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©2022 ISAST https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02254 LEONARDO, Vol. 55, No. 5, pp. 497–502, 2022 497
LAbs 2021
Leonardo Abstracts Service (LABS) is a database of the-
sis abstracts (PhD, Master’s and MFA) on topics at the
intersections of art, science and technology. is 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 consider-
ation in Leonardo.
e LABS Peer Review Panel for included Camille
Baker, Yiannis Colakides, Mat Dalgleish, Johannes
DeYoung, Eugenia Fratzeskou, Tracy Harwood, Tom
Leeser, Felipe César Londoño, Clarissa Ribeiro, Eryk
Salvaggio, Harprett Sareen, Martin Skrodzki, Mary Anne
Staniszewski, Yanai Toister, and Carloalberto Treccani. e
deadline for receipt of abstracts for review by the LABS
peer review panel is June each year. Abstract rankings
are announced in the autumn. e aim of LABS is not
to duplicate existing thesis databases but rather to give
visibility to interdisciplinary work, which is oen 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.
S P
LABS Editor-in-Chief
Leonardo International Co-Editor
—
Top-Rated LABS Abstracts 2021
labs editor-in -chief Sheila Pinkel
See https://direct.mit.edu/leon/issue/55/5 for supplemental files associated
with this issue.
Deep VIsual InstruMents
Realtime Continuous, Meaningful Human Control over Deep
Neural Networks for Creative Expression
Memo Akten
I investigate Deep Learning models as an artistic medium
for new modes of performative, creative expression. I call
these Deep Visual Instruments: real-time interactive gen-
erative systems that leverage the capabilities of Deep Neural
Networks (DNN), with Meaningful Human Control, in a
Realtime Continuous manner.
I characterize Meaningful Human Control in terms of
intent and accountability; and Realtime Continuous Control
with regards to its capacity for performative interaction
with immediate feedback, enhancing goal-less exploration.
inking of DNNs as tools that extract information
from massive amounts of Big Data, I investigate ways to
explore what useful information a DNN has learnt, and
how to meaningfully use such models in the production of
artistic works, with performative, expressive control.
I present ve studies: a collaborative, generative sketch-
ing application using MCTS; a system to gesturally con-
duct realtime generation of text in dierent styles using an
ensemble of LSTMs; a couple of performative live video
feed processing applications allowing for digital puppetry,
augmented drawing and realtime manipulation of hyper-
parameters while training; and a method for lm-making
within a generative model’s latent space with meaningful
control over narrative.
I frame our research with the real-time, performative
expression provided by musical instruments as a metaphor,
in which I think of our systems as not used by a user, but
played by a performer.
Memo Akten:
memo@memo
.tv. PhD thesis,
Goldsmiths,
University of
London, 2021.
Learning to see
(2017) by
Memo Atken at
The Barbican,
London, 2019.
(© Memo Atken)
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498 Top-Rated LABS Abstracts 2021
the curatIon anD DIsplay of InteractIVe
new MeDIa art
Making a Manual
Rene G. Cepeda
As past literature has identied a lack of understanding of
new media art at the installation level it became evident
that a new approach to practical curation and installation
was needed. is research attempts to solve this situation
through the creation of an online manual that can address
these needs. Furthermore, said digital format allows for a
more responsive manual that can keep up with technologi-
cal change and obsolescence pervasive in the eld.
e research questions sought to determine what was
needed in the manual from the perspective of curators and
designers; how it could oer recommendations that met
the needs of curators, artists, and the public; and ensure
that such eorts were accessible and useable. Interviews,
and case studies of FACT (UK) and Laboratorio Arte
Alameda (MX) were used to collect perspectives across
curatorial cultures and budgets.
e results of this research became an online manual
covering the curatorial, display, and memory making
aspects of exhibition design. e manual is a creative
commons online resource to promote its dissemination
through institutions. e manual accepts input from read-
ers to continue its improvement past publication.
Besides the obvious applications of the manual, this
research can also contribute to the better understanding of
interaction, time, reproducibility, and virtual site-specic-
ity in the broader context of art history particularly related
to new media art.
Rene G. Cepeda: renegcepeda@me.com. PhD thesis, University
of Sunderland, 2020.
the Masses
From the Implosion of Fantasies to the Explosion of the Political
Hassan Choubassi
With the industrial technologies of mechanical reproduc-
tion of information, the perceiver values the image in
reference to its ubiquitous state coming from its exhibi-
tion value and mass reproducibility. With the information
technologies of digital reproduction, the perceiver values
the image in reference to its instantaneous and interactive
state coming from live broadcast and online virtual real-
ity with a negation of the elements of physical space and
present time and thus a creation of an image that becomes
itself reality. With mobile technologies of smartphones,
the perceiver values the image in reference to its ubiquity,
its instantaneity, and its mobility altogether as a result of a
mixture of the criteria of the previous technologies com-
ing from space augmentation and mobile connectivity. e
three types of images produced with three dierent types of
technologies imply three dierent types of image interpre-
tation; in the rst, the image is perceived as chronicle with
linear signication, in the second the image is perceived as
fragmented with spherical signication, in the third, the
image is perceived as chronicle and fragmented together.
is image is so present, ubiquitous, actual and virtual at
the same time, an inated aggressive image to the extent of
violence, an image that negates the cleavage between actual
and virtual realities and that combines them together in an
exploding manner.
Hassan Choubassi: hassan.choubassi@liu.edu.lb. PhD thesis,
e European Graduate School, 2014.
CGI Glitch 1 (2003) by
Hassan Choubassi.
(© Hassan Choubassi)
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Top-Rated LABS Abstracts 2021 499
prograMMoIre
Refiguring Witchcraft for a Political Agency in the
Technocapitalist Present
Batool Desouky
How can we transform witchcra into a practice relevant
for modern-day capitalism? is paper delves into the early
relationship between capitalism and witchcra to describe
the anticapitalist roots of magic practices and what that
relationship can look like today as technology becomes a
ubiquitous tool of oppression.
Accompanied by reections on my own computational
art project, the paper journeys across four key terms:
magic, technology, agency, and archive. e project dis-
cussed uses a combinatorics algorithm to generate sigils
based on medieval Arabic mathematical studies of talis-
manic objects known in English as magic squares. rough
reecting on the project and process of making, I inter-
rogate notions of techno-solutionism, productivity, and
political agency.
By using methods long held in the domain of comput-
ing—the use of symbolic logic and language-to-function
association—I propose a form of tech-magic that high-
lights the presence of computational processes within
magic and proposes an alternative history for technology,
rooted in the history of magic. On the other hand, I articu-
late magic as a practice of executable intentionality to move
it away from the space of “glitch” and regure it as an out-
side agency, as opposed to a mistake from within the sys-
tem. e paper aims to coopt technology from capitalism
and rearticulate magic as a practice of subversive political
power.
Batool Desouky: batool.mak@gmail.com. MFA thesis, 2020.
DefInIng Data as an art MaterIal
Julie Freeman
Digital technology, and specically digital data, forms
the backbone of nearly all our communications including
machine to machine, human to machine, and, increasingly,
human to human. It is unsurprising that one of the most
prevalent materials of our time is used by artists to create
work.
is thesis denes data as an art material. It investigates
the variety of manifestations of data when used in art,
through the review of existing artwork and the develop-
ment of new artworks and visualizations.
rough the lens of conceptualizing data as an art mate-
rial, a denition and manifesto of data art is put forward.
In addition, a taxonomy for describing data as an art mate-
rial is proposed and its usage explored by applying it to a
number of data art descriptions and by analyzing existing
data artworks.
Temporal, biological, and real-time, terms from the tax-
onomy, are particularly relevant to the way in which digital
technology mediates our connection to nature. A descrip-
tion of a collaboration with Chris Faulkes, on the design
and implementation of an electronic tracking system to
collect real-time biological temporal data from a colony of
naked mole-rats, explores these forms of data within art-
work creation.
Translations of this data are explored in more detail
through the practical application of various computa-
tional techniques including scientic analysis, animation,
sonication, data visualization and so robotic objects.
e thesis demonstrates that inanimate objects, animated
through the translation of data, can have a body language
through which to eectively convey characteristics of liv-
ing things.
Julie Freeman: julie@translatingnature.org. PhD thesis, Queen
Mary University of London, 2018.
Naked Mole-Rat Redacted Portrait, digital photograph (2016) by Julie Freeman
& Lorna Ellen Faulkes, RAT.systems. (© Julie Freeman)
Screenshot of excerpt of Programmoire (2020) by Batool Desouky.
(© Batool Desouky)
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InterpretIng electroacoustIc
auDIoVIsual MusIc
Andrew Knight-Hill
Within the process of composition, the composer must
decide how to eectively draw relationships between these
time-based media and their various abstract and mimetic
materials. is process usually has no codied laws or
structures and results in relationships that are singular
to the individual artworks. e composer uses their own
experience and intuition in assessing how best to associate
sounds and images and they will use their own interpreta-
tion of the materials to evaluate the how successful they are
in realizing their intentions. But what is there to say that
the interpretation made by the composer bears any resem-
blance to interpretations made by audiences?
Utilizing a combination of empirical research, composi-
tion and scholarly study, the project investigated various the-
oretical approaches to interpretation, and the occurrence of
correlation between compositional intention and audience
interpretation. Models from dierent theoretical disciplines
were combined in order to build up a picture of the pro-
cesses involved in making interpretations, and to aid in the
rationalisation of empirical data. e application of trian-
gulated methodological approaches enabled
the research outcomes. e way in which
individuals build up interpretations from
non-codied abstract and mimetic materi-
als also provided a suitable case study for the
critique and assessment of various theoretical
approaches to interpretation.
e project challenges structuralist
approaches to interpretation, drawing together
theoretical materials and empirical research
ndings in support of a post-structrualist
model of interpretation that demonstrates the
absolutely vital role played by context—the
framing of the artwork in the consciousness of
the individual audience member.
Andrew Knight-Hill: a.hill@gre.ac.uk.
PhD thesis, De Montfort University, 2013.
500 Top-Rated LABS Abstracts 2021
Still from audiovisual composition Perpetual Motion (2012) by Andrew Knight-Hill.
(© Andrew Knight-Hill)
the coMMunIty Bee clInIc
Lisa Korpos
e Community Bee Clinic is a radical veterinary practice
and series of participatory, multimedia installations where
visitors can become emergency caregivers for malnour-
ished and ailing honeybees. rough the performance of
interspecies nursing care and use of speculative biomedical
objects, participants are invited to engage with nonhuman
bodies and ecologies in new ways and at new scales. is
multimodal project appropriates and reimagines the con-
cept of a medical clinic, reconguring objects, protocols,
and documentation methods in order to provide care for
its invertebrate patients.
Situated within the realms of speculative design and
social practice, the Community Bee Clinic explores themes
of vulnerability, agency, urgency, and intimacy. e inter-
disciplinary project also functions as an experimental
application of research on apian physiology, perception,
and stressors, invoking issues of environmental health,
interdependence, and nonhuman socio-ecologies. Integral
to the work is the notion of hybridity: both the physical
clinic installations and the project documentation oper-
ate to blur the lines between art and science, human and
honey bee, fact and aect, audience and participant, peda-
gogy and play, and expert and lay knowledge.
For more information, visit: www.communitybeeclinic.org
Lisa Korpos. Email: lisakorpos@gmail.com. MFA esis,
University of California, San Diego, 2019.
Video still from The Community Bee Clinic (Collected Patient Histories,
2018–2019 (2019) by Lisa Korpos. (© Lisa Korpos)
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MachIne learnIng anD notIons of the IMage
Rosemary Lee
is thesis addresses how visual artefacts of machine learn-
ing (ML) touch on vital issues in discourse surrounding
image production. ML refers to the notion of simulating
the process of information acquisition computationally,
and when applied to the generation of images, it enables
visual content to be inuenced by the statistical analysis
of data. While the increasing incorporation of ML into
various forms of visual media oers new possibilities to
produce visualisations from data, it in many ways builds on
existing modalities and historical narratives concerning the
technical production of images. rough practice-based
and theoretical research examining the work of artists
including Harun Farocki, Anna Ridler, Adam Harvey,
Pierre Huyghe, Hito Steyerl, and Trevor Paglen,
this thesis considers how the use of ML in con-
temporary art oers insight into key issues at the
intersection of several elds. is research seeks
to understand the mediating role played by visual
technologies, how processes and ideas that have
been present in visual media for much longer than
ML continue to color discourse, and to demon-
strate how images produced using ML may oer
new ways of approaching theories of the image.
Rosemary Lee: studio@rosemary-lee.com. PhD thesis,
IT-University of Copenhagen, 2020.
Top-Rated LABS Abstracts 2021 501
MoDel–DataBase–Interface
A study of the redesign of the ArtBase, and the role of user agency
in born-digital archives
Lozana Rossenova Mehandzhiyska
is thesis critically examines the researcher’s embedded
practice of redesigning the net art archive of digital arts
organization Rhizome—the ArtBase.
e archive operates as a network of relations between
users—including sta, artists, programmers, academ-
ics—and digital infrastructure. To expand the potential for
informed user interaction, this research develops an origi-
nal design framework for born-digital archives: Model–
Database–Interface (MDI). MDI traces and makes visible
the links between data model, database soware, and user
interface, reecting processes of institutional and commu-
nity-based classication, use, and maintenance.
is thesis demonstrates how MDI applies prototypes,
data visualizations, and user workshops to open up under-
lying data structures and processes to inspection and inter-
vention. Further, it discusses how the ArtBase redesign
adopts a linked open data (LOD) model to support ongo-
ing user engagement and collaboration. ereby MDI is
positioned as a conceptual and methodological framework
that centers user participation and critical meaning-mak-
ing beyond the redesign’s completion.
is study contributes to interface design theory and
practice by reimagining the ArtBase as a site for infrastruc-
tural inversion and user collaboration. Reaching beyond
the particular case of net art, the strategies discussed in this
thesis are applicable to a variety of digital archive contexts
that place value on the role of user agency.
Lozana Rossenova Mehandzhiyska: Lozana@lozanarossenova
.com. PhD thesis, London South Bank University, 2021.
Installation detail, Deconstructing Representation (2019) by
Rosemary Lee. (© Rosemary Lee)
Diagram of the Model–Database–Interface framework (2021) by Lozana
Rossenova Mehandzhiyska. (© Lozana Rossenova Mehandzhiyska)
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502 Top-Rated LABS Abstracts 2021
honoraBle MentIons
e editors of Leonardo wish to acknowledge the following authors of highly ranked abstracts.
ese abstracts are published online at www.leonardo.info/labs-.
Marcilon Almeida de Melo, “Urban Meta Image—poetic-critical visualization of urban dynamics”
Alejandro Araque Mendoza, “Laboratorio nómada medial Nosomos+, un lugar pretexto para el aprendizaje
signicativo y el diálogo transdisciplinar”
Najam-Ul Assar, “Digital Colonization and Ethical Reconstruction: Digitizing Public Heritage in Developing
Countries”
Phil Barton, “From Land Art to Eco Art: An exploration of Joseph Beuys’ pivotal social sculpture, Oaks—
City Forestation instead of City Administration as a bridge between the two to inform the author’s developing
practice”
Anthony Brooks, “Soundscapes: e Evolution of a Concept, Apparatus and Method Where Ludic Engagement in
Virtual Interactive Space Is a Supplemental Tool for erapeutic Motivation”
Jo Burzynska, “Tuning Sensory Terroir: Mapping correspondences between sound and wine in a crossmodal art
practice”
Haoran Chang, “Emersive VR: An Expanded Immersive VR Practice”
Alex Chechile, “Practical Applications of Dierence Tones in Electronic Music Composition and Synthesis”
Chiao-chi Chou, “e Transition and Practice of Subjectivity: Interactive Art Driven by Biosignals”
Sean Clark, “From Connected Digital Art to Cybernetic Ecologies”
Daniela Elne, “Cornelius, Nicholai, Phil and me”
Cameron Fraser, “Large String Array”
Megan Hines, “Art and Biotech: Bay Area Networks, –”
Derek Holzer, “Vector synthesis: a media archaeological investigation into sound-modulated light”
Laura Hopes, “Being Vulnerable: Distances of the Sublime Anthropocene”
You-Yang Hu, “Research and Development of an Active Bi Olfactory Display and Its Integration with Virtual
Reality”
Jacqueline Knight, “A Relational Ecology of Photographic Practices: Towards a Non-anthropocentric Approach to
Photography”
Charu Maithani, “e Gesturing Screen: Art and screen agency within postmedia assemblages”
Alex McLean, “Artist–Programmers and Programming Languages for the Arts”
Sam Meech, “Video in the Abyss—In the context of the digital, is analogue video feedback still useful as an
approach to making art?”
Clarissa Ribeiro, “Instants of Metamorphosis: e collective as process; the process as system”
Michael Straeubig, “Designing Playful Systems”
Matej Vakula, “Dark Design: Methodology for Ethics of Generative Modeling Practices in Biodesign Based on
Machine, AI and Animal Ethics”
Christine Veras, “Contemporary reinventions of early devices that icker and rotate : a particular type of
animated installation in the quest for an expanded animation experience”
Graham Wakeeld, “Real-Time Meta-Programming for Interactive Computational Arts”
Ashley Wong, “Emergent Economies of Art & Technology: Modes of Making, Circulating and Organizing in the
Contemporary Condition”
Sheung You, “Para-images: Cultural Ideas and Technical Apparatuses Beyond the Pictorial Surface”
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