The Leonardo/ISAST Student Art Contest
- The Leonardo/ISAST Student Art Contest
Leonardo is pleased to present an exhibit of the first Leonardo Student Art/Science Contest, including the five winning entries and two honorable mentions. This contest was organized by Piero Scaruffi in conjunction with the Leonardo Day symposium (coorganized by Scaruffi and myself), held as part of the University of California at Berkeley New Media Conference (Berkeley Big Bang 08) at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive in June 2008. The call for art for the contest was broad: Entrants had to be current students who “blend the arts and sciences” in their work, whether the medium be video, computer or music; this yielded an eclectic mix of submissions that were, on the whole, conceptually sophisticated and physically well executed. The images and descriptions of the works in this published exhibit can only begin to capture the artistic and technological mastery of all the works submitted.
The five contest winners and two honorable mentions span international, disciplinary and formal boundaries. Michiko Tsuda’s video installation Where Are You? creates a playful space that distorts the viewer’s sense of dimensionality; like a carnival funhouse, the piece uses mirrors to slice and splice people and the objects they interact with into multiples of themselves and multiple people into composite images. Jaewook Shin’s Afterimage—Mind Frame is an ingenious interactive project that uses the viewer’s art-historical memory to elicit momentary virtual images of famous paintings as he or she stares at a picture frame on a wall containing seemingly nonsensical arrays of moving blocks of white light. Hiroki Nishino’s experimental video Oberhausen Requiem recorded a site-specific performance of the same name inside a German gasometer, visually and aurally capturing the transformation of this chemical-industrial symbol into a sacred space through choreographed audience participation and a haunting electroacoustic score. Margarita Benitez and Markus Vogl’s sound installation Circadian Capital gives the participant/listener sense-access to the immensity of worldwide currency exchange rates using tokens embossed with maps of 12 Western countries and 12 “rogue” non-Western countries; these tokens move across a table that sonifies their interactions to reflect each country’s monetary and, indirectly, geopolitical power. Byeong Sam Jeon’s Telematic Drum Circle aims to enhance global communications; the sound-art piece uses a human-computer interface for the live audiovisual streaming of an interactive drum circle, allowing users with varying musical experience and languages to participate via their personal computers.
Hung-Lin Hsu and Cheng-I Tsai as well as Cheth Rowe received honorable mentions for their submissions. Hsu and Tsai’s Open Space 2.0 explores two types of generative visual spaces, one static and the other dynamic. In the first, multiple users in the same location, but working at different times, upload and download photographs from that location using their cell phones. In the second, multiple users (again at different times) map their movements through the same space using GPS technologies. Rowe’s wittily titled Reward-Driven Process for Local, Noospheric, and Computational Detection of Stochastic Deviation Fields employs a web interface to engage the user in an addictive three-letter word jackpot game. With each click of the mouse, three “wheels” spin and randomly generate three letters, sometimes forming words or aggregating as a poem. These linguistic formations, although random, satisfy our need to create order out of disorder. [End Page 8]
Four of the seven winners or honorable mentions showed their work at the end of the 2008 Leonardo Day (which also included a full day of conference talks), and the works were remarkably well received. Although it is a challenge to capture the excitement of the live displays in this print and on-line exhibition, these student artists have clearly succeeded in engaging the intersections of art and science in a way that explores technology without sacrificing artistic merit.
- Circadian Capital
Circadian Capital is an interactive sound installation that sonifies and visualizes real-time currency exchange-rate data via Max/MSP, Processing and Tuio. It presents a musical composition based on the daily trading values of 24 currencies, 12 of them the...
