Visionary Pioneers of Media Art
GOLDEN NICA
Documentation
The journal Leonardo was founded in 1968 in Paris by kinetic artist and aerospace pioneer Frank Malina and published by Pergamon Press. The US-American researcher and thought leader strove to establish an international platform for artists whose work focused mostly on science and new technologies.
After Frank Malina’s death in 1981, this vision was carried on by his son, Roger Malina, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1982, together with Frank Oppenheimer and Robert Maxwell, two founding members of Leonardo, he launched the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST). The non-profit organization addressed the growing need on the part of members of the art, science, and technology communities to engage in networking in the form of conferences, symposia, festivals, lecture programs, and competitions, to inspire one another, and to enter into new alliances. All the while, the Leonardo journal has reported on these activities and constantly presented current experiments, pilot projects, and new collaborations. This was the beginning of the Leonardo network.
Ever since its inception, the Leonardo community has nurtured transnational and interdisciplinary collaborative projects in the USA and abroad, propagating and documenting the most creative and most promising ideas of our time.
