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:
The Hub at Stanford Research Park (3215 Porter Dr, Palo Alto)
Free parking at 3165 Porter (map)
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 Research Park.
Register here for the online LASER: 12pm California time.
Program for the online LASER:
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Ethan Siegel (Astrophysicist) on "The Fundamental Constants Behind Our Universe"
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Luciano Chessa (Composer) on "Cena Oltranzista nel Castelletto al Lago - A Career Retrospective"
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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Amy Franceschini (Futurefarmers) on "Excursions through Domains of Familiarity and Surprise"
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Michael Frank (Stanford/ Psychology) on "Bridging the Data Gap between Babies and Large Language Models"
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Mark Pauline (Survival Research Labs) on "TBA"
Discussions, networking
You can mingle with the speakers and the audience
Bios:
- Luciano Chessa is a composer, conductor, performance artist, pianist, and musical saw/Vietnamese dan bau soloist. His work includes assemblage, graphic scoring, painting, opera, sculpture and several other media. His works include ‘A Heavenly Act’, an opera-installation commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; ‘Piombo’, a work for 2bows cello written for Frances-Marie Uitti and commissioned by NYC’s MAGAZZINO Italian Art, and ‘Cena oltranzista nel castelletto al lago’, a 60-hours opera-installation on fasting commissioned by the Festival TRANSART and MUSEION, Bolzano’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. Chessa has been commissioned multiple times by the Performa Biennial, and in 2014 he presented three events at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as part of the exhibit ‘Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe’. Chessa’s work appeared more than once in Artforum, Flash Art, Art in America, and Frieze, and has been featured in the Italian issue of Marie Claire and in the September Issue of Vogue Italia, and is found in private and museum collections in the United States and Europe. He has collaborated with artists of the likes of Mike Kelley, Kalup Linzy, Michael Tavioni, Ugo Rondinone, Tarik Kiswanson, Chris Newman, Jacopo Benassi, the collective Canemorto and Terry Berlier; presented his works in such museums as the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, SFMOMA, MONA in Tasmania, and the MART in Rovereto; and has been artist in residence at CivitellaRanieri, Lucas Artists Residency in Villa Montalvo, the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Djerassi Residency Artist Program, the Harrison House in Joshua Tree, and Tavioni Art Gallery and Vanganga in Avarua, Rarotonga (Cook Islands). Chessa is also an historian specializing in 20th-century Italian art. He is the author of "Luigi Russolo Futurist. Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult" (2012), the first book dedicated to Russolo shift from Painting to his ‘Art of Noise’. In 2009, his Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners (OFNI) was hailed by Roberta Smith in the New York Times as one of the best art events of the year; Chessa has presented this project across the USA and internationally to sold out houses including Rockefeller Center in New York, RedCat in Los Angeles, the New World Center in Miami, Radial System / Maerzmusik-Berliner Festspiele, the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, and Lisbon’s Municipal Theater. With this project he collaborated with the likes of Joan La Barbara, Mike Patton, Lee Ranaldo, Ellen Fullman, Blixa Bargeld, Pauline Oliveros, among others. In the Winter 2018, while in residency at the Steel House in Rockland, ME to develop the audiovisual installation #00FF00 #FF00FF, he prepared the diplomatic edition of Julius Eastman's Symphony No. II, the world premiere of which he conducted at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. The New York Times described Chessa’s rendition as a work that “radiates Cosmic Grandeur”. His edition of this work has been presenteed by The New York Philharmonics, The Cleveland Orchestra, and by the London Symphony Orchestra in the context of the BBC Proms in Royal Albert Hall.
- Amy Franceschini is an artist and founder of the San Francisco-based art and design collective, Futurefarmers. Her work is highly collaborative and usually involves a diverse group of practitioners who come together to make work that responds to a particular time and space. Amy creates tactile frameworks for exchange where the logic of a situation can disappear - where moments of surprise and wonder open the possibility for unexpected encounters and new perspectives on a particular situation. This situational approach emerges as temporary architectural interventions, public programs, choreography, radical journalism and museum exhibitions. Amy received her MFA from Stanford University. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and has exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art, New York Hall of Sciences and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
- Michael C. Frank is Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University and Director of the Symbolic Systems Program. He received his PhD from MIT in Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 2010. He studies children's language learning and development, with a focus on the use of large-scale datasets to understand the variability and consistency of learning across cultures. He is a founder of the ManyBabies Consortium, and has led open-data projects including Wordbank and the ongoing LEVANTE project. He has received awards including the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences and the FABBS Early Career Impact award. He served as President of the Cognitive Science Society, has edited for journals including Cognition and Child Development, and is current co-Editor in Chief of the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science.
- Mark Pauline, performance artist and inventor, started the seminal Survival Research Laboratories in November 1978. His crew staged legendary shows of battling robots which often ended with the destruction of the machines. Many the early Burning Man artists were alumni of SRL.
- Ethan Siegel is an astrophysicist and a science communicator, author of two books 9"Treknology: The Science of Star Trek from Tricorders to Warp Drive" and "Beyond the Galaxy: How humanity looked beyond our Milky Way and discovered the entire Universe") and creator of the podcast "Starts with a Bang!"
- 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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