Leonardo Network News

The Newsletter of the International Society of the Arts, Sciences and Technology and of l'Observatoire Leonardo des Arts et Technosciences

Leonardo Art/Science Student Contest Winners

Leonardo/ISAST is pleased to announce the winners of the fi rst Leonardo Art/Science Student Contest: Hiroki Nishino (DXARTS, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, U.S.A.) for Oberhausen Requiem; Michiko Tsuda (Tokyo National University of the Arts, Tokyo, Japan) for Where Are You?; Jaewook Shin (ITP, Tisch School of Art, New York University, New York, U.S.A.) for Afterimage—Mind Frame; Margarita Benitez and Markus Vogl (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, U.S.A.) for Circadian Capital; Byeong Sam Jeon (Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine, CA, U.S.A.) for Telematic Drum Circle.

In addition, the jury gave honorable mention to Hung Lin Hsu and Cheng-I Tsai (National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan) for Open Space 2.0 and to Cheth Rowe (San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA, U.S.A.) for A Reward-Driven Process for Local, Noospheric, and Computational Detection of Stochastic Deviation Fields.

The jury consisted of Nina Czegledy, Piero Scaruffi , Tami Spector and Pamela Winfrey.

Three of the winning projects were displayed at the closing reception of "Remix: From Science to Art and Back in the Digital Age," on day 2 of the Berkeley Big Bang 08 Symposium at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum (3 June 2008), co-hosted by Leonardo/ISAST and the Berkeley Art Museum. All seven projects will be highlighted in a special gallery section in an upcoming issue of Leonardo.

More information about each project is availabel on the Leonardo web site: <www.leonardo.info/isast/announcements/ArtSci-studentprojects-June08.html>.

Founding Editorial Advisor Yona Friedman

On 5 June 2008 Yona Friedman, who in 1968 was a founding member of the editorial board of the journal Leonardo, celebrated his 85th birthday. Born in Hungary in 1923 and socialized in Israel, Friedman has lectured, written books, exhibited art and worked with international groups with an interest in advancing the concepts of mobile architecture and sustainability, which he has been promoting since the mid-1950s. In the words of Leonardo Editorial Board member Jürgen Claus: "It is also to be owed to Yona Friedman that world architecture included 'the others,' in one 'society free of competition,' which he sees as the most important social utopia. No member of a group carries out a leverage or succumbs to a leverage which is bigger than the suffered leverage carried out by any other member. This sounds like the moral imperative of Kant advanced into the present—and this is so. Self planning: this is what the architect, sociologist, poet and thinker Yona Friedman stands for. The politicians, according to Friedman, cannot control the networks of their citizens. . . . They proclaim with emotionalism, their 'libretti.' Against this misleading attitude poet-architect Yona Friedman lives, writes, subscribes, assembles his critical discourses and says to us: 'One can have a civil sense only compared with a small team, a private town.' It is this that has made this man more than five decades present. And that catapulted him, at least since Documenta XI, again into the exhibition scene, successfully, as his latest exhibitions, for instance in the Frankfurt Portikus Museum in 2008, pointed out."

Leonardo/OLATS Intern Fabrice Lapelletrie

Fabrice Lapelletrie was born in 1975. He is writing a thesis in art history about the life and work of Frank Malina at the University of Paris-4 Sorbonne. Since January 2008, he has been assistant project leader of the Pionniers & Precurseurs program for the French Leonardo web site <www.olats.org>. In this framework, he has contributed to the creation of the database of Frank Malina's artworks at <www.olats.org/pionniers/malina/bdd/oeuvres.php> and regularly posts documents (texts, photos, videos) from the French Frank Malina archives. He has written articles and given lectures on photography of the 1930s, as well as the kinetic photography of Etienne-Bertrand Weill. One of his texts on Frank Malina can be read at <www.olats.org/pionniers/malina/bdd/oeuvres.php>. He lives...