ABSTRACT A series of five large-scale multimedia environments constructed for both live performance and interactive installation, echo::system is a response to our current global environmental crisis. Each echo::system “actionstation” creates an alternative environment to promote both aesthetic and physical reflection on how and where we live. This article pairs a theoretical introduction to the foundations and high-level concepts of echo::system with a concrete description of actionstation.2— the desert . The goal is to examine intersections of art, environmental sciences and technology; information and place; performance; and public engagement through the practical realization of the work.

ABSTRACT The author provides a personal description of how he became an artist and the role of science within his work of the past 25 years. He describes several artworks and their relationship to the science that informs them, addresses how he uses different media toward different ends and traces changes in his representation of certain physical concepts over time, drawing attention to how and why it happened. The emphasis is on his aesthetic development rather than on the conceptual framework for the artwork, which has been covered in previous articles.

ABSTRACT The authors discuss the development of self-organizing artworks. Context Machines are a family of site-specific, conceptual and generative artworks that capture photographic images from their environment in the construction of creative compositions. Resurfacing produces interactive temporal landscapes from images captured over time. Memory Association Machine's free-associative process, modeled after Gabora's theory of creativity, traverses a self-organized map of images collected from the environment. In the Dreaming Machine installations, these free associations are framed as dreams. The self-organizing map is applied to thousands of images in Self-Organized Landscapes —high-resolution collages intended for print reproduction. Context Machines invite us to reconsider what is essentially human and to look at ourselves, and our world, anew.

ABSTRACT The CO 2 morrow art project seeks to join the forces of scientific and artistic enquiry to aid our understanding of the climate debate and how humans are affecting the atmosphere through pollution. The authors consider the combining of art with science an essential means to help science find a voice for its concerns and discoveries and for art to have more of an impact on our society and the world at large. The project has involved the fabrication of a large-scale sculpture—placed at two U.K. sites—that highlights the correspondence between carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions and damage to historic buildings through erosion and adverse weather conditions. CO 2 morrow has laid the groundwork for a new initiative involving global data visualization and awareness of the climate crisis on a worldwide scale.

ABSTRACT Digital fabrication, and especially 3D printing, is an emerging field that is opening up new possibilities for craft, art and design. The process, however, has important limitations; in particular, digitally designed artifacts are intrinsically reproducible. In stark contrast, traditional craft artifacts are individually produced by hand. The authors combine digital fabrication and craft in their work involving object destruction and restoration: an intentionally broken crafted artifact and a 3D printed restoration. The motivation is not to restore the original work but to transform it into a new object in which both the destructive event and the restoration are visible and the re-assembled object functions as a memorial.

ABSTRACT The author began making films and installations in the early 1970s. Although he has worked across a range of media, he has always concentrated on one particular theme that he conceptualizes as a two-sided question: How do we see ourselves in relation to the natural world, and how should we position our selves and our technologies within it? This essay traces some of the threads of these seminal ideas through a selection of works made in the years between 1974 and 2009. The author concludes with a detailed description of Tree Studies , a large-scale new media installation powered by real-time data from weather stations around the planet.

ABSTRACT The shifting rainbow hues of iridescence have, until recently, remained exclusive to nature. Now, the latest advances in nanotechnology enable the introduction of novel, bio-inspired color-shifting flakes into painting—thereby affording artists potential access to the full spectacle of iridescence. Unfortunately, existing rules of easel painting do not apply to the new medium; but, as nature inspired the technology, an exploration of natural phenomena can best inform how to overcome this hurdle. Thus, by adopting a biomimetic approach, this paper outlines the optical principles underlying iridescence and provides technical ground rules for its incorporation into painting.

ABSTRACT While tactile models have been used to describe molecular structures for over a century, the sculpting of structural models is a recent phenomenon. Following X-ray coordinate selection, the author uses modeling software and a computer numerically controlled (CNC) milling machine to create precisely scaled, tactile molecular sculptures. The challenge is to inspire the general public to appreciate the aesthetic aspects of molecular architecture and to reveal the magnificence of nature on the molecular scale.

ABSTRACT This paper presents artwork that was inspired by a computational model called Swarm Grammars. In this work, the “liveliness” of swarms is combined with the generative capabilities of more established developmental representations. Three of the authors followed their individual artistic approaches to explore the creativity and dynamics of Swarm Grammar structures. One chose to breed structures interactively to compose virtual spaces. The second explores the movement and construction dynamics of interactive swarms. The third artist translated developmental processes of Swarm Grammars into interactions of paint particles driven by friction and gravity.

ABSTRACT This article presents two interactive artworks that represent a shift in artistic practice in their approach to active spectatorship. This approach to interaction incorporates the cognitive processes of the participant through an aesthetic interconnection between technological effect and affective human response. The discussion of the artworks seeks to demonstrate how this aesthetic interconnection creates a novel approach to an engagement with interaction, while suggesting a new forum for addressing the philosophical problem of the relationship between body and mind. This aesthetic interconnection between technology and human cognition, which will be referred to as affective aesthetics, is stimulated by introducing a novel application of emerging technologies that dynamically effect and evaluate the participant's affective responses through cognitive feedback loops within interactive artworks.

ABSTRACT The author, a sculptor with a background in physics, describes sculptures he creates inspired by quantum physics. He argues that art such as the presented sculptures can indicate aspects of reality that science cannot and therefore has the potential to help liberate us from the deep impact the paradigm of classical physics continues to have on our every perception of reality.

ABSTRACT The term “auditory tactics” refers to the contextual listening attitudes and competencies adapted to various private and public auditory contexts, spheres and aural architectures. Auditory Tactics , created for the Pure-Data Convention 2007 in Montréal, is a spatial sound installation designed to interfere and play with the auditory tactics of passersby in a public space by projecting sounds from more private spheres. The novelty of the authors' work is the use of beamforming: a sound projection technology that allows the creation of directional sonic beams resulting in sonic illumination and shadow zones that dynamically interact with architectural surfaces. The authors report the results and lessons of this first artistic experiment with sound beams as a creative sound-projection method.

ABSTRACT The authors, an astronomer and an artist, have collaborated on a series of seven mixed-media constructions and prose pieces that follow the flow and themes of Impey's book on astrobiology, The Living Cosmos . The book summarizes recent research on astrobiology, from the origin of life on Earth and its environmental range on this planet to the search for life in the solar system and beyond. The artist's work encapsulates these ideas with its use of material objects, textures, images and metaphors that mirror the elements of the scientific approach to astrobiology.

ABSTRACT The author discusses his attempts to exploit computer-aided design and manufacture to extend Donald Judd's sculptural concept of Specific Objects. The paper focuses on the challenges of creating singular forms exhibiting both unity and variation through rapid prototyping. Consideration is also given to the broader consequences of sculpting through virtual CAD software, including outcomes such as kinetic inflatable sculptures and animated sculptures and drawings.

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the hypothetical relationship of photography and so-called pheromone maps created by an artificial life system that simulates an ant colony and causes its activity to evolve based on the contours of images. Pheromone—used by ants to communicate via the environment—is also simulated, and from the communication and interaction of the swarm with the environment (an image) there results a kind of drawing made with the simulated pheromone. Since ants are able to detect the edges of the image, the outcome is a sketch that resembles the original image, as with old camera obscura drawings. This text explores the observable traits shared by the photographic process and the swarm's pheromone maps. The theme is discussed in the context of the emergent artificial art research field; recent theoretical advances that link swarm intelligence and cognitive sciences are also addressed.

ABSTRACT Despite the rationalist approach to science over the past four centuries, some physicists hold that new ideas mirror metaphysical perspectives of the natural world. The implications of these recent scientific theories present significant and complex interpretative problems for researchers who adopt a more traditional or rationalist philosophical position. Through her artwork, the author provides a conduit for a visual interpretation of the former, more holistic approach. She uses innately recognized symbols that appeal to humanity's natural and spiritual understandings of the environment and the cosmos. This cross-disciplinary artwork parallels contemporary scientific insights into our natural environment and the physical world that characterize, for example, Bohm's conception of implicate order.

ABSTRACT This article details artist Phillip Warnell's use of the body as an elusive object of research, considering a range of artworks realized within an exploratory framework. It examines how, through an interrogative consideration of the body as both place and subject, hidden biological, chemical and psychological transformations are revealed. The artist uses various strategies of mediation to inform this process, including live, recorded and research-driven forms of performance, and the exploration of mutuality, contestation and exchange between the singular and social body, culminating in the exposure of intimate distances. Through metonym and material, the viewer's attention is directed towards conceptual, visual and historical links between the celestial, organic and cellular corpus.

ABSTRACT What is the role of the artist in re-creating a cultural landscape where the psychology and identity are shaped by multiple narratives of wars? The author's art practice attempts to demonstrate the role of digital media in providing a platform for visual representation of multiple narratives.

ABSTRACT I moved to Washington, DC, at the turn of the millennium. Shortly after September 11th, I found myself with a job to do, an artist in the center of power during times of crisis. I held a desire to engage, not as a passive observer, but with an active role—the artist's role, one who sees, listens, analyzes, translates and illuminates the dangerous mechanisms of the unfolding political situation in America. This resulted in the founding of the US Department of Art Technology. The following narrative account is a portrait of the artist as mediator “between a strange, hostile world and the human spirit.”

ABSTRACT Space satellites are invisible instruments of globalization that influence governmental policies. This paper examines remote sensing satellites as optical devices capable of redefining human cognition. They represent accessibility and openness through the more agreeable paradigm of transparency. However, transparency, like surveillance, is based on the interconnection between power, knowledge and perceptual experience. Artists use a variety of tactical practices, including amateurism, to tease apart these connections. Amateurism dedicates itself to the politics of knowledge. The author concludes, based on examples of her work and that of others, that the potential for political intervention exists when knowledge is paired with action.