Leonardo

Standing on a continental edge offers a staggering sense of seeing the edge of time, the edge of space. Iceland's Thingvellir National Park, where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates are visible above ground, exposes fault lines and fissures, the fracture of earth's lithosphere, a jagged divide of continental crust. The force of continental drift creates a liminal space, a chasm where the earth quite literally breaks apart. Yet Thingvellir is not a cinematic, volcanic river of magma, rather a 7-km-wide rift valley park you can walk through.

Witnessing where the earth moves under our feet raises profound questions about what edges portend today. There's a sense that humanity is on the verge of something fundamentally new, the brink of a new era with uncharted frontiers. The momentum toward Singularity underlies a mounting collective anxiety and wonder, seemingly inevitable, at times palpable, yet as invisible as shifting tectonic plates. To live on the edge is to live on the threshold of uncertainty, facing the thrill of adventure, the risk of unknown disaster. Fundamentally, an edge demarcates a border, the beginning or end of an area, an idea, or even an era. We are living on the edge.

How does this edge offer a vantage point to guide us into the future we are co-creating? After all, a competitive edge offers an advantage, a favorable margin for forward movement. What if the edge of our time is less a border separating before and after than a seam interweaving what has been with what will become, even as we undertake the messy, mycelial process of becoming?

To be on edge is to be hyper-alert or nervous about what is ahead. Yet to be on the edge of your seat is to be so excited with anticipation you can hardly wait. To reach your edge is to approach your full potential. In its active state, "to edge" is to move or force gradually, to advance incremental change. To be edgy is to be forward-thinking, outside the box, and avant garde.

Leonardo embraces edgy ideas, provocative experiments, and art-science-tech entanglements through the work of our community and colleagues across the Leosphere. This issue of Leonardo features work entangling human and nonhuman life, intelligences, sensory experience, and creative practice. "Entangled Poetics" (Anne Royston) explores different approaches that bioartists take working with nonhumans, while "In-Habitant" (Umut Tasa) asks how we might consider nonhuman relations in the urban wild of Istanbul. Considering human entanglement with sound technology, experiments in "noise-canceling" smartphone cameras address issues of self-image and anxiety (Carloalberto Treccani). SoundRunner, an arts-led collaboration between an electroacoustic composer (David Berezan) and a sports scientist (Costas Karageorghis) develop "athletic-sonic interactivity," experiments with music adapted to running performance. Examining "Collaborations in Art in Medicine," Fiona Johnstone presents the emerging entanglements of biomedical art collaborations and the framework of critical medical humanities. In collaboration with ASU partners, Leonardo explored how to Seize the Moment (Briana Noonan, Jennifer Strickland), channeling entanglement with climate grief into climate action, as emphasized in "MAY WE HAVE YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE?" (Rachel Bowditch, Karen Jean Martinson).

Confronting the magnitude of complex entanglement and planetary uncertainty calls on humankind to conjure the imagination, compassion, and fortitude required to edge forward despite formidable if not existential threats. If ever there was a time for real courage, it is now. Harper Lee defines real courage in To Kill a Mockingbird as "when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."

Begin anyway. Begin again and again. [End Page 334]