Leonardo Art/Science Evening Rendezvous of June 2012

Exploring the Frontiers of Knowledge and Imagination, Fostering Interdisciplinary Networking
Stanford, 6 June 2012
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.

See also...

  • Stanford interdisciplinary panels
  • Stanford events calendar
  • DASERs
  • Art, Technology, Culture Colloquia
  • ScienceSchmoozer
  • Previous Art/Science Evenings
    When: 6 June 2012

    Where: Stanford University
    Building/Room: Building 200 (History Corner), Room 203 (Stanford map)
    Parking is mostly free at Stanford after 4pm.


    What:
    • 6:45pm-7:00pm: Socializing/networking.
    • 7:00-7:25:
    • Renetta Sitoy (artist) on "The Internet as Media" Art for acquiring, organizing, and re-contextualizing information found online and a tribute to electronic sound artist Laetitia Sonami Read more
    • 7:25-7:50: Luciano Chessa (San Francisco Conservatory) on "Futurist Art for the Present Future" Music compositions inspired by research on futurist Luigi Russolo, the creator of "The Art of Noises" and pioneer of musical synthesis Read more
    • 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:
    • Abigail De Kosnik (Berkeley Center for New Media) on "Revolutionary Fic: Political and Economic Crises Transmediated and Inter(in)animated by Media Fans" "Fan fiction or fanfic is a genre of fiction written by media fans about their favorite films, television programs, comic books...Read more
    • 8:30-8:55:
    • Javier Ideami (filmmaker) on "Art & Tech: From Fiction to Fact and all the way back" Transforming technological reality and fact into artistic fiction and using art to suggest new possibilities in technology Read more
    • 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:
    • Luciano Chessa received a Ph.D. in musicology from the UCDavis; at Bologna's Conservatory he earned a D.M.A. in piano and a M.A. in composition. His research focuses on twentieth-century and experimental music and can be found in Musica e Storia (Levi Foundation, Venice); he is the author of "Luigi Russolo, Futurist" (UCPress), the first English monograph dedicated the Art of Noises Chessa is active as a composer, performer, and conductor. His scores are published by RAI TRADE and Carrara and performed in Europe, U.S., and Australia. Recent compositions include A Heavenly Act, an opera with video by Kalup Linzy commissioned by SFMOMA for Nicole Paiement/Ensemble Parallèle. Chessa's Futurist expertise resulted in a commission by NYC's Biennial PERFORMA to direct the first reconstruction of Russolo's intonarumori orchestra and to curate/conduct concerts which received a 'Best of 2009' mention in The New York Times. In March 2011 Chessa conducted a sold-out intonarumori concert for Berliner Festspiele-Maerzmusik Festival; in December, for Art Basel|Miami Beach, he conducted the New World Symphony+Lee Ranaldo in the premiere of Ranaldo's It All Begins Now!
    • Abigail DeKosnik Abigail De Kosnik is an Assistant Professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies (TDPS). She has written two books: The Survival of Soap Opera - Strategies for a New Media Era (essay collection, co-edited with Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington) from the University Press of Mississippi and Illegitimate Media - Minority Discourse and the Censorship of Digital Remix Culture from the University of Georgia Press. She testified before the US Copyright Office at their hearings regarding the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, in favor of an exemption to the DMCA's ban on the circumvention of digital copyright technologies that would allow non-Film Studies college professors to rip DVDs for the purpose of screening clips of film and television in their courses. She organized a conference on Open Source and the Humanities, sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media.
    • Javier Ideami (born Francisco Javier Gonzalez Bernardo) is a Spanish-born multidisciplinary artist and founder of Ideami Studios. With studies in both artistic (Painting, Photography, Filmmaking, Design and Music) and technical fields (Computing Engineering), Javier has been blending the arts and the sciences, being awarded numerous awards for his work across different disciplines. Javier has exhibited his creative work in many galleries in both Europe and the USA. Javier collaborates regularly with artists, architects, engineers and other creative minds in innovative projects around the world. He is one of the founders of the creative group RAN, winner of an award by the Spanish museum of art and technology Laboral. He was also the founder of the Web 2.0 online application Ewidi, an online social network in 33 languages. In 2008 Javier co-founded Flaii, a Silicon Valley startup in the social networking and gaming space. Javier later launched the interactive creative application Posterini. Javier is also an award-winning filmmaker, screenwriter, and director who occasionally works as well on the photography and music of his films. His filmography includes the films: 2011. The Weight of Light (HD), 2010. The Long Goodbye (Red One 4K), 2010. Erase Love (Red One 4K), 2008. La Ultima Cena (HD), 2007 - El Cuadro (HD), 2006 - Magic Mountain (35mm, Dolby Digital), 2005 - The Moontamer, 2004 - Ego. They won awards at the London International Sci-Fi Film festival, at the Ourense International Film Festival, at the Gaudi Prizes in Barcelona, and at the San Francisco International SFShorts Film Festival. He has also won awards for his photography and music He has also produced the illustrated book for children "The Moontamer" (2010).
    • 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.
    • Renetta Sitoy was born in New York, NY and graduated in 2007 with an MFA in Design + Technology from the San Francisco Art Institute, where she was the recipient of the San Francisco Art Institute MFA Fellowship from 2005 to 2007. Using media that include video and animation to examine the human condition, her work has explored topics such as the alteration of time and space, perception, memory, dreams, and the effects of technology on human behavior. Her work has been shown in Atlanta, Baltimore, New York City, Los Angeles, Athens, Greece, Varna, Bulgaria, Budapest, Hungary, and throughout the Bay Area. She is currently working on a documentary about the French born, Oakland based electronic music artist Laetitia Sonami. She lives and works in the Bay Area.

    Extended abstracts:


    Futurist Art for the Present Future. A collage of music by Luciano Chessa inspired by Luigi Russolo, to whom Chessa has dedicated over a decade of work culminated with the publication of the first English monograph on Russolo (Luigi Russolo, Futurist. Noise, Visual Arts and the Occult ,University of California Press). The collage will include Chessa's "Ragazzi incoscienti scarabocchiano sulla porta di un negozio fallito an. 1902", "Inkless Imagination III, for Fedele Azari", excerpts from the opera "A Heavenly Act", and excerpts from Chessa's major futurist-related performance project, The Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners. The talk will be round up by a taste of Futurist sound poetry: Chessa's own reading of a section from the most striking Futurist poem: "Piedigrotta", by Francesco Cangiullo.
    Transforming technological reality and fact into artistic fiction and using art to suggest new possibilities in technology . Transforming technological reality and fact into artistic fiction and using artistic fiction to suggest new possibilities in technology. Javier Ideami has often used technology to enable his art, transforming technological reality and fact into artistic fiction and at the same time has been using art to suggest new possibilities in technology and science creating the potential to transform what today is a fiction into a fact of tomorrow. This same process has brought together art and technology throughout history. In this talk Ideami describes this process through one of his latest films, the weight of light. In this film current digital technology enables ideami to simulate demonstrations of millions of virtual characters and at the same time the artistic fiction in the film suggests a new type of technology that today is fiction but one day may become real technology able to transform the stress of people into useful energy. In the same project Ideami combines very simple antique technology (Edison type bulbs) to suggest a new potential future technology (transforming the stress of people into useful energy) and uses complex current technology (green screen shooting + digital compositing) to recreate very real events of today (massive demonstrations of people). Fiction and Fact are not only two sides of the same coin in the interlocked reality of art and tech but they can at any time switch and become the other. Artistic fiction can become technological fact and tech facts can serve as the seed, as the base to project new artistic fictions which in turn can end up becoming a new technology in the future. The talk will end reflecting about the present and future of visual media in connection with photography and filmmaking.
    "Fan fiction," also called "fanfic" or simply "fic," is a genre of fiction written by media fans about their favorite films, television programs, comic books, celebrities, and other media texts. Most fan fiction stories, like the media productions on which they are based, are not explicitly political, but there are exceptions. This paper examines several works of fan fiction that directly reference recent political and economic crises, including the Occupy movement, the financial crisis of 2008, illegal immigration in the U.S., and the Mexican drug cartel wars. I argue that by "ficcing" real-world events, media fans simultaneously entertain and educate fellow fans, attempting to draw their attention and interest to serious matters and to recruit their support for specific political stances. I build on Rebecca Schneider's use of John Donne's term "interinanimates" (from his 1633 poem "The Exstasie") and Henry Jenkins' theories of transmediation to propose that these works of fan fiction constitute a type of political new media performance: a bringing-to-life of past and/or distant events for the purpose of transmuting fans' affective investments in media texts into revolutionary feelings.
    Renetta Sitoy will present two of her recent works, each different in nature. With the first, she will demonstrate how she employs a range of strategies for acquiring, organizing, and re-contextualizing information found online, explores themes such as online communities (in which participants communicate through mediated, self-defined personas) and "cyber-stalking," and uses the web as a means of self-discovery and recollecting personal histories. Serving as a continual resource for materials as wide-ranging as the employment histories of strangers, rap song lyrics, and historical photos and movies, Sitoy uses the internet for a variety of artistic projects. She will discuss the 3-channel video piece titled Forecast, a recent finished work that examines three great natural disasters from the past 10 years and for which Youtube footage serves as the primary source of material. The artist will also discuss the production of her in-progress documentary that profiles the French born, Oakland based electronic sound artist Laetitia Sonami. The purpose of this film is to increase awareness of artists, in particular women, in her field and to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of women working at the intersection of technology and art.

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