Leonardo Network News

Leonardo Network News Coordinator: Kathleen Quillian E-mail: <kq@leonardo.info>

Two New Books Available from the Leonardo Book Series and Mit Press

Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media, by Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook; Foreword by Steve Dietz

As curator Steve Dietz has observed, new media art is like contemporary art—but different. New media art involves interactivity, networks and computation and is often about process rather than objects. New media artworks, difficult to classify according to the traditional art museum categories determined by medium, geography and chronology, present the curator with novel challenges involving interpretation, exhibition and dissemination. This book views these challenges as opportunities to rethink curatorial practice. It helps curators of new media art develop a set of flexible tools for working in this fast-moving field and offers useful lessons from curators and artists for those working in such other areas of art as distributive and participatory systems.

Rethinking Curating explores the characteristics distinctive to new media art, including its immateriality and its questioning of time and space, and relates them to such contemporary art forms as video art, conceptual art, socially engaged art and performance art. The authors, both of whom have extensive experience as curators, offer numerous examples of artworks and exhibitions to illustrate how the roles of curators and audiences can be redefined in light of new media art's characteristics. They discuss modes of curating, from the familiar default mode of the museum, through parallels with publishing, broadcasting, festivals and labs, to more recent hybrid ways of working on-line and off, including collaboration and social networking. Rethinking Curating offers curators a route through the hype around platforms and autonomous zones by following the lead of current artists' practice.

Green Light: Toward an Art of Evolution, by George Gessert

Humans have bred plants and animals with an eye to aesthetics for centuries: flowers are selected for colorful blossoms or luxuriant foliage; racehorses are bred for the elegance of their frames. Hybridized plants were first exhibited as fine art in 1936, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed Edward Steichen's hybrid delphiniums. Since then, bio art has become a genre; artists work with a variety of living things, including plants, animals, bacteria, slime molds and fungi. Many commentators have addressed the social and political concerns raised by making art out of living material. In Green Light, however, George Gessert examines the role that aesthetic perception has played in bio art and other interventions in evolution.

Gessert looks at a variety of life forms that humans have helped shape, focusing on plants—the most widely domesticated form of life and the one that has been crucial to his own work as an artist. We learn about Onagadori chickens, bred to have tail feathers twenty or more feet long; pleasure gardens of the Aztecs, cultivated for intoxicating fragrance; Darwin's relationship to the arts; the rise and fall of eugenics; the aesthetic standards promoted by national plant societies; a daffodil that looks like a rose; and praise for weeds and wildflowers. Gessert surveys recent bio art and its accompanying philosophical problems, the "slow art" of plant breeding, and how to create new life that takes into account what we know about ecology, aesthetics and ourselves.

Both of these titles, and more, are available from the Leonardo Book Series (MIT Press): <www.leonardo.info/isast/leobooks.html>.

Leonardo Associate Members receive 20% off all titles in the Leonardo Book Series. For information about how to redeem this discount, visit the Leonardo members page: <http://leonardo.info/members.html>.

Leonardo Education and Art Forum Report from CAA 2010

The Leonardo Education and Art Forum (LEAF) is a working branch of Leonardo/ISAST. LEAF provides a forum for collaboration and exchange with other scholarly communities, including the College Art Association of America (CAA), of which Leonardo is an affiliate society. Despite many flight cancellations and delays due to snowstorms, members of LEAF had a strong presence at this year's Annual CAA Conference, which was held at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago. Over four thousand artists, art historians, curators, educators and students gathered 10–13 February 2010...