A Call for New Leonardos

In 1967 a group of scientists, artists and scholars in Paris, led by Frank Malina, founded the Leonardo organization. In 1968 the first issue of their first project, the journal Leonardo, appeared under the aegis of Pergamon Press. This was the first international peer-reviewed scholarly journal addressing the "two cultures" divide. Marked by the traumas of World War II, the founders were dedicated to world peace through international communication and collaboration. They shared an underlying optimism that advances in the technosciences would bring about new visions of the world that would ensure social justice and universal economic development. They advocated a special role for artists and scientists working together.

In 2008 we live in a world of perplexing paradox. The planet has changed. The roles of artists and scientists have changed, and the Leonardo organizations are mutating to reflect the new situation. We also are traumatized by endemic conflicts and wars. The effects of human activities on the earth's climate and ecologies make it clear that the way our societies are organized is unsustainable. Some wonder whether the very premises of the "Enlightenment Project," with its framework of human measure in the natural world, lay the seeds of its own failure.

Since 1968 Leonardo has documented ways in which artists have appropriated almost all fields of scientific research and new technologies. In the 1960s few artists had easy access to the digital computer. Early pioneers in computer music, computer graphics, animation and interactive telecommunication had few venues for their work and few patrons. Now whole industries owe their roots to these pioneers. Today children interact on the Internet or their cell phones in ways that pioneering artists developed in the face of the general indifference and skepticism of industry and cultural institutions in the 1970s and 1980s. Artists today engage other areas of science and technology, from genetic engineering to space technologies, from ecology to climate science to nanosciences; many work in close collaboration with scientists and engineers. Through this cultural appropriation they create contemporary art that helps frame the way we see the world and shapes the actions we take.

This, however, is not enough. Roy Ascott, who published in the first volume of Leonardo, coined the aphorism "Ask not what the sciences can do for the arts, ask what the arts can do for the sciences." If the Enlightenment Project is fundamentally flawed, then we must re-examine technoscience's cultural foundations. We need the best scientific understanding of the world. We need appropriate tools that use our available resources in sustainable ways. This needed recasting of technoscience is a cultural project, and artists, scientists, engineers and scholars (among other professionals), working together, have important roles.

Technoscience today is carried out in semi-monastic and protected environments. Most people on this planet have never met a scientist. Technoscience still seeks a critical mass of talent using methods like those of medieval universities, barely reflecting the new methods made possible by the Internet. Outreach proceeds from science's top floor, not its ground floor. While some innovative programs place artists in scientific and industry research, fewer programs place scientists-in-residence in cultural institutions. A few deeply interdisciplinary art, science and technology programs exist, but their number is homeopathic, not systemic. Most technoscience uses English, and yet most people do not speak English. The minority of people, who live in science-producing areas, have a sense of ownership of the scientific knowledge about their own environment. Most people, however, live in science-consuming areas and have barely any access to or control of the science of their world. Perhaps the way that technoscience is organized today is one of the reasons for the failure of the Enlightenment Project. We need a more intimate technoscience, understandable and owned by and involving the people it affects and whose future it informs.

Over 40 years, the Leonardo publications at MIT Press have published the work of some 6,000 artists and scientists crossing the art-science-technology divide. Perhaps 10,000 more have been discussed. This creative community, with their families, is larger than that which fueled the Renaissance in...