The idea of sculpture with no visible contact with the earth, hovering in space without the usual vertical and horizontal orientation, arose in contemporary art practice during the postwar decades, amid the Cold War race for space. In Milan, Paris, Düsseldorf and New York, an array of floating art projects were attempted both inside—and outside—the art gallery. These artistic experiments offered a counterpoint to the first satellites and manned spacecraft, using simple technologies including magnets and balloons to address complex aesthetic issues raised by the outer-space environment and, in particular, the zero-gravity field. By the late 1960s, free-floating “aerial” and “pneumatic” art had become an international trend, reflecting a new conception of art’s meaning during a time of cultural and technological change.

YLEM: Artists Using Science and Technology, a nonprofit group in the San Francisco Bay Area, was active from 1981 to 2009, publishing the YLEM Newsletter (later, the YLEM Journal ). In the 1990s, it published the Directory of Artists Using Science and Technology , illustrated with members’ work, and established its website, www.ylem.org . YLEM’s public Forums introduced artists to science, scientists to art and the general public to new artistic and technological expression. It organized field trips to laboratories, industrial sites and artists’ studios and mounted exhibitions of members’ work. Members’ friendships mutually encouraged their work in this new arena.

ABSTRACT In celebration of its 50th anniversary, Leonardo invited authors who have been associated with the publication throughout its history to share their memories. This account describes some essays published in the journal by author David Carrier, with reference to his intellectual career. Because these publications are readily accessible to Leonardo ’s readers, the author does not describe them in detail—nor does he cite all of his contributions. His aim is to sketch, in this personal reflection, one small part of the story of this now long-lived publication.

ABSTRACT This article is a history of the digital computer art and animation developed and created at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated, 1962–1968. Still and animated images in two dimensions and in stereographic pairs were created and used in investigations of aesthetic preferences, in film titles, in choreography, and in experimental artistic movies. Interactive digital computer music software was extended to the visual domain, including a real-time interactive system. Some of the artworks generated were exhibited publicly in various art venues. This article emphasizes work in digital programming. This pioneering work at Bell Labs was a significant contribution to digital art.

ABSTRACT Leonardo da Vinci committed mistakes in geometry, analytical mechanics and arithmetic. The publication of his work was not always done carefully. These revelations have opened up the mystery surrounding the genius artist-scientist’s alleged errors. In this paper, the author explores these errors and their possible sources and potential implications.

ABSTRACT This article examines three computer animations created by the pioneering filmmaker Lillian F. Schwartz circa 1970 that are currently viewable in 3D chromostereoscopy, specifically with ChromaDepth ® 3D glasses. Reimaging these works 40 years after their creation permits a renewed formalist experience and a thematic analysis that reveals the primacy of Schwartz’s concern with depth and visual perception as part of her poetic sensibility. Excerpted interviews between the author and Lillian Schwartz are provided as an online appendix to this paper.

ABSTRACT Considering the aestheticization of post-World War II research in cybernetics as part of a cultural shift in art practices and human and machine subjectivities, the author brings these spheres together by analyzing encounters between the experimental artists and researchers who wrote for and edited Radical Software in the early 1970s, including Harry A. Wilmer, Gregory Bateson and Paul Ryan. She then connects their experimental uses of video feedback (a central tenet of cybernetics) to new and increasingly pervasive human-machine subjectivities.

ABSTRACT In the years after 1870, two theories of color vision vied for primacy: the “trichromatic” theory and a four-color theory, also known as an “opponent” theory of color vision. Among scientists who participated in this debate, mathematician Christine Ladd-Franklin (1847–1930) made special use of graphics as a rhetorical template for reasoning and explanation. Her later work included figures modeled upon novel graphic representations of logical relationships to describe chemical reactions fundamental to visual processes. These and other illustrations demonstrate, in retrospect, how innovation in graphic notation can underlie shifts in the practice and perception of science.

ABSTRACT This paper compares Jack Burnham's “systems esthetics” and Stanley Cavell's “automatisms,” linking them by way of organizational and systems theories of the mid-20th century and the rise of the post-medium condition in art. Although rarely paired, curator and critic Burnham and philosopher Cavell offer similar ontologies of art in the post--World War II period. Their ideas freed artists from old constraints of formalism and medium specificity while foreshadowing the rise of an artistic atomization driven by technology and economics. If Burnham's concept of systems aesthetics is concerned with a sense of cybernetic connectivity based on a feedback loop between the artist, artwork, art community and monetizing power of the market, then Cavell's automatisms describe a condition of laissez-faire independence in which each artist must work entrepreneurially, wholly for and unto herself.

ABSTRACT This paper selectively traces the art history of the gesture in drawing and painting with electronic painting systems/programs. Beginning with Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad (1963), which mechanized the hand gesture via light pen; Richard Shoup's SuperPaint system (1973), with the Summagraphics tablet and stylus; the Quantel Paintbox (1983); and the Macintosh (1984), the author concludes with a review of contemporary finger painting via capacitive touchscreens in the iPhone and iPad. A selection of nine classically trained visual artists who have sought to expand their work by creating art via the computer while heuristically inventing unique ways of working reveals the genesis of a hybrid vocabulary for the visual arts.

ABSTRACT Analyzing technical and other texts of the late 1960s and early 1970s, this paper explores the early discourses of interactivity—including writings by Charles Csuri, J.C.R. Licklider, Michael Noll, Ivan Sutherland and other notable figures—via the intersecting fields of computing and the arts, with a particular emphasis on the dynamic (in this instance, a disjuncture) between visionary ideas and the technical preconditions necessary for their realization.

ABSTRACT In 1900, Greek sponge divers discovered an ancient Greek treasure in the waters of the Aegean island of Antikythera: a device with gears dubbed the Antikythera Mechanism. Scientists studied it for almost a century and eventually declared it the most advanced machine preserved from the ancient world. This device predicted solar and lunar eclipses and harmonized the Greeks' sacrifices to their gods with their Panhellenic games and agriculture. This geared computer from the 2nd century BCE is now said to mirror the philosophy of Aristotle and the science of Archimedes. It was the product of an advanced Greek technological infrastructure that early Christians destroyed.

ABSTRACT Geraldo de Barros produced a series called Fotoformas , consisting of photographic experiments that pioneered abstractionism in Brazil. Since the mid-1990s, this series has been presented in various retrospective exhibitions and publications. The predominant critical interpretation of the work has linked it with Concrete Art, downplaying Barros's participation in the Bandeirante Photography and Cinema Club (FCCB), an amateur association. This article rethinks his engagement in both circuits, demonstrating that the artist created the Fotoformas in dialogue with this photo-club. The author also analyzes Barros's experimental approach, which was based on the inscription of indexical marks on the images to deny the constraints of the camera, with the emphasis instead on process and interdisciplinary artistic practice. Thus, he created an alternative to Brazilian abstractionism, which focused mostly on formal aspects.

ABSTRACT The hologram, the novel imaging medium conceived in 1947, underwent a series of technical mutations over the following 50 years. Those successive adaptations altered the form of the medium, broadened its imaging capabilities and promoted wider perceptions of its functions and possibilities. Appropriated by disparate technical communities and presented to varied audiences, the hologram and its cultural meanings evolved dramatically. This paper relates the fluidity of the form, function and meaning of the hologram to its distinct creators and users.

ABSTRACT In the 19th century, printing methods made significant advances that allowed mass production of illustrated texts; prior to that time, illustrated texts were expensive and rare. The number of illustrated texts thus rose exponentially, increasing the rate of information transfer among scientists, engineers and the general public. The early American state geological reports, funded by the state legislatures, were among the pioneering volumes that used the new graphic capabilities in the improved printing processes for the advancement of science. They contain thousands of illustrations—woodcuts, etchings, lithographs and hand-painted maps—that may be of interest to historians of science, technology, art and culture.

ABSTRACT The author presents a summary of his research on the Stuttgart School and information aesthetics as developed by Max Bense in the 1950s and 1960s. Three artists, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees and Manfred Mohr, adopted the use of information aesthetics in computer graphics. The author investigates the relation between artistic practice and aesthetic theory.

ABSTRACT Misconceptions concerning digital artists in Japan make them out to be mere followers, savvy with technology but not necessarily the conceptual originators of their work. Examining the aesthetic and philosophical content of their work, however, reveals that their attitudes toward the exploration of process, performance and the inherent nature of materials come from innovative and daring avant-garde groups of the 1960s and 1970s in Japan, including the Gutai and Mono-ha groups, whose ideas predate those of the New York avant-garde schools, even outside of the technological milieu.

ABSTRACT Iran in the 1970s was host to an array of electronic music and avant-garde arts. In the decade prior to the Islamic revolution, the Shiraz Arts Festival provided a showcase for composers, performers, dancers and theater directors from Iran and abroad, among them Iannis Xenakis, Peter Brook, John Cage, Gordon Mumma, David Tudor, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Merce Cunningham. A significant arts center, which was to include electronic music and recording studios, was planned as an outgrowth of the festival. While the complex politics of the Shah's regime and the approaching revolution brought these developments to an end, a younger generation of artists continued the festival's legacy.

Art historian Ernst Gombrich argued that learning to create convincing realistic depictions is a difficult, incremental process requiring the invention of numerous specific techniques to solve its many problems. Gombrich's argument is elaborated here in a historical review of the evolution of realistic depiction in ancient Greek vase painting, Italian Renaissance painting and contemporary computer-generated imagery (CGI) in video games. The order in which many problems of realism were solved in the three trajectories is strikingly similar, suggesting a common psychological explanation.

On 17 May 2002 the master of the art form known as musical color-painting, Yury Pravdyuk, passed away in Kharkov, Ukraine. Pravdyuk was the inventor of an ingeniously simple instrument for color-painters and the author of approximately 150 inimitable color-dynamic compositions to accompany the music of composers of different eras and peoples. How the idea of musical color-painting was born and Pravdyuk's creative path is the subject of the present article by one who had been a close assistant of Pravdyuk since 1965.