Leonardo Network News

Leonardo and SFAI Announce Partnership

The San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST) have announced a partnership that will bring the editorial offices of Leonardo onto the main campus of SFAI in July 2005. The announcement was made by SFAI President Chris Bratton and Leonardo/ISAST Board Chair Roger Malina.

The partnership exemplifies a period of great investment in academic programs at SFAI. The school introduced four new Centers for Interdisciplinary Learning to its undergraduate curriculum in fall 2004 and also opened a new facility for artistic investigation into high-definition technology, the Ars Nova XXI HD Research Laboratory. Other SFAI partnerships created through the new centers include those with NASA, the Exploratorium, Bay Area Video Coalition, San Francisco Center for the Book and Arion Press.

The partnership between Leonardo/ISAST and SFAI includes student internships, collaborations on lecture series and symposia, and other joint endeavors to be announced in coming months. The transition will be overseen by a joint oversight committee with members from both organizations.

SFAI is committed to arts education in a cross-disciplinary environment, not only between art-making media but also between the arts and other disciplines. The partnership will help provide an active framework through which students can explore new ways of looking at, thinking about and making art, while learning about science, technology, writing and history. For more information about SFAI programs, visit <http://www.sfai.edu>.

Award Given to Critical Art Ensemble

The Leonardo/ISAST Governing Board has given a special Leonardo New Horizons Award for Innovation to Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). CAE is internationally acclaimed for its artistic work in such fields as biotechnology, robotics and tactical media. Their performances and installations have reached viewers around the world and have broken new ground in the often controversial area of new technologies.

The governing board voted to give CAE this special award to affirm the principle that artists should engage emerging technologies and be willing to take critical stances that may be at odds with those of the mainstream. Freedom of artistic expression and research form a part of the foundation of an open society. For more information on Critical Art Ensemble, please visit <http://www.critical-art.net>. For more information on the Leonardo Awards program, contact <isast@leonardo.info> or visit <http://leonardo.info/isast/awards.html>.

Leonardo Award for Excellence

Steve Mann has been named the recipient of the 2004 Leonardo Award for Excellence for his article “Existential Technology,” published in Leonardo Volume 36, No. 1 (February 2003). This annual award recognizes excellence in articles published in Leonardo, Leonardo Music Journal (LMJ) and Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA). Excellence is defined as originality, rigor of thought, clarity of expression and effective presentation. Receiving Honorable Mention is David First, for his article “The Music of the Sphere: An Investigation into Asymptotic Harmonics, Brainwave Entrainment, and the Earth as a Giant Bell” (Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 13). The winning article and all of the articles nominated for the award are available at <http://leonardo.info/isast/awards.html>.

In Mann’s winning article, the author presents “Existential Technology” as a new category of in(ter)ventions and as a new theoretical framework for understanding privacy and identity. His thesis is twofold: (1) The unprotected individual has lost ground to invasive surveillance technologies and complex global organizations that undermine the humanistic property of the individual; and (2) A way for the individual to be free and collegially assertive in such a world is to be “bound to freedom” by an articulably external force. To that end, the author explores empowerment via self-demotion. He founded a federally incorporated company and appointed himself to a low enough position to be bound to freedom within that company. His performances and in(ter)ventions over the last 30 years have led him to an understanding of such concepts as individual self-corporatization and submissivity reciprocity for the creation of a balance of bureaucracy.

Steve Mann has written more than 200 research publications and has been the keynote speaker at numerous industry symposia and conferences. His work has been shown in museums around...