Top-Rated LABS Abstracts 2022

Leonardo Abstracts Service (LABS) is a database of thesis abstracts (PhD, Master’s and MFA) on topics at the intersections of art, science, and technology. This English-language database was established at Pomona College (Claremont, CA). In addition to being published in the database, a selection of abstracts chosen by a peer review panel for their special relevance will be published annually in Leonardo journal and on the Leonardo website. Authors of abstracts most highly ranked by the peer review panel are invited to submit an article for publication consideration in Leonardo journal.The LABS Peer Review Panel for 2022 included Camille Baker, Yiannis Colakides, Mat Dalgleish, Johannes DeYoung, Eugenia Fratzeskou, Tracy Harwood, Tom Leeser, Felipe César Londoño, Clarissa Ribeiro, Eryk Salvaggio, Martin Skrodzki, Mary Anne Staniszewski, Yanai Toister, and Carloalberto Treccani.The deadline for receipt of abstracts for review by the LABS peer review panel is 30 June each year. Abstract rankings are announced in the autumn. The aim of LABS is not to duplicate existing thesis databases but rather to give visibility to interdisciplinary work, which is often hard to retrieve from existing databases.To submit a thesis abstract or browse those currently published in the English-language database, visit www.leonardo.info/labs.Alejandro Albornoz RojasThis thesis presents practice-based research, where voice and poetry both are inspiration and material. It includes a portfolio of acousmatic compositions and a text, a compositional rationale based on Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro’s aesthetics called Creacionismo, which aims to create artistic works by combining materials from reality through an equilibrium between rationality and intuition. To examine how this rationale operates within the compositions, an analytical methodology is applied using poietic and neutral analyses of the tripartite model proposed by Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1990) and Stéphane Roy (2004). The first describes the author’s creative process, and the second details the pieces’ constitutive elements considering Pierre Schaeffer’s sound objects (1966), Denis Smalley’s spectromorphology (1997), levels of spatial function by Annette Vande Gorne (2010), and two original analyses developed by the author: voice type and speech-sound type. The analyses show the pieces’ structure, and consequently how Huidobro’s theory has been applied successfully to acousmatic composition, generating the notion of acousmatic-creationist. The main outcome of this thesis is a new artistic strategy balancing rationality and intuition within acousmatic composition and placing poetry as a driving force in the use of voice, merging artistic practice and theory in a recursive action.Rogério BordiniWith the improvement of imaging technologies over the years, artistic institutions have increasingly explored digital mechanisms to build virtual exhibition spaces. However, there is still a lack of evidence on what visual conditions and interaction formats are required to ensure effective access in online artistic exhibitions for artists and visitors. It is from this assumption that this research prompted the creation, evaluation, and analysis of GAIA Virtual—a three-dimensional digital version of the University of Campinas Arts Institute’s Art Gallery (GAIA)—both in virtual reality and on the Web. Besides analyzing five online exhibitions from expographic and curatorial points of view, studies based on aesthetic experience, sense of presence, and usability were conducted with participants from different backgrounds (N = 23). Results showed that the 3D virtual tour format not only provided aesthetic and immersive experiences to visitors—with better overall results for the Web version—but also suggested that artists can find in the three-dimensional model greater freedom due to spatial flexibility. Aspects adopted for GAIA Virtual implementation (visual realism, 3D navigation, immersive sounds, and high artwork resolution) were shown to be fundamental elements that offer unique digital experiences of artworks.Cândida Luiza Borges da SilvaIn this practice-led PhD research, I investigate how an artistic practice can respond to the migration phenomena performed by human beings over millennia—what I refer to as the millennial global human journey. I framed this research in the articulation of concepts deriving from the prefix trans: transculture, transhumance, and transmediality. This research contributes to studies in art composition by developing the processes and concept of transmedial composition, impacting the field of new media art.This investigation resulted in the Transeuntis Mundi™ Project—a nomadic artistic practice that encompasses: the TM Derive and manual, the TM Archive, the TM VR work Derive 01, and two forms for its notation.Based on proposals from the Realism art movement and walking-based methodologies of walkscapes and dérive, the TM Derive was created as a nomadic methodology of composition, framed by minimal stories—the narrative captured from field recordings with 3D technology of everyday life worldwide. This material formed the TM Archive.The final composition is an immersive and interactive performative experience for VR that artistically brings together stories, sounds, images, people, and places worldwide, using 3D technology with 360º image and ambisonic sound.Alexis CrawshawPaideia, an ancient Greek notion of education, encompassed holistic formal instruction and art as means to develop cultural values and understanding. This dissertation examines how the new media arts—a transdisciplinary, computational field—can operate as paideia in contemporary practice and instruction. I analyze how computational platforms can facilitate the creation and readability of causal relationships across information to embody value, meaning, and holistic thought. I examine how affordances—formal qualities that constrain an object’s uses—can guide participant behavior and interpretation of meaning in experiential learning.Through artistic and pedagogical proofs-of-concept, we examine: imparting values via physical computing and interactive systems as means to model or incentivize actions and behaviorsshaping meaning via formal design that (1) follows “natural [somatic] mappings” or culturally established associations and/or (2) explicitly defies them, directing attention through “strangeness”promoting trans-paradigmatic, holistic thinking via worldmaking, organizing complex knowledge, within the digital, design-based THEMAS (STEAM + creative Humanities) model (originated by Marcos Novak).We compare these new efforts toward paideia with ancient Greek media and approaches. Building upon ancient roots, this research informs the fields of new media art and education through design strategies for (artistic) experiential and making-based learning.Yuxiang DongThis dissertation argues that the discourse of the historiography of Chinese media art is depoliticized and studies experimental ethnography and social practice, two forms of media art practices, to repoliticize the discourse by bringing the debates on ethnic minority and social class back into its history. The dissertation examines the origin and development of Chinese media art in the historical contexts of the traumas of the 1989 Tiananmen Incidents and the depoliticized politics following the postsocialist reforms. The primary purposes of the depoliticized discourse of Chinese media art, which prioritized technological and aesthetic aspects over sociopolitical implications, were to legitimize itself in both the global art institution and in the official domestic art system. To counter this impulse, the dissertation investigates experimental forms of ethnography in the community of ethnic minorities in the China-Vietnam border area. Also, the dissertation conceives a new social imaginary of class between artists and migrant workers originated from their shared experience, interests, and struggles in postsocialist society through examining their artistic, cultural, social, and media practices. Ultimately, the dissertation sheds light on socially and politically engaged practices of Chinese media art which have been marginalized by the depoliticized discourse.Majli af EkenstamWhat if fibers were strings of numbers, arrays of digits turned into threads, not taking a specific form but constantly evolving? A consensual understanding and definition of textiles are based on craft traditions and industrialized society. With increasing online presence and virtual experiences, there is a shift in this understanding and the definition of materiality. This practice-based research starts with a focus on textiles in a virtual world. It explores the intersection of traditional craft and complex computer-generated structures. The research is built on new ideas on material thinking, with an emphasis on the divergence of aesthetic expressions. By exploring digital materiality, relating to the history of computation, and weaving and speculating on the current and future states of the art, the idea is to reimagine how textiles are designed and made using cutting-edge computer graphics and experimenting with 3D modeling strategies. A series of artifacts—digital textile sculptures—is designed based on methods developed in the research.Cornelia ErdmannThis thesis inquires into the practice-based aesthetic exploration of light in our lived-in environment as a culture-specific experience framed by allusions of site and sociocultural context. To this end, the thesis analyzes and integrates atmospheric narrations of site, light, and color in contemporary Hong Kong through theory and artistic practice as research-creation and subsequently applies the findings in new works of (light) art for proof of concept.Notions of landscape and atmosphere are phenomena integrating spatial and sensory experiences and thus providing theoretical frameworks for the analysis of existing metropolitan light conditions. Initially, a visual ethnographic investigation of Hong Kong’s lightscapes—using sets of time-lapse videos, photography, color space creations, and various field notes and interviews—traces and analyzes the development of culture-specific aesthetics of light and color unique to their location, showing it is more than a physical matter or circumstance.Additional research conducted through a series of smaller artworks, as well as two formative exhibitions, probes the sociocultural effects of light further, substantiating the impact it has on our perceptions in and through lightscapes. The summary findings of the research were integrated in the expansive installation Lightscape Sequence ‘Fragrant Harbour,’ an artistic proof of concept based on observations from contemporary Hong Kong. The artwork translates the city’s distinctive lightscapes into an embodied and experienceable reflection of light and color’s narrativity.Nicolas HoltThis thesis argues for a new interpretation of the work of Chilean multimedia artist Juan Downey (1940–1993) as an aesthetics of energy. The aesthetics of energy frames Downey’s practice as an exploration of how energies—like the electromagnetic, the photosynthetic, and the metabolic—could be harnessed as arts media in response to the historical conditions of the Cold War, including the rise of Information Age telecommunications, cybernetic and ecological systems theory, and the neo-imperial politics of resource extraction in Latin America. I argue the intent of Downey’s aesthetics of energy was both a questioning of what counts as artistic media and a critique of how different energies are entangled within specific historical, cultural, and geopolitical scenes. This took the form of electronic sculptures that sensed radar waves, environmental installations featuring minerals mined in Chile, and videotaped accounts of the hallucinogenic rituals of Yanomami shamans. In advocating for Downey as an energies artist, this thesis turns to the sciences—especially physics and ecology—to sharpen its account of his art’s energetic interactions, while arguing his relevance for current debates in the energy humanities, elemental and environmental media, and decolonial critiques of extractivism.Rebecca MottWhether obviously or subversively, machine learning feeds our minds and directs our attention. Hidden behind layers of purposeful obfuscation, immense power resides in the hands of those who control these systems, while the majority of the public lacks the knowledge with which to hold these processes accountable. To overcome these barriers, artists must demand and create the resources needed to increase the diversity of voices that will shape the future of artificial intelligence. To that end, we must establish a precedent of providing open-source resources and education about AI so that it evolves into an accessible and comprehensible tool guided by society and not solely by a few. Likewise, artists must interact with these technologies to demonstrate their ethical potential. In support of my proposal, AI+ART provides a network of analysis, resources, and documentation of my own experiences as a painter working with AI. Within this framework, I consider some misnomers and assumptions about AI and art, discuss ethical dilemmas linked to AI, examine the legacies of several artists who have collaborated with AI, and perform my own practice of curiosity, inquiry, and accountability as I consider how artists might re-imagine and reinvent the future of AI.Mikhel ProulxThis dissertation examines the concurrent emergence of digital networks and participatory art in Canada over a period of five decades. From the Eternal Network to the global village to the virtual community and social media today, artists have been at the forefront of articulating how concepts of community have shifted in relation to technological development over the last 50 years. Chapters in this dissertation are built from case studies of art projects that each employ a specific media network to create a temporary community. These include Anna Banana’s (b. 1940) extended community produced through an ongoing, 50-year practice of mail art exchange; the cooperative performance of Vera Frenkel’s (b. 1938) 1974 String Games: Improvisations for Inter-City Video, which used an early telematic network; a collaboratively produced, site-specific textile installation in Laura Vickerson’s (b. 1959) Fairy Tales and Factories, 1999; and CyberPowWow, a platform for Internet-based artworks made by Indigenous artists, which was a project produced by the artist Skawennati (b. 1969) and many collaborators between 1997 and 2004. These are art projects that draw attention to intimate social encounters with diverse networked media, and they demonstrate how communications technologies can be used consciously and critically in the formation of temporary communities.Ana RewakowiczMy research-creation dissertation deals with the problem of diminishing sources of fresh water and looks at an alternative method of collecting water from fog, particularly pertinent in arid, mountainous regions, where there is little or no precipitation and groundwater is unavailable or polluted. Through the process of creative interactions, this art-and-science collaborative research challenged the standard model of collecting water from fog with grid mesh nets and proposed a new paradigm of harvesting fog water with a net of parallel vertical fibers.This thesis demonstrates that through art-and-science collaboration, new scientific, artistic, and art-science solutions can be co-created. To provide the reader with a more intimate understanding of the co-creating process, the thesis employs novel and experimental formal writing structures, as well as writing from a variety of (for a thesis) unusual viewpoints. Karen Barad’s framework of agential realism allows us to understand how different ways of relating can produce different relationships and meanings. To solve major global problems, including water scarcity, we need viewpoint-altering collaborations bringing together artists, scientists, viewer/participants, and entire communities, thereby expanding the circle of inclusion and closing the gap between what we know, what we sense and feel, and what we do.Bart H.M. Vandeput“This is Aronia” is how artist Bartaku is introduced to a berryapple plantation in Latvia. There, “things merely happen” that instigate Bartaku’s art and research practice, with findings that are shared through this monograph. “This is Aronia” turns fuzzy quickly: “It is an apple not a berry,” the microbiologist says; “It is a chokeberry,” European migrants in Northeast America say; “It is Aronia melanocarpa (Michx.) 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