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 USF invite you to a meeting of the Leonardo Art/Science community.
The event is free and open to everybody.
Like previous evenings,
the agenda includes some presentations of art/science projects,
news from the audience, and time for casual socializing/networking.
See below for location and agenda.
Email me if you want to be added to the mailing list for the LASERs.
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See also...
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Program (the order of the speakers might change):
- 7:00-7:25:
Enar de Dios Rodriguez (Photographer), Thomas Juffmann (Stanford/ Physics and SEEC Photography) and Phillip Haslinger (UC Berkeley/ Physics) on " Photography at the Speed of Light"
Photographing light as it travels across objects... Read more
- 7:25-7:50:
Brewster Kahle (Founder and director of the Internet Archive) on "Universal Access to All Knowledge"
Technological advances, for the first time since the loss of the Library of Alexandria, may allow us to collect all published knowledge... Read more
- 7:50-8:10: 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.
- 8:10-8:35:
Mark Nelson (Co-director, Stanford Peace Innovation Initiative) on "Technology for Peace"
The Peace Innovation Lab is an initiative from Stanford's Persuasive Tech Lab... Read more
- 8:35-9:00:
Purin Phanichphant (Interaction Designer) on "Can Art Be More?"
Applying a serene and joyful Buddhist-inspired philosophy of life to fast-paced digital technologies... Read more
- Discussions, networking
You can mingle with the speakers and the audience
Bios:
- Brewster Kahle is the founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive. A passionate advocate for public Internet access and a successful entrepreneur, Brewster Kahle has spent his career intent on a singular focus: providing Universal Access to All Knowledge. He is the founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, one of the largest libraries in the world. Soon after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied artificial intelligence, Kahle helped found the company Thinking Machines, a supercomputer maker. In 1989, Kahle created the Internet's first publishing system called Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), later selling the company to AOL. In 1996, Kahle co-founded Alexa Internet, which helps catalog the Web, selling it to Amazon.com in 1999. The Internet Archive, which he founded in 1996, now preserves 25 petabytes of data-the books, Web pages, music, television, and software of our cultural heritage, working with more than 450 library and university partners to create a digital library, accessible to all.
- Mark Nelson is co-director of Stanford's Peace Innovation Initiative. A former relief-worker, investment banker, and social entrepreneur, Mark Nelson founded the Stanford Peace Innovation Lab, where he researches mass collaboration and mass interpersonal persuasion. Mark focuses on designing, catalyzing, incentivizing, and generating resources to scale up collective positive human behavior change. He has described a functional, quantitative definition of peace, in terms of technology-mediated engagement episode quantity and quality across social difference lines; he has identified innovative, automated ways to measure peace, both at the neighborhood and global level; and he has developed a formal structural description for peace data. He leads the Global Open Social Sensor Array Project, and designs technology interventions to measurably increase positive, mutually beneficial engagement across conflict boundaries. Mark's mission is to create an entire new, profitable industry, where positive peace is delivered as a service. other projects include epic global challenge and peace markets. mark is also a researcher and practitioner at Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, and a member of Stanford's Kozmetsky Global Collaboratory.
- Purin Phanichphant's works are often playful, interactive, and simple, combining his fun-loving Thai roots, an obsession with knobs, buttons, and screens, and his training as an interaction designer. He was Principal Product & Interaction Designer at IDEO. His most recent works include a land-glider dubbed the Death Wheel 3000dx, an interface for human-computer sex, a wall covered with all the tap lights in the Bay Area, and a machine that churns out Thai food. Purin was born and raised in Northern Thailand, where he spent part of his life as a Buddhist monk.
- 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 "Thinking about Thought". 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). His latest book of history is "A History of Silicon Valley" (2011). The first volume of his free ebook "A Visual History of the Visual Arts" appeared in 2012. His latest book is "Intelligence is not Artificial" (2013). He has also written extensively about cinema and literature. He founded the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) in 2008.
- SEEC Photography is a collaboration of artist and photographer Enar de Dios Rodriguez und two physicists, Philipp Haslinger (UC Berkeley) and Thomas Juffmann (Stanford University). Having met during their studies in Vienna, the trio is now based in and around San Francisco.
Address and directions:
University of San Francisco
2130 Fulton Street
SF, CA 94117
Fromm Hall - Broad Conference Room
2130 Fulton Street, San Francisco, CA 94117-1080
Fromm Hall is behind the church, best accessed from Parker Ave.
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Extended abstracts
Phanichp
In this world of ever-increasingly complex and fast-paced digital technologies, Purin's work reminds us to take pause, play, touch, and take joy in simplicity. With his roots in Northern Thailand, where he spent part of his life as a Buddhist monk, combined with his background in designing innovative products in Silicon Valley, Purin's interactive objects and installations engage audiences while exploring authenticity, expressiveness, and co-creation. His medium are often buttons, knobs, and screens, all combined with a touch of code, resulting in simple, playful, and interactive experiences for the audience. Purin Phanichphant discusses his designer-turned-artist journey, and how this unique hybrid leads him to create interactive art pieces that go beyond pure self expression.
Juffmann
We describe a science-art project that investigates how light moves across objects. This happens at the speed of light and within a few nanoseconds (1 nanosecond = 0.000000001 seconds). Using a gated camera, which allows for exposure times as short as 0.1 nanoseconds, we record the motion of ultra-short laser pulses across subjects that represent traditional photographic themes, like the portrait, the still life or a horse's head-in reference to Eadweard Muybridge's pioneering work in stop-motion photography. The main character of these archetypical forms of photography is not the subject in front of the camera but light itself, traveling across the subject, being scattered and reflected off of surfaces. We literally watch light (photo-) in the process of writing (-graphy) an image.
Kahle
Advances in computing and communications mean that we can cost-effectively store every book, sound recording, movie, software package, and public webpage ever created and provide access to these collections via the Internet to students and adults all over the world. By using mostly existing institutions and funding sources, we can build this, as well as compensate authors, within the current worldwide library budget. Technological advances, for the first time since the loss of the Library of Alexandria, may allow us to collect all published knowledge in a similar way. But now we can take the original goal another step further to make all the published works of humankind accessible to everyone, no matter where they are in the world. Thomas Jefferson's statement that "All that is necessary for a student is access to a library" may be an exaggeration, but access to information is a key ingredient to education and an open society. Will we allow ourselves to re-invent our concept of libraries to expand and to use the new technologies? This is fundamentally a societal and policy issue. These issues are reflected in our governments' spending priorities, and in law.
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996 with the mission to provide "Universal access to all Knowledge." The organization seeks to preserve the world's cultural heritage and to provide open access to our shared knowledge in the digital era, supporting the work of historians, scholars, journalists, students, the blind and reading disabled, as well as the general public. The Internet Archive's digital collections include more than 25 petabytes of data: 460 billion Web captures, moving images (2.2 million films and videos), audio (2.5 million recordings, 140,000 live concerts), texts (8 million texts including 3 million digital books), software (100,000 items) and television (3 million hours). Each day, 2-3 million visitors use or contribute to the archive, making it one of the world's top 250 sites. It has created new models for digital conservation by forging alliances with more than 450 libraries, universities and national archives around the world. The Internet Archive champions the public benefit of online access to our cultural heritage and the import of adopting open standards for its preservation, discovery and presentation.
Nelson
The Peace Innovation Lab is an initiative from Stanford's Persuasive Tech Lab. Launched in Spring 2010, the PI Lab is focused on casting a spotlight on how technology and emerging social behaviors and insights are promoting new paths to global peace. The Peace Innovation project started with Peace Dot. The goal of Peace Dot was simple: persuade any individual, organization or corporation with a website to create a peace subdomain that spotlights what they are doing to help promote peace in the world. At our launch in 2010 over 50 sites ranging from Facebook to the Dalai Lama Foundation, Khan Academy to CouchSurfing, in multiple languages created peace dot pages around the world.
Photos and videos of this evening
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