The LASERs are a national program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversation with an audience. See the program for the whole series.
The event is free and open to everybody.
Email me if you want to be added to the mailing list for the LASERs.
Like previous evenings,
the agenda includes some presentations of art/science projects,
news from the audience, and time for casual socializing/networking.
This event is kindly sponsored by the Minerva Foundation.
Where: UC Berkeley Extensions,
Room 110, Barrows Hall - see this page
Campus map
What:
- 6:30-6:55:
Zann Gill (former NASA scientist) on
"Resolving Prediction's Paradox: collaborative intelligence ecosystems"
Collaborative intelligence characterizes distributed, multi-agent networks... Read more
- 6:55-7:20:
Jennifer Parker (UC Santa Cruz) on "Publishing in Public: Breaking Down Academic Silos to Create Trans-Disciplinary Research"
Highlighting new works created by artists and scientists from the UCSC OpenLab Network... Read more
- 7:20-7:40: BREAK. Before or after the break, anyone in the audience currently working within the intersections of art and science will have 30 seconds to share their work. Please present your work as a teaser so that those who are interested can seek you out during social time following the event.
- 7:40-8:05:
Cheryl Leonard (Composer) on "Music from High Latitudes"
Making music out of sounds, objects and experiences from the polar regions. Read more
- 8:05-8:30:
Wayne Vitale (Gamelan Sekar Jaya) on "Between Ancient Texts and Three Screens"
An ancient Hindu text was given new dimensions in the multimedia event "Makrokosma Bali" by an Indonesian gamelan ensemble and a team of US-based visual, audio and software artists... Read more
- 8:30pm-9:00pm: Discussions, networking
You can mingle with the speakers and the audience
See also...
Stanford interdisciplinary panels
CODAME Festival
Stanford events calendar
DASERs
Art, Technology, Culture Colloquia
ScienceSchmoozer
Previous Art/Science Evenings
Bios:
- Zann Gill started her career as a researcher for Buckminster Fuller. Early interest in Fuller's concepts for "World Game" to achieve environmental sustainability and "design science" sparked her focus on cross-disciplinary innovation, including a networked system of urban innovation as a complex adaptive system. She moved to Australia in 1989 to work on a proposal from the Japanese government to the Australian government to build an IT "city of the future", the so-called Multifunction Polis (MFP). At NASA she developed plans for an Institute for Advanced Space Concepts (IASC), a collaboratory BEACON (Bio-Evolutionary Advanced Concepts) and the astrobiology program for NASA University. Zann is currently working with Australia's National ICT Center Excellence (NICTA) to reposition the "eco-sustainable city of the future" initiative to harness smart systems technology, ubiquitous computing, and social networks. Check out her websites: Microbes-Mind Forum, Planet Innovation, Books, and Collaborative Intelligence .
- Cheryl Leonard is a San Francisco-based composer, performer and instrument builder. Over the last decade she has focused on investigating sounds, structures and objects from the natural world. Her recent works cultivate stones, wood, water, ice, sand, shells, feathers and bones as musical instruments. Leonard uses microphones to explore the intricate sounds hidden within these instruments and develops compositions that highlight the unique voices they contain. She has also composed numerous soundtracks for film, video, dance and theater, and created sounds for museum exhibits Her commissions include works for Kronos Quartet, Illuminated Corridor and Michael Straus.
- Jennifer Parker is the Founding Director of OpenLab, an Associate Professor of Digital Art and New Media, and the Chair of the Art Department at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her research is rooted in sculpture, interactive and kinetic art, and cross-disciplinary and collaborative research. Current and past projects explore new methodologies for art making that engage art and science thinking. She is co-founder and director of The OpenLab Network at UCSC and has been working with Barney Hyanes since 2008 developing the SonicSENSE interactive art platform. She has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. Local venues include Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF Camerawork; The Lab; Gray Area Foundation for the Arts; Kala Art Institute; and ZER01:10SJ Biennial.
- Piero Scaruffi is a cognitive scientist who has lectured in three continents and published several books on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, the latest one being "The Nature of Consciousness" (2006). He pioneered Internet applications in the early 1980s and the use of the World-Wide Web for cultural purposes in the mid 1990s. His poetry has been awarded several national prizes in Italy and the USA. His latest book of poems and meditations is "Synthesis" (2009). As a music historian, he has published ten books, the latest ones being "A History of Rock and Dance Music" (2009) and "A History of Jazz Music" (2007). His latest book of history is "A History of Silicon Valley" (2011). The first volume of his free ebook "A Visual History of the Visual Arts" appeared in 2012. His latest book is "Demystifying Machine Intelligence" (2013). He has also written extensively about cinema and literature.
- Wayne Vitale is an composer, educator, and scholar who has long been inspired by the music of Bali, Indonesia. He has worked with many of Bali's greatest musicians, extensively documenting their work, and leading myriad projects bringing them together with diverse artists and audiences. His works for bronze gamelan, spanning a stylistic range from traditional to experimental/multimedia, have been performed by noted gamelan orchestras in Bali, and have directly influenced the evolution of Balinese kebyar music. The most recent was Makrokosma Bali, performed by the gamelan orchestra of Tunjuk, Bali and a US-based design/live media crew, and presented by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in 2011. The second phase of this tryptich, Mikrokosma 5, will premiere in 2015. it will focus on the "micro" aspects of Bali-Hindu cosmology and be scored for an octet of musicians.
Extended abstracts:
Crowdsourcing platforms are poised for a breakthrough - capacity to evolve, through use, toward Ecosystem Utility that exploits synergies across computer data processing and human pattern recognition. Based on study of how evolution operates, and how thriving ecosystems provide platforms for co-evolution of species, collaborative intelligence characterizes distributed, multi-agent networks where each unique agent is an autonomous contributor to its collaborative problem-solving ecosystem. This talk will show how these principles are applied in the project EarthDECKS (Distributed Evolving Collaborative Knowledge Systems).
OpenLab is a research center at the University of California Santa Cruz. OpenLab targets complex education issue of national significance regarding the ability of art and science researchers to collaborate on research endeavors. The goal of the OpenLab is to help change the current status by providing shared research facilities and create a network for collaborative discourse fueled by academic communities, arts and science communities, and industry. OpenLab is currently pursuing the physical development of new collaborative laboratories on campus as spaces to foster this research and establish an on-line social networking system for faculty and students to create projects. Laboratories and studios in both the arts and the sciences will be accessible to users in OpenLab. Within an immersive studio/lab environment we share skills and knowledge across disciplinary boundaries between science, education, engineering, design, and the arts while sharing expertise in collaborative research methodologies.
Making music out of sounds, objects and experiences from the polar regions.
Composer and instrument-builder Cheryl Leonard has been making music out of sounds, objects and experiences from the polar regions. In 2009 she travelled to Palmer Station, Antarctica on a grant from the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, and this past September-October she participated in the Arctic Circle expeditionary residency program in Spitsbergen (aka Svalbard). Leonard will discuss working with sound at the ends of the earth and share examples of the field recordings, instruments, and compositions that have grown out of her polar adventures.
In 2011 composer Wayne Vitale collaborated with a 25-musician gamelan ensemble from Bali, and US-based visual, audio, set, and live-media artists to create Makrokosma Bali. The work was premiered at the Asian Art Museum on May 13-15, 2011, in conjunction with the exhibition Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance, the most ambitious presentation of Balinese arts in US history. Supported by the Creative Work Fund, Makrokosma Bali combined and contrasted the sound worlds, musical aesthetics, and ancient Hindu philosophy of Bali with more Western conceptions of the universe, from macro (the cosmos) to micro (a human cell). Scenes of ceremonial ritual and the forging of red-hot bronze by gongsmiths were juxtaposed with images of the cosmos on all scales, ranging from galaxies to a drop of water. This imagery was projected onto multiple screens and surfaces, including the musicians and instruments themselves. This presentation will focus on one aspect of Makrokosma Bali: The interaction of modern technologies, such as HD flipcams and live-media programs, with the recitation of ancient texts in Bali-Hindu performance practice.
Photos and videos
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