• What: a "Leonardo day" during Berkeley's New Media Festival
• When: 3 June 2008
• Where: Berkeley Art Museum (enter from either 2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, USA, 94720, USA, or 2625 Durant Avenue, Berkeley, CA, 94720) - (510) 642-0808
• Contact: piero scaruffi
• Official website of the conference

Backgrounder

This Berkeley festival will be coordinated with and timed to occur immediately before a similar festival in San Jose titled "ZeroOne San Jose" that will take place June 4-8 and will include many more exhibitions, performances, a few talks, and no conference, estimated to involve 20,000 people. The San Jose event and the Berkeley event will cross-market each other. The Berkeley event will differentiate itself by adopting the typical academic format of a conference/symposium. However the two events expect to share the same audience (see below). However, Berkeley will keep it free and open to the general public.

The Berkeley Art Museum will provide the venues for the Berkeley conference.

The first day (June 2) will be managed by Berkeley's Center for New Media. The theme for the first day will be: "Embodiment" (the role of the human body in an increasingly digitally-mediated experience). On the first afternoon starting at 3pm there will be demos and other happenings around the campus. At 6pm an exhibition will open with social events. Some other exhibition may open later in the night. This way the audience will leave the conference at 3pm and start wondering around the campus till late evening.

Leonardo day - 3 June 2008

• 9:00 Introduction: Celebrating Forty Years of Leonardo, by Steve Wilson, Leonardo board member since 1983, artist, author, Leonardo board member since 1983 and Director of the Conceptual/Information Arts Program at San Francisco State University
• 9:30-11:00 "Osmosis": What can the arts do for the sciences? Art-Science interaction is a two way process. The impact of science and technology on the arts is much discussed and well documented. This panel seeks to examine the influence of the arts on the sciences, and the benefits that science can derive from the arts.
  • Bronac Ferran, Writer, Researcher, Instructor at Royal College of Art in London, Past director of the Interdisciplinary Arts at Arts Council England
  • Melinda Rackham, Executive Director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology
  • Jim Crutchfield, Complexity and Chaos Researcher, Professor of Physics at UC Davis, Co-founder and Scientific Director Art and Science laboratory
  • Chris Chafe, Composer, Duca Family Professor at Stanford University, Director Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics
• 11:15-12:45 "Brilliant Noise: how data becomes experience for artists and for scientists" Most information about the world we live in is now mediated by instruments. This data is often visualised and sonified both to aid analysis and to communicate with other researchers, but artists too can make this data meaningful and "sensual". The same data sets can lead to very different kinds of work. One person's noise is another person's sound.
  • Camille Utterback, Interactive Video Artist, Inventor, and Founder of Creative Nerve
  • Laura Peticolas, Space Scientists and Educator at the Space Sciences Lab, UC Berkeley
  • Douglas Kahn, Auditory and Sound Culture Historian, Director of Technocultural Studies, UC Davis
• 12:45 free-form meeting of the interested audience with Leonardo ISAST board members during the lunch break
• 14:00-15:30 "The New Sensuality: Epistemologies of the Very Very Small" Human cognition is bounded by the inadequacy of human senses to allow us sensory contact with the world on scales larger or smaller than ourselves. To perceive the nano world one needs extended senses or new senses. The nano world requires a new ontology and a new epistemology.
  • Ruth West, Director, Interactive Technologies, at the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, UCLA
  • Wayne Lanier, Microbiologist, San Francisco Exploratorium
  • Jennifer Frazier, Project Director of the Visualization Laboratory, San Francisco Exploratorium
• 15:30-17:00 Closing event of the two-day conference for the audience to mingle with the speakers of the various panels and with Leonardo board members. Winners of the first Leonardo Art/Science Student Contest will also be presented.

• Chris Chafe is a composer/ cellist / music researcher with an interest in computer music composition and interactive performance. He has been a long-term denizen of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, Stanford University where he directs the center and teaches computer music courses. His doctorate in music composition was completed at Stanford in 1983 with prior degrees in music from the University of California at San Diego and Antioch College. Two year-long research periods were spent at IRCAM, and the Banff Center for the Arts developing methods for computer sound synthesis based on physical models of musical instrument mechanics. Two recent discs of his works are available from Centaur Records.
• James Crutchfield is professor of Physics at the Computational Science & Engineering Center (Physics Department) of the University of California at Davis, where he is helping to establish a new research and graduate program at the Center for Computational Science and Engineering. Prior to this he was Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute for many years, where he ran the Dynamics of Learning Group and SFI's Network Dynamics Program. Over the last two and a half decades Prof. Crutchfield has worked in the areas of nonlinear dynamics, solid-state physics, astrophysics, fluid mechanics, critical phenomena and phase transitions, chaos, and pattern formation. His current research interests center on computational mechanics, the physics of complexity, statistical inference for nonlinear processes, genetic algorithms, evolutionary theory, machine learning, quantum dynamics, and distributed intelligence.
• Bronac Ferran is a writer, researcher and organiser of events and initiatives relating to the intersection between the arts and other disciplines, particularly art and science, art and law and art and technology. She is a part-time Senior Tutor at the Royal College of Art in London, where she manages an interdisciplinary laboratory for the Industrial Design Engineering Department. She was previously Director of Interdisciplinary Arts at Arts Council England where she led many programmes related to art and science.
• Jennifer Frazier is the Project Director of the Visualization Laboratory at the Exploratorium. She has been at the Exploratorium since 2004, where she developed exhibits and multimedia for the Microscope Imaging Station and the Traits of Life exhibition. Before joining the Exploratorium, she created exhibits, multimedia, and documentary films at NOVA, the National Academy of Sciences, The Tech Museum of Innovation, and several multimedia companies. Jennifer received her Ph.D. in Cell Biology from UCSF, where as an NSF and AAAS Fellow she used advanced imaging techniques to study polymer assembly during cell division. She has a B.S. in Bioethics from the University of California, Davis.
• Douglas Kahn, Professor of Technocultural Studies at University of California at Davis, is author of Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press) and is currently writing Arts of the Spectrum for University of California Press. He received a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship to research the historical discovery of natural radio.
• Hidden Ecologies is a field experiment of architect Cris Benton, microbiologist Wayne Lanier, and independent curator Marina McDougall. Fusing views assembled through aerial kite photography with onsite micro-cinematography, Hidden Ecologies maps three transitional salt-marsh geographies of the San Francisco Bay. Equipped with a mobile field laboratory of notebooks, field microscopes, GPS devices, and an array of cameras, the team works in the field to record aspects of the local environment that lie beyond usual perception, such as historical landscape features, the invisible composition of micro-communities, or forgotten cultural histories. Field research is joined with archival materials and cultural commentary on a website designed as a living organism, inviting annotations from within as well
• Laura Peticolas is a space scientist and educator at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been studying aurora on Mars and Earth (northern and southern lights) since she was a graduate student at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (1994-2000). For the past four years, Laura has also been involved with and run education and outreach programs for NASA satellite missions. This education work involves collaborating with scientists, educators, and musicians. These collaborations help make the science of the Sun, Earth's Magnetosphere, and Auroras accessible to students, educators, and the public. Examples of these projects are turning solar and magnetospheric data into sound, creating websites with information about NASA space science missions, creating lessons for middle and high school teachers, and providing teacher professional development workshops for teachers.
• Melinda Rackham is the Director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT), Australia's leading cultural organisation working at the intersection of art, research, science and emerging technologies to generate new creativities For over a decade she has engaged with emergent practices and innovative technologies as a pioneering net artist, a writer, curator, media consultant and cultural producer. In 2002 she established -empyre-, one of the world's leading online critical theory forums. Melinda regularly writes and speaks on the intertwining cultural issues and aesthetic, technological and conceptual shifts in networked, distributed, multiuser, game and mobile environments.
• Camille Utterback is an internationally acclaimed artist whose interactive installations engage participants in a dynamic process of kinesthetic discovery and play. Utterback's work explores the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of linking computational systems to human movement and gesture in layered and often humorous ways. Her work focuses attention on the continued relevance and richness of the body in our increasingly mediated world. Highlights include The Valencia Institute of Modern Art, Spain (2007); The Itau Cultural Center, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2006); The San Jose Museum of Art, California (2005); The New Museum of Contemporary Art, The American Museum of the Moving Image, New York (2003); The Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art (2001); The Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Ars Electronica Center, Austria (2000). Utterback's awards include a Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award (2005), a Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship (2002), a Whitney Museum commission (2002), and a US Patent (2004).
• Ruth West is an artist with background as a molecular genetics researcher. She is Director, Interactive Technologies for CENS (Center for Embedded Networked Sensing) on the UCLA campus and is concurrently an Artist-Research Associate at the UCSD Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, where she is the first CALIT2 New Media Artist crossing over to the Digitally Enabled Genomic Medicine Layer. Prior affiliations include artist-in-residence and Director, Visual Analytics and Interactive Technologies for the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research.

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  First Leonardo Art/Science Student Contest

  The Jury of the first Leonardo Art/Science Student Contest has selected the following projects as winners:

  • "Where Are You": Michiko Tsuda (Tokyo National University of the Arts, Japan)
  • "Telematic Drum Circle": Byeong Sam Jeon (Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine, California)
  • "Circadian Capital": Margarita Benitez (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois)
  • "Afterimage - Mind Frame" : Jaewook Shin (ITP, Tisch School of Art, New York Univ, New York)
  • "Oberhausen Requiem": Hiroki Nishino (University of Washington)
  In addition the jury has recommended a honorable mention for:
  • "Open Space": Homling Hsu (National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan)
  • "Three-letter dictionary": Cheth Rowe Cheth Rowe (San Francisco Art Institute)
  All seven will be featured in a forthcoming issue of the Leonardo journal.

  See this slide show and these photos of the exhibition:

  • Photo 1
  • Photo 2
  • Photo 3
  • Photo 4
  • Photo 5

  The jury consisted of

  • Nina Czegledy, independent media artist, curator and writer
  • Piero Scaruffi, cognitive scientist and writer
  • Tami Spector, professor of organic chemistry at the University of San Francisco
  • Pamela Winfrey, senior artist at the San Francisco Exploratorium

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  Podcast of the panels