Leonardo: Our Fourth Decade

Leonardo: Our Fourth Decade With this issue we begin our fourth decade of publication. Since our founding 30 years ago,we have published the work of more than 3,000differentauthors from more than 35 different countries,in more than 140 issues and 10,000pages. The small isolated Leonardovillage of 1967has become one town in a burgeoning international network of artists,researchers, theorists, educators,scientistsand engineers. Our goals remain twofold: First, to make visible, and document, the work of artists and scholarswho explore the interaction of art and science or of art and technology. Second, to foster the collaboration of artists, scientistsand engineers. It is they who are creating the new cultural fabric of the contemporary arts that will combine the artistic, scientificand technical strands of today’sworld. Leonardo’soperating principles have remained largely unchanged. We publish writings by artists, scholars and researchers about their own work, in the tradition of scientificand technicaljournals. All articles are peer-reviewedby referees before acceptance, and as a result we reject the majority of the submissionswe receive. Authors are sought from all parts of the world. Our editorial board, and their interests, define our editorial scope. Thisjournal belongs to the professional community it serves,and it is evolvingas the interests of that community evolve. One major change since 196’7is the variety of publication formats that are now part of the Leonardofamily.The original idea for Leonardohas been expanded to include Leonardo MusicJournal (LMJ ,accompanied by the LMJaudio compact-diskseries; the online LeonardoElectronicAlmanac, edited by Craig Harris, and which includes Leonardo Digital Reviews;the Leonardo Book Series;and the Leonardo World Wide Web Site. The approach in each publication ranges from scholarly in the printjournals (which are subjected to a high degree of editorial selectivityand editing) to more informational and timely on the web site. (Wewould like to thankJanet Fisher,Associate Director of the MIT PressJournals, and all of the MIT Press staff for their professional and visionary support of all our publications). As we go forward followingthe promise of new electronic communication media such as the Internet, we will continue to develop our print publications, in part because of the flexible and established, archival nature of print, but also because we recognize that the Internet is and will remain inaccessible to a large fraction of our professional community, particularly those outside major institutions. One of our challenges continues to be finding enough paying subscribersto cover production costs. Leonardopublications continue to be produced at a financial loss.We survive thanks to the generosity of our colleagueswho volunteer their time and expertise, individual patrons who make financial donations, and grants from companies and foundations . Leonardowill survive and flourish as long as the professional community it serves continues to sustain it. As we enter our fourth decade we are launching a new fundraising campaign to assure our survival.Those of you who responded to our fundraising campaign at the time of our 20th anniversaryhelped Leonardoreach its 30th anniversary.We hope that you will help again. What will future issues of Leonardocover?The current interests of our editorial boards can be seen from some of the editorial projects that are under way: Judy Malloy and Pat Bentson continue to solicit the work of women artists and scholars to ensure that Leonardoreflects the broad range of work being carried out. 0 1997EAST LEONARD0,Vol. 30,No. 1, pp. 1-2,1997 1 Roy Ascott has issued a call for papers on the topic of “The Planetary Collegium,”seeking visionary models that begin to address the crisis in art education curricula. Curtis Karnow has issued a call for papers on topics related to intellectual property rights and the arts confronted with the new digital technologies. Eduardo Kac, with the “RadicalIntervention”project, both on the Leonardo WWW Site and in thejournal, is seeking to make visible the work of innovative and pioneering Brazilian artists. Jurgen Claus hasjust completed the first phase of a publishing project focusing on artists addressing solar energy and other renewable energy sources. New papers are being sought. Timothy Binkley, who organizes the annual New York Digital Salon, has issued a call for essays on the digital arts to be published in this year’s special issue. Bulat...