Leonardo Art/Science Evening Rendezvous of December 2011

Exploring the Frontiers of Knowledge and Imagination, Fostering Interdisciplinary Networking
Stanford, 7 December 2011
c/o Stanford University
Chaired by Piero Scaruffi

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.

Leonardo ISAST and Stanford Continuing Studies invite you to a meeting of the Leonardo Art/Science community. See below for location and agenda.

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.

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...

  • Interdisciplinary panels
  • Stanford events calendar
  • DASERs
  • Art, Technology, Culture Colloquia
  • ScienceSchmoozer
  • Previous Art/Science Evenings
    When: 7 December 2011

    Where: Stanford University (Stanford Events)
    Building/Room: Braun Hall, Geology Corner, room 105 (Stanford map)
    Parking is free at Stanford after 4pm (read the fine print on the parking signs).

    What:

    • 6:45pm-7:00pm: Socializing/networking.
    • 7:00-7:25:
    • Shona Kitchen (Artist) on "Speculation of an Alternative Today" A fresh outlook at technological adaptations and how they can enhance and enrich our surroundings rather that distract us from them.
    • 7:25-7:50: Carlo Sequin (U.C. Berkeley) on "Knotty Sculptures" Simple knots can be used as constructivist building blocks for abstract geometrical sculptures.
    • 7:50-8:05: 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.
    • 8:05-8:30:
    • Margarita Marinova (NASA) on "The Dry Valleys of Antarctica as an analogue for Mars" The Dry Valleys of Antarctica are a unique place on Earth: the coldest and driest rocky place, with no plants or animals in sight. Studying the Dry Valleys allows us to understand how the polar regions on Earth work, what the limits of life are - and to apply these ideas to the cold and dry environment of Mars.
    • 8:30-8:55:
    • Peter Foucault (SFAI) on "Systems and Interactivity in Drawing" A discussion on how drawings are constructed through mark making systems, and how audience participation can influence the outcome of a final composition, focusing on an interactive robotic drawing installation
    • 8:55: Piero Scaruffi on the next Leonardo Art/Science evening I will simply preview the line-up of speakers for the next Leonardo evening.
    • 9:00pm-9:30pm: Discussions, more socializing You can mingle with the speakers and the audience

    Bios:
    • Peter Foucault creates works on paper, videos, and installations that are fueled by his love of drawing and mark making. He has created a series of Drawing-Projects, which utilize systems developed by the artist that produce complex abstract compositions. Viewer interactivity plays an integral part in his drawing installations, large-scale artworks in which participants influence the outcome of a drawing that is created by a small robot over the duration of an event or exhibition. Foucault has participated in numerous exhibitions nationwide and has curated several art events.
    • Shona Kitchen is an internationally-renowned multidisciplinary artist/designer with a passion for technological advancement. Kitchen focuses her attention across several fields which allows for a breadth of exploration on current and future technologies through architecture/interaction design, art and conceptual narrative architectural proposals. Her work explores the intersections between the physical and virtual and the ways in which they manifest themselves as new spatial experiences. She uses technology to enhance and enrich, rather than distract from, the culture and aesthetics of their surroundings and considering their consequences socially, politically and environmentally. http://www.shonakitchen.com/
    • Margarita Marinova's main research interests are in characterizing extreme environments, and understanding the surface of Mars. She has worked at NASA Ames Research Center on understanding extreme environments and the limits of habitability for Earth life. Margarita received her PhD in Planetary Science from Caltech in 2010, where she examined planetary-scale impacts and their implications for the early history of Mars and the solid Solar System planets. Her research interests focus on understanding interesting processes and features on Mars through simulations and field measurements. Her study sites range from the High Arctic, to the Sahara Desert in Egypt, the bottom of a lake in British Columbia in Canada, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and to the Dry Valleys of Antarctica.
    • 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.
    • Carlo Sequin has been a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1977. His research interests lie in the fields of Computer Graphics, Virtual Environments, and Computer Aided Design Tools. He has built CAD tools for the layout of integrated circuits, for the conceptual phase in architectural design, for the design of mechanical systems, and -- most recently -- for artists who create abstract geometrical sculptures. One approach places simple n-foil knots on the n-sided faces of a Platonic or Archimedean polyhedron. Another investigation explores various generating principles for the construction of recursive knots. For instance, a simple crossing of two strands is replaced with a more complicated tangled version of two strands, and the process is then repeated recursively. A few of these designs conceived on a computer are then developed further to make actual 3D models on various rapid prototyping machines, or even large-scale bronze sculptures.


  • Photos