ABSTRACT Conceptual art presents an important challenge for neuroaesthetics. Such art helps to stimulate complex psychological events—beyond the perceptual responses usually studied by neuroscience. If science is to engage meaningfully with art, scientists need to address the conceptual content of our experience of many different kinds of art. As a test case, this essay suggests that neuroaesthetics should come to terms with works such as Marcel Duchamp's Bôite-en-valise (1935–1941), which is representative of many artworks and art exhibitions organized into composite parts or groups of works. The essay shows that, typically, art stimulates a network of conceptual relations rather than merely perceptions of the visible aspects of single artworks.

ABSTRACT Composer Morton Subotnick moved to New York in 1966 for a brief but productive stay, establishing a small but notable electronic music studio affiliated with New York University. It was built around an early Buchla system and became Subotnick's personal workspace and a creative home for a cluster of emerging young composers. Subotnick also provided artistic direction for a new multimedia discoteque, the Electric Circus, an outgrowth of ideas he formulated earlier at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. A Monday evening series at the Circus, Electric Ear, helped spawn a cluster of venues for new music and multimedia. While the NYU studio and Electric Ear represent examples of centers operating outside commercial forces, the Electric Circus was entrepreneurial in nature, which ultimately compromised its artistic values.

ABSTRACT Fractal art, one of the significant conjunctions of art, modern mathematics and computer technology, has been the author's primary art medium for the past five years. After presenting an introduction to the general properties of fractal art, the author explains certain visual aspects and processes of creating such art using examples from his own work.

ABSTRACT This paper aims to highlight the interplay of technology and cybernetics within conceptual art. Just as Lucy Lippard has illustrated the influence of information theory within 1960s conceptual art, this paper traces the technological discourses within conceptual art through to contemporary digital art—specifically, establishing a correlation between Katherine Hayles's mapping of first-, second- and third-wave cybernetic narratives and, respectively, 1960s–1970s conceptual art, 1970s–1990s video art and new media art. Technology is shown to have a major influence on conceptual art, but one often based on historical, social and cybernetic narratives. This paper echoes Krzystof Ziarek's call for a Heideggerian poiesis and Adorno/Blanchotnian “nonpower” within conceptual art and advocates Ziarek's notion of “powerfree” artistic practices within new media and transgenic art.

ABSTRACT Peter Selz engages Helen and Newton Harrison in discussion about their expansive career in ecological art. The artists reflect upon the influences of Renaissance artists and the Bauhaus on the development of their approach, and they chronicle their concern with survival at progressively larger scales. In their recent Force Majeure series, working at the ecosystemic level, they present poetic meditations on prospects for the security of all living things as land, food, fresh water and other species diminish.

ABSTRACT Yago Conde based his 1988 concept design for the Barcelona Olympic Village water fountain on John Cage's indeterminate graphic work Fontana Mix . In this paper, a critique of Conde's work serves as the departure point for an examination of Cagean notions of indeterminacy, an interrogation of the original musical context of Fontana Mix , and the presentation of a distinct methodology (employing NURBS modeling) for proto-architectural representation of Cage's graphic score Variations III .

ABSTRACT The authors created the Spiral of Life as a new, accessible symbol for the evolution of life. This novel visual interpretation of evolution challenges traditional tenets of the field in light of emerging new themes in research. The Spiral brings recent principles to the general public and also provides scientists with a new visual concept to support further discussion. The Spiral emerged from the combination of the analysis of the latest scientific research with an artistic process to create new images and icons. A resulting complementary series of artworks was installed in five cultural institutions and museums in Pittsburgh, PA.

ABSTRACT Interactive narratives are inextricable from the way that we understand our encounters with digital technology. This is based upon the way that these encounters are processually formed into a narrative of episodic events, arranged and re-arranged by various levels of agency. After describing past research conducted at the iCinema Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, this paper sets out a framework within which to build a relational theory of interactive narrative formation, outlining future research in the area.

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the possibility of developing an “art of science” in the literal sense of the words—that is, art illustrating scientific theories. In this perspective, scientific knowledge is used for itself, independent of the reality it is supposed to represent (even if this knowledge does not directly involve a pictorial dimension). Using a specific theory originating from financial economics, the author illustrates his analysis using two of his own collages.

ABSTRACT Fertilization narratives are powerful biological stories that can be used for social ends, and 20th-century artists have used fertilization-based imagery to convey political and social ideas. In Danae , Gustav Klimt used an esoteric stage of early human embryos to indicate successful fertilization and the inability of government repression to stifle creativity. In Man, Controller of the Universe , Diego Rivera painted a mural of a man controlling an ovulating ovary, depicting Trotsky's view that society will rationally regulate human fertilization. His former wife, Frida Kahlo, refuted this view in Moses: Nucleus of Creation , wherein she painted images of fertilization and embryo formation as the ultimate acts of erotic consummation and generation.

ABSTRACT In light of constantly exploding bandwidth and nearly limitless digital storage, FM radio may appear an anachronistic means of communication. However, many new media artists are using this most ephemeral, unindexable, “old” medium instead of or in addition to digital technologies. In this paper, artist Sarah Kanouse discusses three of her own projects that use radio transmission as a unique public material to create ephemeral monuments to difficult moments in American history. By using an analog and dissipating material, these pieces suggest that the struggle to remember is more meaningful than the total recall promised by the digital archive.

ABSTRACT A live coding movement has arisen from everyday use of interpreted programming environments, where the results of new code can be immediately established. Running algorithms can be modified as they progress. In the context of arts computing, live coding has become an intriguing movement in the field of real-time performance. It directly confronts the role of computer programmers in new media work by placing their actions, and the consequences of their actions, centrally within a work's setting. This article covers historical precedents, theoretical perspectives and recent practice. Although the contemporary exploration of live coding is associated with the rise of laptop music and visuals, there are many further links to uncover throughout rule-based art. A central issue is the role of a human being within computable structures; it is possible to find examples of live coding that do not require the use of a (digital) computer at all.

ABSTRACT This paper puts contemporary theories of embodiment and performance in the service of interactive arts criticism. Rather than focusing on vision, structure or signification, the author proposes that we explicitly examine bodies-in-relation, interaction as performance, and “being” as “being-with.” He presents four concrete areas of concentration for analyzing the category of interactive art. The author also examines how such work amplifies subjects and objects as always already implicated across one another.

ABSTRACT Nigerian educational policies continue to emphasize the development of science and technology. Arts are being relegated to the background as a result of this emphasis. This paradigm shift has affected visual arts education in Nigeria. The number of those seeking admission into science- and engineering-based courses has risen tenfold in spite of the limited infrastructural facilities available, while the number seeking admission to creative arts continues to dwindle yearly. Those who had been preparing for courses in engineering and science but could not secure admission are often absorbed into arts-based industrial design courses. Students in industrial design with science backgrounds are able to develop their creative potential, which is necessary in developing economies. This paper suggests that art training in Nigeria should embrace integrated science subjects.

ABSTRACT The authors, a social scientist and a visual artist, collaborated to produce building_space_with_words , an interactive multimedia installation. The project investigated the relationship between physical and virtual space and more specifically what happens when the physical properties of space become intangible and discourse becomes the main material. Drawing on studies of organizational space and of on-line communities, the authors created an environment that materialized virtual and physical interactions. This paper describes the elements—the maze, the sound, the tag wall, the tag journey and the blog—that created the installation and the concepts that inspired the work.

ABSTRACT The Electric Retina is an interactive sculpture built by the artist Jill Scott. This project is the result of her residency at the Institute of Zoology (Zurich) neurobiological laboratory and is an artistic interpretation of the lab's research on zebrafish vision. This trans-disciplinary collaboration has served to communicate scientific findings to the general public. Moreover, learning different styles and modes of communication required for interfacing with the general public and with the artist has been a worthwhile experience for the scientists involved.

ABSTRACT Collapse (suddenly falling down) was a dance/theater/media production that brought together a diverse group of artists and scientists to explore the varied ways that social and natural systems collapse and the responses of human societies. This paper focuses on the nature of the collaboration, the unique products it produced and the lessons learned. Three art-science collaboration themes emerged: (1) implementation of a large-scale stereo display for 3D data; (2) exploration from a visual design perspective of digital scans of natural hazard sites normally used for scientific research; and (3) integration of optical tracking for interaction between performers and visualizations. Each theme is explored in detail and each member of the team reflects on lessons learned from the process.

ABSTRACT Greg Lynn's Embryological House was an early work of digital architecture: a work in which the computer was a fundamental part of the design process. It was the subject of a case study in digital preservation by the Daniel Langlois Foundation's project for the Documentation and Conservation of Media Arts Heritage (DOCAM) and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). Research identified characteristics of digital architectural artifacts that are key to their long-term preservation. The results imply a shift in the focus of preservation from the artifact to its transformation in a digital context and a re-evaluation of preservation strategies and principles.

ABSTRACT The geometry of the conspicuous variations in the apparent contrast observed in Fall , a representative painting by Bridget Riley, is analyzed here with a computational model of human vision. Observed contrast patterns constitute a source of perceptual rivalry between compositional elements in the artwork, causing visual tension. The analysis further brings to attention previously unnoticed abstract order—a global structure that may visually anchor perception during active viewing of the artwork. The combination of the different compositional layers drives sophisticated visual effects, setting the painting apart from similar patterns that are often used as scientific experimental stimuli.

ABSTRACT What the author calls the “crystal interface” presents an opportunity to historicize and theorize the remarkable fascination with crystals found in contemporary art theory and practice. In aesthetics, science and art production, the crystal materializes intimations of transparency, of vitalistic transformation or of a purist stability. It powerfully articulates a line or gradation between the organic and inorganic. The author's goal is to create a context in which to understand the recourse to the crystal in contemporary art, specifically in the work of Roger Hiorns, David Altmejd and Gerard Caris. As a frame, the author examines Schopenhauer's, Worringer's and Deleuze and Guattari's adoption of the crystal as metaphor and material exemplar.