Special LASER for the Bay Area Science Festival 2011

San Francisco,
2 November 2011
c/o swissnex

An event about Artists and Scientists who work/think/imagine/engage at the intersections of the Arts and Science.

Chaired by Piero Scaruffi (p@scaruffi.com) and Vanessa Drigo
Part of a series of cultural events


During the Bay Area Science Festival, Leonardo ISAST and swissnex invite you to a special Leonardo Art/Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER).

The event is free and open to everybody but please register at this page

Like previous evenings, the agenda includes some presentations of art/science projects, news from the audience, and time for casual socializing/networking.

In order to facilitate the networking, feel free to send me the URL of a webpage that describes your work or the organization you work for. I will publish a list on this webpage before the day of the event so that everybody can check what everybody else is doing. (Not mandatory, just suggested).

See also...

  • Wonder Dialogue at Stanford
  • LASERs
  • DASERs
  • Bay Area Science Festival
  • Swissnex events


    Program:
    • 6:00pm-6:30pm: Socializing/networking.
      6:30pm-8:00pm: Presentations
    • John Edmark (Stanford Univ) on "Geometric Patterns of Change" Transforming and kinetic works from an ongoing exploration into spatial patterns of symmetry and growth, focusing on those arising out of logarithmic spiral structures, Fibonacci numbers, and the golden ratio.
    • Deborah Munk (Recology) on "The Art of Recycling" An overview of the Artist in Residence Program at Recology and will focus on a few of the 70 artists who have had residencies
    • 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.
    • Robert Buelteman (Photographer) on "Photography Without the Camera" The application of high-voltage electrical currents and hand-delivered fiber optic light can create fine-art photographs of living plants through a creative process inspired by Japanese ink-brush painting and improvisational jazz
    • Therese Lahaie (Artist) on "Longing for the Background" An unusual combination of glass, steel, motors, lighting and photography is employed in an investigation of the sciences, the natural world and contemplative practice.
    • Christian Gonzenbach (Artist) and Martin Pohl (Univ of Geneva) on "QUARC - Quantum art connection" Understanding the universe via experiments and sculptures using ordinary objects thanks to a collaboration between a physicist and an artist
    • 8:00pm-9:00pm: Discussions, more socializing You can mingle with the speakers and the audience

    Bios:
    • Robert Buelteman has published 4 books of photographs and thirteen limited-edition portfolios of his work. He has been honored with three residencies at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the subject of his monograph Eighteen Days in June (2000), as well as a three year residency at the Santa Fe Institute. He is currently working on a new collection of images as a guest of Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. His work is found in the permanent collections of he Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Santa Fe Institute, Yale University Art Museum, Stanford University and numerous corporate and private collections as well.
    • John Edmark teaches design, color theory, and animation at Stanford University. His creative investigations range from geometric kinetic works and transformable objects, to products for storage, kitchen, and creative play. Previously, he researched 3-D virtual environments at Bell Laboratories. He has Masters degrees in Product Design (Stanford), and Computer Science (Columbia), and is named inventor on nine U.S. utility patents. His other interests include hyper-stereo landscape photography, ultra-light backpacking, and throat singing.
    • Christian Gonzenbach is an experimenter and an explorer at the edge between the normal and the bizarre. It is the unexpected, the little weird thing, that the artist focuses on. Hence he has created installations in which a landscape is made out of corn flakes, a video in which all the people are pickles, that play soccer, go for a dance or a boxing match, etc. His works look familiar but always disorient the viewer.
    • Therese Lahaie studied Fine Art at Emmanuel College and Glass Technology at Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA. She is a kinetic sculptor using glass, low rpm motors and LED lighting and also has a background in architectural lighting design. At a 2010 Djerassi Artist Residency she collaborated with NY choreographer Leigh Evans. Their performance installation called "Quite Two Departure," will be premiered at PS. 122 in NYC in July 2010.
    • Deborah Munk manages the Artist in Residence Program at Recology San Francisco where she works with Bay Area artists and organizations to promote art, recycling and sustainability. She will give an overview of the Artist in Residence Program and will highlight several of the 100 artists who have been awarded residencies in the past 20 years.
    • Martin Pohl is an experimental physicist who has worked on major particle physics experiments at particle accelerators for 35 years, exploring the structure of matter, elementary forces, space and time. He also contributes to space-borne experiments measuring cosmic particles to investigate their nature as well as their sources. He is interested in the contributions of science to culture and its interaction with other cultural activities: "A major point of contact between fundamental physics and the arts ought to be that neither scientists not artists should ever expect anything but the unexpected".
    • 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). An avid traveler, he has visited 135 countries of the world. His latest book is A History of Silicon Valley, coauthored with Arun Rao, and his first ebook was "A Brief History of Knowledge" (2011), available on Kindle.

    Address and directions:


    swissnex
    730 Montgomery Street
    San Francisco, CA 94111
    Phone: (415) 912 5901


    Photos