The LASERs (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) are an international program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversation with an audience. See the program for the whole international series and the dates for the Bay Area.
Chaired by cultural historian Piero Scaruffi.
Send an email to "scaruffi at stanford dot edu" if you want to be added to the mailing list for the LASERs.
Where: on Zoom.
Click here to register
or here.
Program (the order of the speakers might change):
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Michael Jewett (Stanford University) on "Revolutionizing Protein Manufacturing with Cell-Free Protein Synthesis"
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Patricia Blessing (Stanford/ Art History) on "Water in Islamic Architecture"
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Kat Mustatea (Media Artist) on "What does it mean to have a voice? Art in an increasingly algorithmic world"
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Will Tavlin (Author) on "Casual Viewing"
Bios:
- Patricia Blessing is Associate Professor in Stanford University's Department of Art & Art History. She specializes in the art and architecture of the Islamic world, with a focus on the eastern Mediterranean from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. In her current book project, Arches Like Rainbows and Floating Palaces: Ottoman Water Architectures, Blessing analyses how in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire, buildings were designed in relationship to nature and climate, with an emphasis on water. Blessing co-directs the project Reimagining Royal Space. The project aims to reimagine and digitally reconstruct the original appearance of the largely destroyed late twelfth-century Qilij Arslan II Kiosk in Konya, based on the close study historical photographs of the building, extant material remains in museums across the world, and the in-situ structural elements. At Stanford, the project is housed at the Center for Spatial and Digital Analysis (CESTA). Blessing is the author of two books, Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest: Islamic Architecture in the Lands of Rum, 1240–1330 (Ashgate, 2014; Turkish translation Koç University Press, 2018) and Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-century Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2022). With Eiren L. Shea (Grinnell College) and Elizabeth Dospel Williams (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Blessing co-authored Medieval Textiles across Eurasia, c. 300-1400 CE (Cambridge University Press, 2023), a brief introduction to the study of textiles in a born-digital format. She is the co-editor of Architecture and Landscape in Medieval Anatolia, 1100-1500, with Rachel Goshgarian (Edinburgh University Press, 2017); Textile in Architecture: From the Middle Ages to Modernity, with Didem Ekici and Basile Baudez (Routledge, 2023) and The Making of Modern Muslim Selves Through Architecture, with Farhan S. Karim (Intellect, 2023).
- Michael Jewett is a Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University. He received his B.S. from UCLA and PhD from Stanford University in 2005, both in Chemical Engineering. He completed postdoctoral studies at the Center for Microbial Biotechnology in Denmark and the Harvard Medical School, and was a guest professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich). His research group focuses on advancing synthetic biology research to support planet and societal health, with applications in medicine, manufacturing, sustainability, and education. He is the recipient of the NIH Pathway to Independence Award, David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, Camille-Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and a Finalist for the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists, among others. He is the co-founder of SwiftScale Biologics (acquired by National Resilience), Stemloop, Inc., Synolo, and Pearl Bio. Jewett is a Fellow of AIMBE, AAAS, and NAI.
- Kat Mustatea is a transmedia playwright and artist whose experiments with language, live art, and the computational uncanny, articulate the absurdities of being human in an increasingly algorithmic world. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally at Ars Electronica, Linz (AT), New Images Festival, Paris (FR), CPH:DOX Lab, Copenhagen (DK), New York Live Arts, New York (US), The Cube at Moss Arts Center, Blacksburg (US), The Ferst Center, Atlanta (US), Roulette, Brooklyn (US), and Fabrica, Treviso (IT), and she has held residencies and fellowships at the New Museum’s NEW INC, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, the Orchard Project, and New York University’s ITP/IMA Program. Her TED talk, about AI, agency, and puppetry, offers a novel take to the meaning of creative machines, and her project BodyMouth, an instrument for embodied language, was a finalist for the Guthman Prize and the Lumen Prize, and was featured nationally on CBS Sunday Morning (Click here for CBS News' report on her project "BodyMouth").
- Will Tavlin is a writer and journalist based in New York City, known for his critical analyses of the film industry, particularly concerning the impact of digital platforms like Netflix. His work has been featured in publications such as n+1 Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, and Bookforum. In his essay "Casual Viewing," published in n+1 Magazine on December 16, 2024, Tavlin examines how Netflix's business model has transformed the film industry, affecting both the production and consumption of movies. Tavlin has also contributed to The Forward, writing about events at Brown University related to the Nakba, the 1948 Palestinian exodus. Additionally, he has appeared on podcasts such as The Distraction, where he discussed the evolution of Netflix and its influence on the film industry.
- Piero Scaruffi is a cultural historian 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 "Intelligence is not Artificial" (2013). He has also written extensively about cinema and literature. He founded the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) in 2008. Since 2015 he has been commuting between California and China, where several of his books have been translated.
Photos and videos of this evening
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