Leonardo Art/Science Evening Rendezvous of March 2009

Constructive Interference of the Arts and Sciences

San Francisco, 9 march 2009
c/o SFSU Downtown Centre
835 Market
San Francisco

An event about Artists and Scientists who work/think/imagine/engage at the intersections of the Arts and Science.

Chaired by Piero Scaruffi (p@scaruffi.com)
Part of a series of cultural events
Sponsored by: ZKM|Center for Art and Media


Leonardo ISAST invites you to a meeting of the Leonardo Art/Science community. See below for location and agenda.

The event is free and open to everybody. Feel free to invite relevant acquaintances.

Please RSVP to p@scaruffi.com . Admission is limited.

Like previous evenings, the agenda includes some presentations of art/science projects, and time for casual socializing/networking.

In order to facilitate the networking, feel free to send me the URL of a webpage that describes your work or the organization you work for. I will publish a list on this webpage before the day of the event so that everybody can check what everybody else is doing. (Not mandatory, just suggested).

See also...

  • Art, Technology, Culture Colloquia
  • Art/Science Fusion at UC Davis
  • Green Museum
  • Visual Music Series
  • Previous Art/Science Evenings
    When: March 9, 2009

    Where: Donwtown facilities of SFSU

    835 Market, between 4th and 5th Streets
    Room 609
    BART and MUNI tip: the building is above the Powell Station
    What:
    • 6:15pm-6:45pm: Socializing/networking. We encourage you to interact with Leonardo ISAST board members.
    • 6:45-7:10: Wayne Vitale of Gamelan Sekar Jaya on "The Planets: Balinese Music Meets 21st Century Astronomy." A century ago, composer Gustav Holst brought together contemporary conceptions of the solar system, mostly from astrology, with the universe of the symphony orchestra. Now, I and visual designers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are engaged in an elaborate updating of this project, which may end up as remote from Holst's "Planets" as the newly discovered exoplanets are from the Hindu temples of Bali, Indonesia. I'll focus on the creative and conceptual arc of the project, touching on the tuning systems of Balinese gamelan, the end of the universe, and why the two might have more in common than is apparent prima vista.
    • 7:10-7:35: Richard Rinehart, Curator of the Berkeley Art Museum, on "Artists and Subversive Metadata" Information design as a form of contemporary artistic practice and how artistic and philosophical concepts such as the "performative utterance" operate at the edges of metadata and large-scale technology projects like the semantic web.
    • 7:35-7:50: BREAK
    • 7:50-8:15: Irene Chien of Berkeley's Center for New Media on "Embodied Gaming from Dance Dance Revolution and Wii to Biofeedback Gaming" Embodied Gaming from Dance Dance Revolution and Wii to Biofeedback Gaming Video games have been traditionally pathologized for turning players into passive thumb-twiddling zombies sucked into the virtual space of the computer screen. But video game interfaces from Dance Dance Revolution to Guitar Hero to Wii Fit now urge players to get up and move. They direct us away from the screen and toward player's real bodies, calling unprecedented attention to the curious ways our bodies occupy both digital and physical space.
    • 8:15-8:45: Ruzena Bajcsy, Director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), on "Digital Choreography - The Road to Information Technology Creativity" Dance choreography is a system of techniques used to create new dances. Creating a new dance requires choreographer/dancers to engage with inner motivations to express feelings as well as to dialogue with the external environment, whether that be visual, aural, tactile, or kinesthetic environmental stimulus on a stage or in a laboratory. Imagine a moment when a dancer enters into a 3D tele-immersive (3DTI) room surrounded by multiple 3D digital cameras and displays, where internal and external cues for creative movements come not only from physical objects in the 3DTI room, but also from a remote dancer who is placed in geographically-remote 3DTI room and appears in a joint virtual space with our dancer. Suddenly the choreographer has exponentially more options to create new body movements in the new dance since the 3DTI technology offers an array of visual stimulations called Digital Options which will influence this movement making process. The hope is that random, nondeterministic behaviors found within this new dance-making process will interact with the distributed 3DTI system causing different functional and data configurations and compositions
    • 8:45: Piero Scaruffi on the next Leonardo Art/Science evening I will simply preview the line-up of speakers for the next Leonardo evening.
    • 8:45pm-9:30pm: Discussions, more socializing You can mingle with the speakers and the audience

    Bios:
    • Ruzena Bajcsy is director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley
    • Irene Chien is a PhD candidate in Film and New Media at UC Berkeley. She writes and teaches about race and gender at the intersection of cinema and new media, including a column "Camera Ludica" for Film Quarterly.
    • Richard Rinehart is a digital media artist and Digital Art Curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. He is Associate Director for Public Programs of the Berkeley Center for New Media. Rinehart's papers, projects, and more can be found on his website
    • 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. As a music historian, he has published ten books, the latest ones being "A History of Rock Music" (2003) and "A History of Jazz Music" (2007). He has also written extensively about cinema, literature and the visual arts. An avid traveler, he has visited 121 countries of the world.
    • Wayne Vitale is a composer, performer, author, teacher, recording engineer, and instrument conservator in the field of Balinese music. He is the director of Gamelan Sekar Jaya (www.gsj.org), an ensemble of sixty musicians and dancers that has achieved an unparalleled international reputation for its cross-cultural creative work. As a composer, he has created numerous works for gamelan that have directly impacted the evolution of Balinese kebyar music. His recording label, Vital Records (www.vitalrecords.ws), releases critically acclaimed CDs of Balinese music. He has also devoted himself to the metallic art of gamelan tuning, grinding and filing his way throughout the US and Europe to restore Balinese instruments.

    Directions:

    From Market Street, Enter at SFSU (835 Market) and take elevator to 6th Floor. Signs will be posted If coming on BART, take POWELL STATION exit, enter Concourse Food Court, look for Out The Door restaurant on the left. Immediately past the restaurant, turn left, walk past the first set of elevators to the second set of elevators and go to the 6th floor.

    If coming on MUNI, take POWELL STATION exit, enter Westfield Centre and head through the first mini-food court to main concourse food court. Walk straight across the food court and walk between Amoura and Out the Door restaurants, past the first set of elevators to the second set of elevators and go to the 6th floor.

    If driving, Park in the 5th and Mission Garage. Enter through Market Street or walk through Bloomingdale's, look for the signs to San Francisco State University and take elevator to 6th floor.

    SFSU Downtown Campus 835 Market Street San Francisco, CA 94103

    ICA Office: 415.817.4476


    Confirmed so far:

  • Photos