roger malina presentation at Tsinghua University, Beijing for Leo50 celebration

3. The Leonardo Journal
The Next 50
Roger F Malina
Executive Editor the Leonardo Publications at MIT Press
Zuangshi 60th Anniversary
Tsinghua, Beijing, Sept 29 2018

4. My Narrative Today
• Personal background which biases my personal and professional approaches
• The Leonardo “Publications”
• Enabling the work of hybrids and amphibians whose work together bridge
• The arts, design and humanities and
science/technology/engineering/medicine
• We are not creating new disciplines, inter/multi/trans-disciplinarily is
not “a” discipline
• Helping make a “community of practice: visible to itself”
• Working with the community to re-design and evolve itself for the future
• A snapshot of the last 50 years
• Experimental Publishing, or reinventing the professional association for the
21st century in face of the ‘tragedy of the internet’.
• Leonardo is dead, Long Live the new Leonardo teams

5. My Career in Science
– Director NASA EUVE Astronomy
Observatory
– Director Observatory Marseille
Provence
– Telescope Design , Engineering design
– Data Analysis Design
• .BIG DATA,OPEN DATA
– Satellite Operations. TQM, Process
improvement
– Cosmology Group
– We are badly designed to understand
the universe – most doesn’t emit light

6. Roger Malina
• PhD in Astrophysics, MIT, Berkeley
• An “Astro-holick” -deep disciplinary
expert then
• Executive Editor Leonardo art-
science-technology 1982
• NOW Art-Scienceresearcher UTDallas
ARSCILAB in collaboration with
Design Prof Cassini Nazir
• Occasionally I take a secret drink of
astronomy
• ,
6

7. ArtScilab @ ATEC University of Texas at Dallas
• Opened 2013 with design professor Cassini Nazir
• We work on research that requires collaboration between artists,
designers, scientists, engineers, humanities researchers
• Cultural Timeliness ( why now ?)
• Society Urgency ( justify cost of collaboration )
– Our current societies are unsustainable
– We must redesign Culture

8. Recognizing our implicit biases
• ‘scientist” using the scientific “methods” to make sense of the world
so that “we” can ‘pilot through chaos’ and survive
• The human senses are biased, inventing new instruments to
augment our senses
• I am a positivist and an atheist
• Western male of Czech/Texan and English extraction
• Have worked in USA (MIT, Berkeley, UT Dallas), France (CNRS), UK
(University College London)
• 68 years old, married, 3 children ( data scientist, medical
entrepreneur, medical student)
• extrovert, social/collaborative, poetry as a way of thinking aloud

9. We underestimate how our nature
impacts what we know and can know
• Einstein:
•“The universe of ideas is
just as independent of the
nature of our experience as
clothes are of the form of the
human body”
• Varela:
•All knowledge is conditioned
by the structure of the
knower
• Stelarc and his “third arm”:

10. *
The Leonardo
Organisations
• My father Founded Leonardo Journal 1968 Paris
• Founded two non-profits (Paris, San Francisco)
• Promoting and documenting the interactions of
the arts, sciences and new technologies.
• For Scientists deeply engaged in the arts and
humanities
• For Artists Seeking to appropriate science and
technology for cultural purposes
• For scholars studying the interaction of the arts,
sciences and technology
• Champions writing by artists about their own
work.
• Peer review. Currently 2th in google scholar
visual art journal citation rankings
• VVesna, J. Gimzewski, Blue Morph

11. 12,000 authors , MIT Press
Leonardo Book Series, Journals, e-zines
• 1967 – 1995 the central issues were art and ICTechnology
• 1995- Art-Science as a burgeoning nexus
• 2010 STEM to STEAM… Collaboration/Innovation/Entrepreneurs
• Design , Art and Humanities/STEM

12. Distributed Editorial Network- collective of > “100”
• Executive Editor- strategy and experimentation
• Editors in Chief Sean Cubbitt UK Book Series, USA Music Journal, Michael Punt,
UK Leonardo reviews, Sheila Pinkel US Leonardo Abstracts, Leonardo LASERS 20
countries, Leonardo Electronic Almanac Lanfranco Aceti, US.
• Editorial boards, “substantial” geographic, disciplinary and gender
heterogeneity
• Thematic Section “editors in chief” ( eg Ken Friedman “PhD in Art and Design”)
• Peer review panels ( 200 individuals), volunteer
• “Academic” journal format patterned on 20th C scientific publications
• Single blind peer review, normally 3 peer reviewers editorial, 30% acceptance
• 4 person editorial staff (silicon valley), MIT Press strategic partner
• 1500 paper subscriptions, 400.000 pdf downloads in 2017

13. Leonardo is but one node in a network of networked ‘villages”
with Hybrid labs..and Renewable Futures…and…and..Ars
Electronica…Manizales

14. With partners in “redesign”
• Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, ARTS
CATALYST, ISEA, ANAT, YASMIN, CAA,
Trust me I am an Artist, Future
Everything, Noema, Kosmica, LASER
hosts, Leo50 Birthday party hosts
and …- a network of > 100 “villages”
• That are helping overcome the
TRAGEDY of the INTERNET
• We apologize for the techno-philia
and techno-optimism we often
promoted in the last century
• We have learned some lessons

15. 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 work and show over the world
• Artists don’t use art theory
– Neuroscience, CogSci, Computer Science , AI
• Artists don’t write, Art Critics do
– Artists and designers can now publish as well as create and
perform their art

16. Artists don’t collaborate,
they work solo.
•Perhaps the age of the individual genius is over
•PhDs are still only awarded to individuals
•Start the century of the teams “exhibiting” genius
like behaviors ?
•Ways of creating transdisciplinary collaborations
•We need to support disciplinary, cultural migrants
and diasporas
•Leonardo is DEAD
•500 years ago May 2 1519 age 67
• Long live collaborative and team LEONARDOS ?

17. Is Science in Trouble ?
• 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."--
ROOSEVELT 1944.
• Vision of science: science for the winning of
“wars”.. War on Cancer… War on Drugs… rather
than co-design !!!
• Anthropocene is not a war but a systemic,
cybernetic, complex system collapse
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18. Now the arts, design must help Redesign Science and
Engineering
• Redesign the scientific methods
• Sciences of complexity
• Computer simulations as hypotheses
• New concepts of causality (correlation,retrodiction)
• Epistemological Inversion due to big data
• Instruments that can study our own minds, implicit biases
• AI making discoveries independent of human
intervention
• The scientific method has always been redesigned

19. Redesign the social embedding of science
• H. Nowotny, former president of the E.R. C. called for ‘socially robust
science
• Include artists and designers in all big data projects
• Redesigning the University and the PhD
– PhD in Art and Design underway
– PhD to train ‘for research’ and “through research”
– Mismatch between long term research careers and PhD production
– Training teams not just individuals
• Funding citizen science, open science, professional amateurs
• Address the rising concerns about non-reproducible science and
fake data , predatory publishing, the tragedy of the internet

20. Changing Metaphors as we enter the Data Culture.
‘2’ cultures of CP Snow are over, universities have the wrong structures

21. ARTECA.MIT.EDU
ARTECA an experimental publishing,Research
platform for the art/science/technology community
of practice
Start: Hybrid open access and subscription access to
hundreds of MIT Press ebooks and 100,000s articles
in the “art science technology” field.
Free “open” access to all those who contribute
content, to the quality and the pertinence of the
content – a ‘gated’ commons
Will tackle how to ‘capture’ the key “grey literature”
A growing fraction of key “literature” doesn’t go
through publisher, Much is archivally unstable –
often not highly referenced on search engines (more

22. ARTECA.MIT.EDU Leonardo Collaboration and
Publication Platform Multi Lingual, Multi-Modal
Open free access to all Leonardo authors, editors, peer reviewers
Business model: mixed open access, institutional subscriptions

23. CreativeDisturbance.Org
Podcast driven professional documentation
Multilingual 17 languages
• Imagining the future of translation
engines so we can all write in the
languages we think, work and live “in”
• Art/Sci/Tech Collaboration Platform
• we want to create the first trandisciplinary
intellectual ‘dating’ service- BRAIN-DER
• IF YOU WANT TO PUBLISH A PODCAST
IN ANY LANGUAGE…send it to us

24. ARTECA.MIT.EDU : a “gated commons” on the internet
where we are trying to invent gates to keep out
- the hackers, the government spies, the sloppy researchers
so we know the ‘provenance’, so we have some trust

25. Contemporary Hybrids helping redesign science
Francois-Joseph Lapointe
PhD Molecular Biology and Phd
Dance
String Theorist Lisa Randall with
Composer Hector Parra and
Multi-media artist Matthew
Richie

26. Creating safe places for enabling new Hybrid and
Nomadic Teams and Individuals

27. I come for wisdom from the Older Child to the Younger
Child ! From the older to the younger civilizations
60th Birthday (1958) 50th Birthday (1968)