In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • From the Leonardo Archive
  • Lowry Burgess

Throughout cultural history we see pulsations driving the major disciplinary axiologies (art, science, language, religion, technologies, economics, etc.) toward each other for renaissances of mutual inspiration and creativity.

Otto Piene and Robert Russett's "Sky, Scale and Technology in Art" gives a specific focus on these transformative cultural forces at play in art over the past 60 years, revealing Piene's seminal role in these now-enduring developments in the interactions of art, science, technology and their expanded contexts.

Otto Piene's focal presence at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1968 on has been the only sustained central viewpoint in the art world where so many of the original artists, scientists and technologists, working across disciplines, engaged in the expansion of Gyorgy Kepes's original and nearly prophetic vision of the expanded efficacy of the arts in society, as well as the environment, through the collaboration of art, science and technology.

For 25 years that vision has been sustained, wonderfully expanded and given form by Otto Piene through his expansive art practice, actionable theory, influential teaching, exemplary collaboration and extraordinary organizational activity, revealed in this article's images and text. [End Page 510]

Lowry Burgess
Dean, Professor, Distinguished Fellow
Carnegie Mellon University
E-mail: <lb30@andrew.cmu.edu>
...

pdf

Share