ABSTRACT Where does the quality of an artwork reside? Is it in the work or in the perceiver and her culture? Belief in the former can be called aesthetic realism, the latter aesthetic antirealism. Nanay suggests that Cutting is an antirealist because he has found that multiple brief exposures to an artwork enhance viewers’ judgments of it. In fact, Cutting is agnostic on the distinction, but as a scientist is unable to discern how quality might be objectively measured in art.

ABSTRACT It has been argued that some recent experimental findings about the mere exposure effect can be used to argue for aesthetic antirealism: the view that there is no fact of the matter about aesthetic value. The aim of this article is to assess this argument and point out that this strategy, as it stands, does not work. But we may still be able to use experimental findings about the mere exposure effect in order to engage with the aesthetic realism/antirealism debate. However, this argument would need to proceed very differently and would only support a much more modest version of aesthetic antirealism.

ABSTRACT Discussions of the specificity of digital media are in a state of fruitful flux. After the dismissal of mediality in the utopian glow of media convergence, new theoretical developments allow us to reconceive this idea. Using the critical realist precept that properties in the world have real dispositions or powers, the author expands this system of thought to provide a framework with which to understand digital media. This is presented to add to and help direct the current debates.

ABSTRACT The author argues that the application of digital algorithmic structures to analog media may illuminate hidden values and perceptions inherent in the digital technologies themselves. The paper sets out the understanding of metaphor in contemporary cognitive linguistics, in which metaphor is perceived as a conceptual device that creates meaning through cross-domain mapping—that is, partially mapping (projecting) one conceptual domain onto another. While the projected domain is intended to elucidate the target domain, the author argues that metaphor itself is self-reflexive—drawing attention to characteristics of the projected domain.

ABSTRACT This text is an investigation into media culture, temporalities of media objects and planned obsolescence in the midst of ecological crisis and electronic waste. The authors approach the topic under the umbrella of media archaeology and aim to extend this historiographically oriented field of media theory into a methodology for contemporary artistic practice. Hence, media archaeology becomes not only a method for excavation of repressed and forgotten media discourses, but extends itself into an artistic method close to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture, circuit bending, hardware hacking and other hacktivist exercises that are closely related to the political economy of information technology. The concept of dead media is discussed as “zombie media”—dead media revitalized, brought back to use, reworked.

ABSTRACT How do artists, scientists and artist-scientists view images, and how does their cultural background affect their interpretation? The author proposes that artist-scientists may exhibit cultural multistability, akin to the perceptual multistability associated with viewing visual illusions such as the Necker cube. After carrying out a survey, the author suggests that all individuals may exhibit cultural multistability in response to a challenging image. The author postulates a tendency of artist-scientists to use textural descriptions and discusses coming to see her own images in a new light.

ABSTRACT The authors have developed a model of practice-based research from observations and studies of practitioners undertaking Ph.D.s in digital art and specifically interactive art. Trajectories of research and practice have been identified that have common elements but are driven by different practitioner goals and preferences. The authors present a model of practitioner research that represents the relationship between theory, practice and evaluation, and they describe how different trajectories of research and practice lead to the development of theoretical frameworks by practitioners. Whilst the common features of the trajectories are important to identify so that the characteristics of practitioner research can be understood more generally, the authors believe that having scope for individuality is vital to such research.

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the incorporation of text within interactive installations as an expression of cultural anthropophagy. This “consumption” is carried out not by displacing the text (i.e. replacing it with images) but by transforming text into image, sound or action, or into a post-alphabetic object (i.e. depriving the text of its linguistic value). As shown in detailed examples, the de-semanticization of text turns words into ornament, while in other cases (where the linguistic value of the text is stressed within the interactive installation or can be “rescued” from it) the literary is still an important subject of attention.

ABSTRACT This paper explores the ways in which Leonardo da Vinci's anachronistic skepticism of Renaissance perspective and his subsequent invention of sfumato prefigure contemporary digital technology and its ability to literalize this formal technique. Marcos Novak and Char Davies offer parallel theories on the permeable boundaries among objects and between physical and virtual worlds. The resultant theories, like those of Leonardo, offer new conceptions of space and representation that challenge those who suggest the digital world will subvert the physical. Briefly comparing Leonardo's initial revisions to Renaissance perspective to those realized through digital technology, this paper examines radical revisions of the notions of space and boundary and the ways in which those revisions challenge the traditional goal to aptly represent the physical world via linear perspective.

ABSTRACT The idea of the computational sublime has been introduced into discourse within the generative electronic arts. The author proposes that, for an artwork to exploit the sublime, the form and context in which the mapping of computational process occurs are crucial. He suggests that digital-analogue hybrids within an urban setting allow engagement with a wider audience and the capacity for the work to be surveyed over multiple timescales. To this end, a framework for the design of kinetic architectural skins is presented for artists to consider as a potential resource for collaboration.

ABSTRACT In one sense, the visual experience of a thing in a depiction is similar to seeing the actual thing. In another sense, the experience is quite different, involving a “twofold” simultaneous awareness of the picture surface and what it depicts. The author argues that the standard ways of explaining depiction in terms of perception fail to properly accommodate the complex twofold nature of pictorial experience. He proposes an alternative account, based on an “enactive” approach to perception.

ABSTRACT This paper uncovers the relationship between texts and machines, two major human inventions seemingly situated at polarities. In the Western tradition, the former originates from Aristotelian poetics and rhetoric, while the latter is associated with science and technology. The two have started to overlap in the 20th century, especially with the advent of the computer—a machine simulating human mental activities. This article begins by revisiting a few cardinal ideas from various scholars. Then, having outlined a corpus of texts in different manifestations related to the essence of machines, the author attempts to devise a preliminary framework for an inventive taxonomy of media artifacts in the post-digital age.

ABSTRACT The author formally and thematically reconsiders the Buddhist philosophical concept of dependent origination in the context of technological practice. In this context, he discusses historical attempts in Tantric art to develop an integrated practice and conceive a dynamic “entity” of the body (that of the artist or the spectator), science, technology, art, architecture, philosophy, space-time and nature; and the veracity of such concepts in the context of particular new scientific insights. Furthermore, he reconsiders notions of relational being and nonanthropocentric being, and a polyphonic “I.” The article aims to interrogate new ways of evolving current practice and thinking on themes related to the socialization and mediatization of “difference.”

ABSTRACT The author explores the thesis that crossing the boundaries of genre within a medium requires the reassignment of defining constructs and can be used as a tool for deconstructing the medium. In this process, elements considered impartial or invisible become consciously manipulated tools, deconstructed and reassigned as narrative devices. The author posits that this reassessment is essential for the continued development of any medium or genre and discusses reasons for its recent renewed prominence. The author traces convention-crossing in several media, revealing attributes that are redefined by subversions, and explores subversions of digital media constructs, before discussing his own forays into web-based works that hinge on the artifice of convention.

ABSTRACT The author proposes a taxonomy of abstract form anchored in an examination of the history and theory of synesthesia and abstract art. The foundations of this taxonomy lie in empirical psychological studies of “form-constants” found in cross-modal synesthetic visions and hallucinatory states, specifically the work of Heinrich Klüver in his examinations of mescaline and the mechanisms producing visual hallucinations. While the proposed taxonomy is limited only to synesthesia-inspired abstraction, it has suggestive possibilities when considered in relation to other forms of non-synesthetic abstraction such as Islamic Art, the geometric forms found on classical Greek vases, and other kinds of decorative abstract patterns.

Evolution in natural environments has endowed humans with a cognitive system that is specialized in processing information about living things. Yet the presence of living things in the human living environment is ever decreasing, which leads to the underdevelopment of this system. The author speculates that biomorphic architecture or design can counteract this trend, which would have positive implications for various aspects of human functioning and could provoke subtle shifts in certain areas of human thinking.

The concept of metadesign was adopted in the 1980s regarding the use of information technologies in relation to art, cultural theories and design practices (from interactive art to biotechnological design). This article introduces theories and practices of metadesign and contributes to the unfolding of metadesign as an emergent design culture, calling for an expansion of the creative process in the new design space engendered by information technologies.

The concept of plasticity provides a unifying hypothesis to account for the natural properties of living systems as well as the different levels of perception and information associated with these systems. Are the metadynamics of evolutionary processes able to describe the nature of consciousness as a whole? The close study of the link between the coherence of emerging objects and the way we think they appear allows us to use the metaphor of a discontinuous bridge linking primitive perceptions to consciousness just as brain plasticity is linked to art.

The author has identified four fundamental organizational principles common to both organic form and the creation of visual composition. The author proposes that our perceptual system has evolved to respond to these principles (perceptual primitives) due to the necessity of recognizing the diversity of organic forms on which our survival depended during our earlier evolution. The evidence shows that these four principles occur widely throughout humankind's aesthetic expression in different cultures, epochs, art forms and media. Applying von Humboldt's principle, the author proposes that these limited means provide unlimited possibilities for developing student creativity if it were taught as a coherent grammar