Leonardo is celebrating its 50th anniversary. It was founded in the 1960s by Frank Malina and others to foster collaboration between artists and scientists. During this time, many important institutions and events bridging the arts and sciences emerged, including the Leonardo Journal, Experiments in Art and Technology, and the Exploratorium. Leonardo helped build a global network of practitioners across disciplines. The document argues this network must now help redesign science and engineering to address modern challenges like climate change through more open, team-based, and socially embedded approaches.

2. Leonardo is Dead
Long live the Leonardas
Roger Malina

4. Leonardo founding
networks
• Frank Malina.. J Needham..J
Brownowski.. C P Snow Max
Bill..Buckminster Fuller..C H
Waddington..E
Gombrich..Robert
Maxwell...R Arnheim. G
Kepes, John Holloway,
J.J. Gibson..Liliane Lijn..Roy
Ascott,Pauline Oliveros. Sonia
Sheridan..Jasia Reichardt
Gyorgy Kepes..Jonas Salk…
Takis.. R Arnheim, Frank
Oppenheimer, Michele Emmer,
Sheila Pinkel…………

5. 1960s interesting years
• Leonardo Journal Paris
• Gyorgy Kepes: Founds Center For Visual Arts
at MIT, led to Media Lab
• Frank Oppenheimer founds Exploratorium in
San Francisco
• Jasia Reichardt Cybernetics Serendipity
Exhibition in London
• Experiments in Art and Technology NY
• New Tendencies in Zagreb
• ……1968…..a time of cultural phase change

6. Leonardo as one Node in a
Planetary Network of Villages

7. The Importance of Intellectual Dating

8. Across Institutional, Social, geographic
and Disciplinary Boundaries

9. Frank Malina
1912-1981
• Born Brenham Texas
• Bohemians .. 1880s
• 1918 Czech republic
• 20s Brenham HS
• Texas A and M
• Caltech, JPL, Aerojet
• 1947 UNESCO Paris
• 1953 Kinetic Artist
• 1960 Intl Academy
Astronautics
• 1968 Leonardo Art-
Science Journal

10. The Mysterious Effectiveness of
Mathematics
Von Karman “Vortex Street”
Mathematics and Engineering..
It was a hard sell to convince
the engineers to integrate
mathematics into their practices
Now lets address the
mysterious effectiveness of the
arts in the sciences
•Thank you Michele Emmer
•Istvan Hargittai
•Jacques Mandebrojt……

12. A high Tolerance for Strange
People
Jack Parsons
Amateur Chemist
Invention and patenting of
solid rocket motor fuels
Led to first human object to
reach out of space
Interest in ‘esoterica”
Aha moment on a Caltech
roof

14. Tired of Painting Dead Fish
The Mysterious Effectiveness of Instruments
– Our Senses are Filters not
Windows on the World
– Other scales of size, time, other
sources of energy
– Some aspects of the world cannot
be understood until we have
invented the right instrument
– Augmented Senses
– Extended Senses
– New Senses
– The arts/design as sensory
expansion
– Thank you David Rosenboom, JJ
Gibson, Ernst Gombrich……

15. The Leonardo “Communities of
Practice” Today
• 15,000 have
published in Leonardo
• Planetary, allmedia
• All areas of science
and technology
• The villages have
become small towns
• Lets not grow them
into cities

17. USA National Academies of Science,
Engineering, Medicine Report ( May 2018)
•The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with
Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher
Education: Branches from the Same Tree
•Released by the US National Academies on May 7
2018 collect evidence and models for integration of
the arts and humanities and STEM/M fields
• Welcome Ashley Bear, thank you JD Talasek

18. Leonardo 50th
Birthday
• Recommended closing Leonardo on our 50th
– Vision of the founders has been accomplished
• If you have to plug it in, it cannot be art
– Art forms enabled by new media and
technologies becoming dominant art forms
• Art is local not international
– Artists and scientists collaborate over the world
• Artists don’t use art theory
– Neuroscience,, Computer Science ,AI
• Artists don’t write, Art Critics do
– Artists and designers can now publish as well
as create and perform their art

19. Lets cut down the tree of knowledge and
enable an ecology of knowledge for the
anthropocene

20. And now==And now==
• the network of villages has helped
redesign the arts for the 21st
century
•Now lets help redesign the sciencesNow lets help redesign the sciences
and engineering and medicineand engineering and medicine
•Overcome the tragedy of the internetOvercome the tragedy of the internet
•Anticipating the traumas of climateAnticipating the traumas of climate
changeschanges

21. The Leonardo founders Context in
1950s
• A generation traumatized by WW II
• Dedicated to rebuilding Europe and
international cooperation in both sciences
and arts—UN..EU..NATO…..UNESCO
– As a force for global development and peace
• A belief that the best minds of artists and
scientists were needed ..woven together..
( C P Snow)
• Cultural optimism science and technology-
“science the endless frontier”

22. •From the individual “genius”
•to hybrid ‘genius’ teams
•train for heterogeneous
transdisciplinary collaborations
• Institutions are badly designed
•Bridging Cultures, Over
planetary distances, multilingual
•But grounded in local knowledge
•No best practices, but many
good practices
• We still award Phds to
individuals not teams…….
•From a patral to a matral culture

23. Does Science Itself Need Redesigning ?
• 1945 « Science the Endless Frontier »
report, Vannevar Bush
• "New frontiers of the mind are before us,
• and if they are pioneered with the same
vision, boldness, and drive with which we
have waged this war
• we can create a fuller and more fruitful
employment and a fuller and more fruitful
life."--FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT November
17, 1944.
• This vision of science: science for the
winning of “wars”.. War on Cancer… War
on Drugs… rather than co-design !!!
• The problem of the Anthropocene is not a
war but a systemic, cybernetic, complex
system collapse
23

24. Now we,you, have to help Redesign Science and
Engineering
• We need to redesign the
scientific methods
• given the sciences of
complexity. New concepts
of causality, new maths
• - existence of big data, AI
• -new instruments that can
study our own minds
• cog science can help
redesign human methods
• Citizen Science and
Professional Amateurs
• Redesign the social
embedding of science
• Helga Nowotny former
president of the
European Research
Council called for
‘socially robust science
• artists and designers
and the humanities to
help us redesign
science
• Open Science

25. Change Our Metaphors
from the Tree of Knowledge to the Ecology of
Knowledge
credit: Botero