “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium” as a starting point, the author explores the potential for neural decoding and brain-computer interfaces to support a medium of awareness. This article intends to open a set of questions that reconsider ongoing issues in phenomenology and the arts. If art addresses the human condition, then it is arguably essential for art to address our growing integration with external—and increasingly internal—technology.

Slow looking is an increasingly prevalent strategy for enhancing visitor engagement in the gallery, yet there is little research to show why looking at artworks for longer should be beneficial. The curator of a recent exhibition of Pierre Bonnard at the Tate Gallery in London encouraged viewers to look slowly in order to enrich their experience of Bonnard’s paintings. This article explores some of the reasons why Bonnard’s work, in particular, rewards the viewer who spends more time studying it. The authors draw on various scientific studies of the ways in which observers process color contrasts, spatial configuration and figure-ground segregation in artworks and in everyday vision. They propose that prolonged interactions with works of art can facilitate perceptual learning, and they suggest ways in which these effects could be empirically studied using psychological methods.

The author presents postdoctoral research on the concept of art exhibitions presented as virtual artist's books. The author's intent was to conduct theoretical research on emerging trends in art curation and virtual artists’ books, in addition to creating a digital art exhibition to be displayed in museums and other cultural venues. The research resulted in the creation of a hybrid augmented reality book titled Acropolis Remix, which can be exhibited in galleries, museums, libraries, gardens, private homes, etc.

Noor: A Brain Opera is the first fully interactive, immersive brainwave opera, in which a performer wearing a wireless EEG brainwave headset touches, gazes and walks around audience members in a 360° theater while a story is narrated. Her measured emotional states trigger videos, sound and a prerecorded libretto as her emotions are displayed as live time-colored bubbles. The opera rhetorically asks: “Is there a place in human consciousness where surveillance cannot go?” This article discusses the rationale and implementation of the brainwave opera.

Forming part of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Grand Challenge initiative, the Nature, Environment, Science & Technology (NEST) Studio for the Arts is a new endeavor that explores the interrelation, generative overlaps and productive differences between the sciences and the arts by means of exhibitions, student work, lectures, panels, courses and events. Operationally launched in the summer of 2018, NEST seeks efforts that engage with central questions regarding alternative and constructive ways of passing information and methodologies back and forth between the two worlds. Efforts such as these are key to advancing cross-disciplinary efforts in siloed campuses across the nation.

The authors’ project O-Tū-Kapua (what clouds see) explored concepts related to air quality by creating a mixed reality, art/science, educationally focused exhibition for children, mixing participatory art, scientific concepts and technology. The young are directly affected by the social and environmental impacts of the changing world climate, making their voices particularly important in determining ongoing dialogue about Earth's atmosphere. Through a nexus of the handmade, education, augmented technology, installation and aural soundscapes, O-Tū-Kapua engaged over 1,000 children. The project also combined real-time air quality and weather data, superimposing it as a virtual data layer on top of hand-drawn images of native flora and fauna. The magnitude of the data determined the visual and aural form of the virtual experience, creating environmentally responsive representations that enabled participants to readily see and interpret how the atmosphere was affecting the native forest in their neighborhood.

This article describes an investigation of interactive narrative in virtual reality (VR) through Samuel Beckett's theatrical text Play. Actors are captured in a green screen environment using free-viewpoint video (FVV). Built in a game engine, the scene is complete with binaural spatial audio and six degrees of freedom of movement. The project explores how ludic qualities in the original text elicit the conversational and interactive specificities of the digital medium. The work affirms potential for interactive narrative in VR, opens new experiences of the text and highlights the reorganization of the author-audience dynamic.

Faces of Merseyside is a gallery/online exhibition of digitally processed facial averages produced from Merseyside image collections by Face Lab, a research group at Liverpool School of Art & Design. The project seeks to foreground the question of cognitive bias in relation to facial images that claim to represent particular communities, in the context of a resurgence of interest in physiognomic judgments and discrimination. By revisiting Francis Galton's nineteenth-century composite portraiture, as informed by current craniofacial research, Faces of Merseyside explores the claims advanced in relation to the representation of human diversity and how they both inform and challenge social stereotyping.

This article proposes a new conception of art and presents a form of painting that exemplifies that concept. Considering the developments in twentieth- and 21st-century art, the author notes that art created after the conceptual period has failed so far to take account of the profound transformation that occurred within it in the twentieth century. This change consisted in the identification of art with reality, achieved by incorporating into art all significant spheres/objects of reality. One result has been the dominance of referential art following the conceptualist period. Referential artworks are split into object and reference. This impedes untrammeled creativity, which would otherwise promote the integration of diverse formal elements. This article proposes painting that exemplifies such artistic creation.

Industrial designer Bin Yu and visual artist Rogier Arents have collaborated on a project visualizing heart rate variability with the assistance of a pen plotter. The authors present artworks produced at the interface between biofeedback techniques and visual art. This biofeedback project created a new process of drawing and painting which is driven by the participants’ heart activity, which itself is influenced by their mental, physical and emotional states.

Heritage visualizations are works of the cultural imaginary and this paper examines the artwork Artistic License: VR Sydney Cove circa 1800, which foregrounds the interpretive nature of heritage visualization. It is a reimagining in VR of A View of Sydney Cove, New South Wales, 1804, a contemporaneous print of Sydney Cove. Existing in the liminal space between accuracy and authenticity it is both art object and heritage visualization. The dual nature of this work supports engagement with wider audiences, fostering and broadening debate at individual, institutional, academic and societal levels about the nature and role of heritage.

The authors explore the work of artists looking at the relationship between illness, identity, the brain and imagery produced by medical imaging technology. Digital images of the brain generated by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology represent a powerful unveiling, making visible that which was invisible until the creation of the CT scanner and, shortly after, the more refined MRI technology. At the intersection of fine art and clinical medical images, the authors discover a resistance and a reshaping of the experience of illness. In their focus on the brain, illness and identity, the authors feature specific works of artists impacted by diseases of the brain and spinal cord, specifically Laura Ferguson, Katherine Sherwood, Marilène Oliver, Kelly Haydon, Darian Goldin Stahl and Elizabeth Jameson.

Making visible the invisible in nature and culture has been the focus of the author's work since 1973. In the early 1970s, experimental approaches were being explored in art and photography. At that time, the author investigated imaging possibilities using a range of approaches, from making photographic images without a camera or enlarger to using light-sensitive emulsions, Xerox machines, and computer and X-ray technology available in the 1970s in order to explore the potential for light to make visible form in nature. Unexpectedly, this exploration also resulted in social content that was the outcome of the author's work, the exhibition Multicultural Focus. This period was the beginning of the artist's ongoing investigation into the transformative potential of light.

This article closely examines aspects of the Virtual Museum of Canada’s website A Journey into Time Immemorial to investigate the relationship between the poetics of new media and contemporary curatorial practices in Indigenous cultural heritage. In this interactive cyber museum, detailed reconstructions of a longhouse village, engaging motion graphics and video interviews with Elders are combined to represent the historical practices of Stó:l̄-Coast Salish peoples and their enduring significance today. The objective of this research is to reflect on how computational tools and spatial design were used to express temporal aspects of tangible and intangible heritage preservation and transmission.

This paper concerns the presentation of a set of possibilities of connecting mathematical concepts and performance art pieces. These possibilities have their origin in a personal practice in perfor...

Late in his life Rodin produced many thousand “instant drawings.” He asked models to make natural energetic movements, and he would draw them at high speed without looking at his hand or paper. To help understand his “blind drawing” process, the authors tracked the eye and hand movements of art students while they drew blind, copying complex lines presented to them as static images. The study found that line shape was correctly reproduced, but scaling could show major deficiencies not seen in Rodin's sketches. The authors propose that Rodin's direct vision-to-motor strategy, coupled with his high expertise, allowed him to accurately depict in one sweep the entire model, without “thoughts arresting the flow of sensations.”

In this paper, the author implements and uses a subset barycenter pattern to analyze various paintings. The suggested visualization and analysis tool is inspired by Gombrich’s theory of a painter’s window and Locher’s psychological research on computational balance. An image’s or an image group’s subset (set of cropped images) may reveal genre and artist characteristics. Moreover, it may also reveal forensic information about each artist’s individual style and its changes over time with barycenter dispersion patterns. The suggested barycenter pattern analysis can enrich the methods of art history and criticism.

CAVE is a shared narrative six degrees of freedom (6DoF) virtual reality experience. In 3.5 days, 1,927 people attended its premiere at SIGGRAPH 2018. Thirty participants at a time each saw and heard the same narrative from their own individual location in the room, as they would when attending live theater. CAVE set out to disruptively change how audiences collectively experience immersive art and entertainment. Inspired by the social gatherings of theater and cinema, CAVE resonated with viewers in powerful and meaningful ways. Its specific pairing of colocated audiences and physically shared immersive narrative suggests a possible future path for shared cinematic experiences.

During the second half of the 1960s, artist-filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek collaborated with Bell Labs researcher Kenneth Knowlton in the production of ten computer-animated movies. This article describes that collaboration and discusses certain movies that resulted. In this early example of collaboration between an artist and a computer technologist, VanDerBeek built on his experience to learn computer programming, and Knowlton extended his artistic sensitivities and programming languages—each learned from the other. The article concludes with a discussion of the term “computer artist” as used during those early days of computer art and animation. In the author’s opinion, VanDerBeek, by doing his own computer programming, became a computer artist, while Knowlton’s creativity in creating computer-animated sequences made him an artist.

To normalize ArtScience, examples need to be shared of its average practitioners within the sciences, in addition to its historical exemplars. Described here are two cases of arts practice informing scientific research as experienced by early-stage researchers in postdoctoral or PhD work. Each case involves different arts approaches and yields different effects on the science; both inform ideas for how to better support and institutionalize ArtScience work.

How can vibrant, contemporary art be produced that deals with vibrant, contemporary mathematics? To address this question, a collaboration began between an artist (Schuh) and a mathematician (Devadoss), revolving around recent problems in phylogenetics and the space of evolutionary trees. The result was twofold: First, a triptych of paintings was created, using acrylic, graphite, watercolor and metal leaf, that focused on different navigations within this tree space. Second, a novel set of open mathematics problems was discovered solely as a result of this investigation.

Captivated by the periodic table’s cultural power as one of the scientific icons, numerous contemporary visual artists transmute the table into a contemplation of its symbols and substance. This article employs a cross-disciplinary model of art criticism that focuses on the specific ways artists illuminate the periodic table’s cataloging innovation, memorable visuality, formal qualities and semiotic resonances.

Giorgio Scarpa (1938–2012) was an Italian designer, artist and teacher who worked in bionics, topology and rotational geometry. This article describes Scarpa’s bionic model of “Aristotle’s lantern”—the mouth of the sea urchin. The technical literature on Echinoidea lacks a detailed study of its remarkable mouth mechanism. Scarpa’s model is the only known analysis and physical analogue of the mechanism. It is a striking example of geometrical analysis and craftsmanship, bridging science and art. Built in the early 1970s and described in 1985 in Modelli di Bionica, his model has inspired designs for a biopsy harvester and for a mini-rover to collect soil samples on Mars.

The author’s father, Luciano Emmer, was an Italian filmmaker who made feature movies and documentaries on art from the 1930s through 2008, one year before his death. Although the author’s interest in films inspired him to write many books and articles on cinema, he knew he would be a mathematician from a young age. After graduating in 1970 and fortuitously working on minimal surfaces—soap bubbles—he had the idea of making a film. It was the start of a film series on art and mathematics, produced by his father and Italian state television. This article tells of the author’s professional life as a mathematician and a filmmaker.

To provide guidance to the vastly expanded, uncurated art world made available through the Internet, the author developed a methodology for objectively and repeatably rating artists. He then applied that methodology to Western painters in particular, creating a ranked list of the significance of nearly 10,000 of those painters. Analyzing the process, he observed that the Internet not only greatly broadens access to art but also provides the tools needed to curate that access in a meaningful, scientific manner. The analysis also exposes questions about both the methods used and more traditional art history sources, which can be explored through alternative methods.

More than ever, Moholy-Nagy’s influence circulates within contemporary art and visual media. In this essay, the author reconsiders his extended influence in regard to the complex scientific theories of space-time and molecular forces he invokes in Light-Space Modulator. To do so effectively and provocatively, the author brings on board a fictive resource: “Doctor Who.” Like the TARDIS, Moholy’s kinetic sculpture is conceptually a transdimensional apparatus that figuratively bores through time and space to connect past, present and future and resonates with today’s perception of space-time-light entanglement.

This article reports on a recent study that examines the effect of white space on perception of Chinese paintings. The authors investigate whether white space in Chinese paintings is not simply a blank background space but rather meaningful for aesthetic perception. Applying a computational saliency model to analyze the influence of white space on viewers’ visual information processing, the authors conducted an eye-tracking experiment. As a case study, they analyzed paintings by a well-known artist, Wu Guanzhong, and collected users’ subjective aesthetic ratings. Their results show that white space is not just a silent background: It is intentionally designed to convey certain information and has a significant effect on viewers’ aesthetic experience.

When the MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (iEAR) enrolled its first class in 1991, it was, as far as the author is aware, the first graduate program in the United States to focus on the electronic arts as a unified interdisciplinary field. This article recounts the process used to design an academic curriculum to help students develop the skills and the breadth of artistic vision needed to pursue careers as artists using electronic media. The article also describes the climate and culture of the iEAR Studios in the 1990s and argues that the values embodied in the studio culture played a large part in fostering the creative and experimental use of electronic media and developing artists whose work disregards traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Art critic Jerry Saltz is regarded as a pioneer of online art criticism by the mainstream press, yet the Internet has been used as a platform for art discussion for over 30 years. There have been studies of independent print-based arts publishing, online art production and electronic literature, but there have been no histories of online art criticism. In this article, the author provides an account of the first wave of online art criticism (1980–1995) to document this history and prepare the way for thorough evaluations of the changing form of art criticism after the Internet.

This paper discusses the process of recognition of early computer art not as iconic but as a purely intellectual or conceptual form as it took place during a debate on the pages of PAGE, initiated by Frieder Nake’s “Statement for PAGE” and his seminal text “There Should Be No Computer Art.”

This article presents the work of the retro-utopian Slovenian performance and theater collective Cosmokinetic Cabinet Noordung and its effort to abolish mimetic art in zero gravity (“postgravity art”). It describes the origin of a space station rotating around its own axis (designed in 1928 by Hermann Potočnik Noordung in The Problem of Space Travel); questions the relationship between zero gravity and the historical avant-garde (especially Suprematism) as postulated by theater director Dragan Živadinov; and sketches the past, present and future of the collective’s 50-year project Noordung 1995–2045.

This essay explores the relationship between pictures and the lighting conditions in which they were originally viewed. The theoretical interrelationship between brightness, illumination and depiction is explored in a case study of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper mural at the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. Advanced rendering software allows for the reconstruction of the refectory as it stood when Leonardo painted The Last Supper and demonstrates the complex interaction between light and space in the mural. This analysis illustrates how digital humanities might bridge traditional art-historical methods and forensic visualization.

Creativity is a highly variable and individual trait, but can it be measured? And if it can, what does that tell us? Both scientists and artists have worked on the question for years, but there has been no consensus on the answers, or even on what questions to ask. However, technological advances and a burgeoning interest from funding agencies suggest the field may be beginning to coalesce. An international conference held in Cancun, Mexico, addressed the intersection of the arts and neuroscience, how to promote creativity and innovation, and the need to find common ground.

Hiroshi Kawano was one of the earliest pioneers of the use of computers in the arts in Japan, and indeed the world, publishing his first ideas about aesthetics and computing in 1962 and computer-generated images in 1964. This paper provides an introductory overview to Kawano’s work and influences from his earliest studies in aesthetics and his interest in the work of Max Bense in the 1950s, to his change of approach in the 1970s through his developing interest in artificial intelligence, until his final exhibition, a retrospective of his work held at the ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in 2011. This paper utilizes previously unused sources including interviews conducted by the author with Kawano in 2009 and subsequent correspondence, as well as Kawano’s rich archive that was donated to ZKM in 2010.

Walk-in Theater is a portable virtual cinema for the display of spatially distributed multichannel movies (“walkies”). The miniature experience engages participants’ proprioceptors and spatial memory, allowing them to orient themselves as they navigate a field of scattered video streams and localized sounds reproduced on a handheld computing device. Departing from one-way linear cinema played on a single rectangular screen, this multichannel virtual environment pursues a cinematic paradigm that undoes habitual ways of framing things, employing architectural concepts in a polylinear-video polyphonic-sound construction to create a kind of experience that lets the world reveal itself and permits discovery on the part of beholders. Interaction design for Walk-in Theater supports approaches to cinematic construction that employ the ambulatory, multiple and simultaneous viewpoints that humans exercise in everyday life.