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.
Send an email to "scaruffi at stanford dot edu" if you want to be added to the mailing list for the LASERs.
Where:
LiKaShing building - Room LK101
There should be ample parking in the structure on corner of Campus Drive West and Roth Way (355 Roth Way).
Parking is mostly free at Stanford after 6pm.
This is two LASERs in one. The online portion will take place at lunch-time and will host speakers from the East Coast.
The in-person portion will take place at the Stanford LiKaShing room LK101.
Register here for the online LASER: 12pm California time.
Program for the online LASER:
Program of the in-person LASER, not necessarily in this order (no need for RSVP - just show up at the venue):
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Gary Steinberg (Stanford) on "Stem cell therapy for stroke"
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Joshua Landy (Stanford) on "Literature and the Brain"
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Susan Clark (Stanford) on "The Interstellar Medium and its Impact on Cosmological Models"
Discussions, networking
You can mingle with the speakers and the audience
Bios:
- Susan Clark is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Stanford University. She is an astrophysicist, with primary research interests in cosmic magnetic fields, magnetohydrodynamic processes, and the interstellar medium. Prior to joining the faculty at Stanford, she was a NASA Hubble Fellow and postdoctoral member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She received her Ph.D. in 2017 from Columbia University, where she was an NSF Graduate Fellow, and she attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a Morehead-Cain scholarship.
- Joshua Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where he co-directs the Initiative in Philosophy and Literature and co-hosts the nationally syndicated public radio program “Philosophy Talk.” His books include Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004), How to Do Things With Fictions (Oxford, 2012), The World According to Proust (Oxford, 2022), and (as coeditor) The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, 2009).
- Victoria Shen is a sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument-maker based in San Francisco. Shen's sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body. Her music features analog modular synthesizers, vinyl/resin records, and self-built electronics. Eschewing conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of extreme textures and gestural tones, Shen uses what she calls "chaotic sound" to oppose signal and information, eluding traditionally embedded meaning. Her personal identity; her body; is the space her work utilizes to restructure sonic meaning. In her live performances, she proposes an exploration between meaning and non-meaning through the physical activation of noise tropes. Her probing into these melodic voids interrogate the ways we perceive value within aural experiences. The appendage-like instruments and objects she makes, exemplify Shen’s ability to embody through sound her interest in the tension created by opposition: control and chaos, the unique and the mass produced, the practical and the absurd. Shen’s multimedia practice extends beyond musical composition and performance to include installation and non-traditional methods of distribution. Her DIY approach to deconstructing the concepts of “materiality, value and mass production” both integrate and re-contextualize the formats of the readymade and assemblage techniques. For example, the album art for her debut LP, Hair Birth, utilizes copper to transform the cover into a loudspeaker through which the record can be played. In 2021, Shen produced a series of cut-up records in cast resin embedded with found materials, functioning not only as playable music media but as unique art objects. For recent performances, she pioneered the use of Needle Nails, acrylic nails with embedded turntable styluses, which allow her to play up to 5 tracks of a record at once. Needle Nails, Levitating speaker, and her Noise Combs are some of the objects created by her as part of an extensive repertoire of innovations in the design of sound augmentation. These sculptural elements invite the viewer to unpack one’s relationship with the material possibilities for creating sound. Shen has performed solo across North America, Japan, China, Mexico, Australia/NZ, the UK, and Europe, as a member of the turntable trio with Mariam Rezaei and Maria Chavez, as a member of hip hop group 1 Above Minus Underground. Shen has also collaborated with groups such as the Kronos Quartet, Matmos, clipping, Acid Mothers Temple, and Mike Watt and the Missing Men. Some notable venues in which she has performed include Boston City Hall, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, ISSUE Project Room NY, DOMMUNE Tokyo, Petreon Sculpture Park Cyprus, MUNCH Museum Oslo, Art Gallery of NSW Sydney, and Museo d'Arte Orientale Turin. Shen has also been an artist in residence at Elektronmusikstudion EMS Stockholm SE, WORM Rotterdam NL, Kurimanzutto New York US, The Royal Danish Academy Copenhagen DK, and AUDIUM San Francisco US, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Omaha US, and Headlands Center for the Arts US, and Audio Foundation Auckland NZ. Shen currently works at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics Stanford and School of Visual Arts NY. Shen is also a serving member of the Board of Directors for The Lab in San Francisco.
- Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American, and Latino Culture at Amherst College, the publisher of Restless Books, and a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. His work, translated into two dozen languages, has been adapted into radio, TV, film, and theater. His latest books are Conversations on Dictionaries: The Universe in a Book (Cambridge University Press), Lamentations of Nezahualcoyotl: Nahuatl Poems (Restless Books), and Sabor Judio: The Jewish Mexican Cookbook (University of North Carolina Press).
- Gary K. Steinberg is the Director of the Stanford Moyamoya Center, the founder and Co-Director of the Stanford Stroke Center, and the former Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery. As a cerebrovascular and skull base neurosurgeon, he specializes in treating brain aneurysms, moyamoya disease, brain and spinal AVMs and other vascular malformations, carotid artery disease, meningiomas, skull base tumors, stroke, and hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia.
Dr. Steinberg has practiced neurosurgery at Stanford for more than 31 years. He has pioneered microsurgical techniques to repair intracranial vascular malformations and certain aneurysms that were previously considered untreatable. He has also refined revascularization techniques for patients with cerebrovascular arterial occlusions, as well as moyamoya disease. He is leading novel clinical trials of stem cell therapy for stroke and spinal cord injury. He graduated from Stanford University in Neurosciences in 1980. Before attending medical school he studied classical trumpet on a music study scholarship at the Institute for Advanced Musical Studies in Montreux, Switzerland.
- Catherine Wagner is Emeritus Professor of Studio Art, at Mills College at Northeastern University. She received her BA in 1975 and MA in 1981, both from San Francisco State University. She is the recipient of major awards, including the Rome Prize (2013–14), a Guggenheim Fellowship, NEA Fellowships, and the Ferguson Award. Her work is included in major museum collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Art, Houston; and the San José Museum of Art. For over thirty years Catherine Wagner has been observing the built environment as a metaphor for how we construct our cultural identities. She’s examined institutions as various as art museums and science labs, the home and Disneyland. Ms. Wagner’s process involves the investigation of what art critic David Bonetti calls "the systems people create, our love of order, our ambition to shape the world, the value we place on knowledge, and the tokens we display to express ourselves." While Ms. Wagner has spent her life residing in California, she has also been an active international artist, working photographically, as well as site-specific public art, and lecturing extensively at museums and universities. She has received many major awards, including the Rome Prize (2013-2014), a Guggenheim Fellowship, NEA Fellowships, and the Ferguson Award. In 2001 Ms. Wagner was named one of Time Magazine’s Fine Arts Innovators of the Year. Her work is represented in major collections nationally and around the world, such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, SFMOMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, MOMA, MFA Houston. She has also published several monographs, including American Classroom, Art & Science: Investigating Matter, and Cross Sections. Wagner is represented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, CA.
- 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 books of poems and meditations are "Synthesis" (2009) and "Dialogue of the Lovers". 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 on technology are "A History of Silicon Valley" (2011, revised edition in 2022) and "Intelligence is not Artificial" (2013, expanded edition 2019). The first volume of his free ebook "A Visual History of the Visual Arts" appeared in 2012. "A History of California" appeared in 2025. 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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