Frank J. Malina — Leonardo journal founded

1968

Artists: Frank J. Malina · Year: 1968 · Medium: Peer-reviewed academic journal on art, science, and technology · Substrate: Quarterly print publication (later digital); continuous publication since 1968 · Place: Paris / Oxford · Institution: Pergamon Press (original publisher); MIT Press (from 1988); International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (ISAST) from 1982 Frank J. Malina was an unlikely figure to have founded the most important academic journal on art and technology. He had been a rocket engineer — a co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and technical director of JPL's earliest work in the 1940s — before political troubles in the McCarthy era drove him to Paris, where he spent the second half of his life as a kinetic artist. In 1968, already an established figure in Parisian kinetic art, he founded the journal Leonardo through Pergamon Press, with the editorial mandate of publishing peer-reviewed scholarly work at the intersection of art, science, and technology. Leonardo has been continuously published since 1968 — first by Pergamon, then by ISAST, then by MIT Press from 1988 onward — and it is the longest-running academic journal in the English language dedicated to this intersection. Its scope has evolved over the decades: early issues published kinetic and cybernetic art theory, 1970s issues covered computer art extensively, 1990s issues tracked net art and VR, 2000s and 2010s issues have engaged with biomedia, AI, and digital preservation. Every major theorist of the field — Gene Youngblood, Roy Ascott, Jasia Reichardt, Christiane Paul, Margaret Boden, Simon Penny — has published in Leonardo. The journal's historical significance is larger than any single issue. Leonardo has been the institutional continuity of art-and-technology discourse across five decades, through periods when the field had no other scholarly venue. Much of the English-language critical literature on computer art exists because Leonardo published it. Malina died in 1981. Lore Malina's 1940s rocket work at JPL was technically exceptional — he designed the first American sounding rocket and supervised the development of JPL's early solid-fueled rockets — and his political exile from American engineering was a direct consequence of 1950s anti-Communist investigations. His shift to kinetic art in Paris was not a retreat but a continuation: he had always been interested in visual science, and his post-engineering career produced substantial kinetic light sculptures alongside the journal. His son Roger Malina, a physicist, took over as editor of Leonardo after his father's death. Sources • Leonardo — journal archives at MIT Press (mitpressjournals.org/leon) • ISAST (Leonardo organization) • Archives of American Art — Frank J. Malina papers