During the covid pandemic, this online program replaces both the 12
physical L.A.S.E.R.s that were planned
at Stanford University and University of San Francisco for 2020 and the
L.A.S.T. Festival that was planned for Spring 2020.
Since some of them are simply "fireside chats",
we tentatively called them the The Life Art Science Tech (L.A.S.T.) dialogues.
See previous and future speakers and their videos.
(Note: All times are California time)
- December 3 @ 6pm
Ian Hodder (Stanford/ Anthropology) on "What we learn from studying Çatalhöyük, one of the world's earliest societies"
Miriam Dym (Visual Artist & Systems Thinker) on her visual art based on infinitely variable and interactive pattern systems
Vijaya Nagarajan (Univ. of San Francisco/ Theology and Religious Studies) on "Embedded Mathematics in Southern India's Ritual Art of the Kolam"
Register here
or
here
Ian Hodder (Stanford/ Anthropology) on the prehistoric settlement of Çatalhöyük
If you missed this dialogue, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
Ian Hodder was trained at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London and at Cambridge University where he obtained his PhD in 1975. After a brief period teaching at Leeds, he returned to Cambridge where he taught until 1999. During that time he became Professor of Archaeology and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. In 1999 he moved to teach at Stanford University as Dunlevie Family Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the Stanford Archaeology Center. His main large-scale excavation projects have been at Haddenham in the east of England and at Çatalhöyük in Turkey where he worked from 1993 to 2018. He has been awarded the Oscar Montelius Medal by the Swedish Society of Antiquaries, the Huxley Memorial Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Fyssen International Prize, the Gold Medal by the Archaeological Institute of America, and has Honorary Doctorates from Bristol and Leiden Universities. In 2019 he was appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in the Queen's Honor List. His main books include Spatial analysis in archaeology (1976 CUP), Symbols in action (1982 CUP), Reading the past (1986 CUP), The domestication of Europe (1990 Blackwell), The archaeological process (1999 Blackwell), The leopard's tale: revealing the mysteries of atalhyk (2006 Thames and Hudson), Entangled. An archaeology of the relationships between humans and things (2012 Wiley Blackwell).
Miriam Dym (Visual Artist & Systems Thinker) on "Decision Fields and Embodied Algorithms: working with infinitely variable and interactive pattern systems"
If you missed this dialogue, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
Miriam Dym is a visual artist who messes around with systems. Dym's system inquiries range from the mildly lyrical-can they make a fictitious map convincing?-to problem solving-how could they transform all their household trash into new, raw material? Dym's work comes from a pleasure in discovering what's connected, what's not, and why simple answers don't resolve anything. For years, Dym found it challenging to share their sprawling systems projects, mostly because they didn't understand they were working with sprawling systems: This isn't (yet) a category on, say, grant applications, or in art departments. When they figured it out, it was an epiphanic moment. While printing textiles, Dym invented an embodied, algorithmic system they've named Decision Fields. Through the actions of conscious agents, Decision Fields fosters the emergence of infinitely variable patterns on a plane. This has been their main focus since 2018. Dym has shown at museums and galleries in the USA and abroad, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art and SFMOMA, which has one of their pieces in the permanent collection, Susanne Vielmetter, POST-LA, and Pierogi. Residencies include The Watermill (Long Island), Cite' des Arts (Paris), Kala Art Institute (Berkeley) and Stanford University Digital Art Center. In 2018, several drawings Dym created in the 1990s were in "Contraption" at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Dym is a 2020 LABA East Bay Fellow.
Vijaya Nagarajan (Univ. of San Francisco/ Theology and Religious Studies) on "Embedded Mathematics in Southern India's Ritual Art of the Kolam"
If you missed this dialogue, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
Vijaya Nagarajan is an associate professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies and in the Program of Environmental Studies. In addition to teaching at the University of San Francisco, she has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University. Vijaya's academic interests weave among the fields of Hinduism, Environment, Gender, Ritual, and the Commons. She received her PhD in South Asian Language and Literatures from UC Berkeley. Vijaya has received grants, fellowships, and awards from University of San Francisco (Davies Chair, Jesuit Foundation, NEH Chair, Post-Sabbatical), Harvard University, UC Berkeley, Fulbright-Hays, Oxford University, American Institute of Indian Studies, California Tamil Academy, American Academy of Religion, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and MESA Refuge. Vijaya has been devoted to the environmental movement for several decades in both India and the Bay Area. She is the co-founder of The Recovery of the Commons Project and the Institute for the Study of Natural and Cultural Resources, where she has co-organized events with a large range of scholars, activists and artists. Her book,
"Feeding A Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual and Ecology in India, an Exploration of the kolam" was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. Every day millions of Tamil women in southeast India wake up before dawn to create the kolam, a ritual design made of rice flour, on the thresholds of homes. This thousand year old ritual welcomes and honors the goddesses Lakshmi and Bhudevi. Propelled by a lifelong wonder, and fueled by deeply informed research, Vijaya Nagarajan provides a poetic and surprising entryway into the layered complexities of this ritual practice. Braiding Tamil women's voices and the author's own stories, Feeding a Thousand Souls brings into conversation different knowledge traditions--beauty, history, literature, religion, anthropology, mathematics, and ecology.
- December 17 @ 12pm
TBA
Daniela de Paulis (Artist in Residence at the Dwingeloo radio telescope in the Netherlands) on her conceptual art based on space exploration and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
Janine Marchessault (Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts at York University in Canada) on "Media, Utopias, Ecologies "
Register here
or
here
Daniela de Paulis (Artist in Residence at the Dwingeloo radio telescope in the Netherlands)
If you missed this dialogue, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
Daniela de Paulis is a former contemporary dancer, a trans-disciplinary artist, licensed radio operator and radio telescope operator. >From 2009 to 2019 she has been based at the Dwingeloo radio telescope, where she has developed the Visual Moonbounce technology and a series of innovative projects combining radio technologies with live performance art and neuroscience. Since 2010 she has been collaborating with a number of international organisations, including Astronomers Without Borders, for which she is the founder and director of the arts programme. She is a member of the IAA SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Permanent Committee, the only worldwide forum for SETI scientists, and member of the METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) advisory panel. She is the recipient of the Baruch Bloomberg Fellowship in Astrobiology at the Green Bank Observatory where she will develop an art-science project in 2021. She is a regular host for the Wow! Signal Podcast. She has published her work with the Leonardo MIT Journal, Inderscience, Springer, Cambridge University Press and RIXC amongst others. More information: www.danieladepaulis.com, www.cogitoinspace.org, www.opticks.info
Janine Marchessault (Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts at York University in Canada) on "Media, Utopias, Ecologies "
If you missed this dialogue, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
Janine Marchessault is a professor in Cinema and Media Arts and holds a York Research Chair in Media Art and Social Engagement at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her research is engaged with four areas: the history of large screen media (from multiscreen to Imax to media as architecture and VR); diverse models of public art, festivals, and site specific curation; 21st century moving-image archives and notions of collective memory/history. She belongs to the CinemaExpo67.ca research group and is a founding member of the Public Access Curatorial Collective. Her latest project is an expanded cinema festival Outer Worlds outerworlds.org-commissioning five IMAX films by artists which premiered at the Cinesphere in 2019 as part of Images Festival and is set to tour the world (soon). She is the project director for Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating AV Archives [counterarchive.ca], a research collaboration involving more than 14 community and artist run archives in Canada devoted to diverse histories from Indigenous, LGBTQ, immigrant and women's histories. Her research explores the afterlife of moving image archives as art forms and new forms of historical knowledge. Her publications include: Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias and Ecologies (MIT 2017); Cosmic Media: Marshall McLuhan (Sage 2005); and numerous collections including the Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema (Oxford University Press 2019), Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age ( MQUP 2019), Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (MQUP 2014).
Photos and videos of this evening
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