A theory of Cybernetic-Existentialism is proposed to offer a new critical perspective on technological performance art. Case studies of Wafaa Bilal, Stelarc and Steve Mann are used to demonstrate how core ideas and themes from both cybernetics and existentialism are increasingly converging in contemporary arts.

This study uses computer vision models, which to some extent simulate the initial stages of human visual perception, to help categorize data in large sets of images of artworks by the artist Antoni Tàpies. The images have been analyzed on the basis of their compositional, chromatic and organizational characteristics, without textual notes, so that the analogies found may take us closer to, and help us to understand, the creator’s original values. The system as programmed can assist the specialist by establishing analogies between different artists or periods using the same criteria.

The authors explore the role that public and land-grant universities play in sciences, engineering, arts and design (SEAD). They combine a networked institutional history of art and technology collaborations with an ethnographic study of SEAD initiatives. They use the notion of land-grant hybrids to describe widespread entanglements between research, teaching and public engagement. Their study identifies three “matters of concern” that aid in rethinking the origins, current practices and possible futures of SEAD: disparities in sponsored collaboration, the need for hybrid practitioners to demonstrate measurable impact and the ambiguities of what counts as appropriate art and reputable research.

Current technologies available to artists are of unprecedented complexity and variety compared with conventional techniques. They have enabled creators, in particular those in the performing arts, to familiarize themselves with robots, avatars, virtual characters and other “intelligent agents.” As diverse as they are, these technologies use computer models inspired from life and intelligence.

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.

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.

This article explores hybrid curatorial practices that have developed around digital “socio-techno-cultural” practices such as machinima. Machinima is a creative cultural movement that has evolved considerably since its emergence in 1996. The article highlights interrelated themes of curatorial practice: coevolving sense-making and social consumption; creative cognition and exploratory visualization; technologies as cultural intermediaries; social products, materialized expression and collective memory; capturing contexts through cocuration; and sustainability and stability of cultural capital. The article concludes that curation is a process of continually evolving interpretation of the artifact, representing shifts in the technology landscape, network of community members and audience interactions.

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.

Apparently, the use of two picture planes to draw a single view has not been attempted before. Most perspective methods, after Alberti, take for granted the use of a single picture plane, disregarding its likely use in dual positions. What if two picture planes are necessary to draw a single view—for example, given a lack of spatial references at ground level to estimate the distance between two objects? This article demonstrates that to draw the interior of a building from which another building can be seen about 190 m away, where the projection of such building on the first picture plane would be imprecise, it may be wise to use a second picture plane. This leads to consideration of how objects change shape as they move away from the viewer. For example, if a cube recedes from the observer up to 100 times its side length, it takes on an axonometric view. This raises a question: Could axonometric projection be a particular case of perspective?

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.

This article examines the history of art inspired by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in the twentieth and 21st centuries. The article argues that artists can show us radically different narratives about this space than those that are told by the mainstream media, by scientists and by CERN’s own public relations structure.

The author proposes a theoretical framework for better understanding the scope of expression of interactive computer simulations. As programmed processes, simulations embody the logic of systems as conceived by systems theory. Here, this basis is seen as a kind of pre-forming perspectivation on a general level, leading to certain characteristics of simulated dynamics (differing from other modes of conceptualizing processes). It is crucial for epistemological questions as well as simulation practices to recognize the specificity of the kind of processes producible by simulations and to be conscious that there is no “natural” relationship between the simulation dynamics and their iconization.

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 .

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.

To work flexibly with the sound design for The Locust Wrath , a multimedia dance performance on the topic of climate change, the author developed software for interactive sonification of climate data. An open-ended approach to parameter mapping allowed tweaking and improvisation during rehearsals, resulting in a large range of musical expression. The sonifications represented weather systems pushing through Southeast Asia in complex patterns. The climate was rendered as a piece of electroacoustic music, whose compositional form—gesture, timbre, intensity, harmony, spatiality—was determined by the data. The article discusses aspects of aesthetic sonification, reports the process of developing the present work and contextualizes the design decisions within theories of cross-modal perception and listening modes.

This article discusses art’s potential in outer space through a dialogue between European and Russian avant-garde traditions, and the postgravity art project by Dragan Živadinov, Dunja Zupančič and Miha Turšič. They enact a 50-year theater performance, Noordung:: 1995–2045 , with the help of high tech, Suprematism and Constructivism. The performance is based on five replays every 10 years with the same actors and on technological substitutes of the deceased. The project has several topical theoretical implications. The author explores its key philosophical aspects and presents new potentialities for a systemic cognitive model for image and space conceptual transformations within the context of contemporary art and aesthetics.

This article discusses the conceptual implications of the introduction of video mapping to building facades, the role of the facade as an architectural mediator between interior and exterior spaces and the ways in which video mapping transforms this role. At one time transparent (in modern architecture) and then opaque (in postmodern architecture), the architectural facade has traditionally maintained its integrity as a mediator between public and private spheres. Video mapping proposes to transform this situation by creating an everchanging image for the facade, as well as by exploiting the facade’s ability to absorb any projection on its surface. The outcome is a video-mapped facade, composed of both a physical surface and the video’s virtual images; together, these two elements create a new type of architectural facade.

The author utilizes the mode space of certain transforms for digital image data to change and combine images in ways that cannot be visualized directly by an artist. The author’s methods include a novel use of nonmatched transform pairs in forward and backward processing. The results retain some broad predictability of effect, while the outcomes of using a particular method vary by image. This demonstrates that an artist can guide the choice of techniques used while obtaining unexpected results that suggest variations in the creative process. Results of this research illustrate some of the systematic and individual effects obtainable in several dimensions using such techniques.

In his Death and Disaster series, Andy Warhol repeated gruesome images of suicides and car crashes. The artist’s use of repetition has been discussed extensively but not in terms of its direct impact on the viewer’s perceptual and cognitive processing. This article considers the viewer’s affective experience resulting from repeated exposure to negative images in artworks from the Death and Disaster series. The authors put forward an account of the potential affective experience of Warholian repetition based on existing experimental findings and by way of the artist’s own remarks on the relationship between repetition and affect.

The author discusses Biopoiesis , a cybernetic art project that explores the relationships between structure, matter and self-organization. Based on the work of cyberneticist Gordon Pask, the project features the construction of simple computational devices that harness an electrochemical reaction. The design and construction of the system is discussed, as well as its conceptual underpinnings and historical context. The relevance of Pask’s electrochemical works to artmaking is also explored.