Leonardo Art/Science Evening Rendezvous of November 2011

Constructive Interference of the Arts and Sciences

San Francisco, 7 November 2011
c/o University of San Francisco
Fromm (FR) building, Berman Hall

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) and Tami Spector
Part of a series of cultural events
Sponsored by:
School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
the University of Illinois' eDREAM Institute,
the University of Calabria's Evolutionary Systems Group,
Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology,
School of Visual Arts Computer Art Department,
and USF Dean's Office of Arts and Science.


Leonardo ISAST and USF 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.

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...

  • Wonder Dialogue at Stanford
  • DASERs
  • Bay Area Science Festival
  • Swissnex events
  • Art, Technology, Culture Colloquia
  • ScienceSchmoozer
  • Antarctic Science and the Cultural Arts
  • Previous Art/Science Evenings


    Program:
    • 6:30pm-6:45pm: Socializing/networking.
    • 6:45-7:10:
    • Jennifer Parker (UC Santa Cruz) on "Down to earth: Art, Astronomy and Physics" Highlighting new works created by artists and scientists from the UCSC OpenLab Network... Read more
    • 7:10-7:35:
    • Bob Ostertag (Composer) on "The Human-machine Interface Blues" Various human-machine interfaces used by a composer over the years
    • 7:35-7:50: 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.
    • 7:50-8:15:
    • Laurie Frick (Headlands Center for the Arts) on "Sleep, Self-tracking and Art-making" Installations and scores that incorporate the abstractions that emerge from sleep monitoring... Read more
    • 8:15-8:45:
    • Walter Kitundu (Sound artist) on "The Turntable as a Lens" Records are sonic archives and they naturally reference the past. They are also objects that encourage a conversation with materials and movement. The turntable becomes a lens through which one can view the world... Read more
    • 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:
    • Laurie Frick draws from neuroscience to construct intricately hand-built works and installations to explore the nature of pattern and the mind. Formerly an executive in high-technology, using her background in engineering and high-technology she explores science, compulsive organization and the current culture of continual partial attention. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Yaddo, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, The Amerian Academy in Rome, McColl Center for Visual Art, The Lower East Side Printshop, Djerassi Fellowship and the Headlands Center for the Arts. The body of work from her Spring 2011 show at Edward Cella in Los Angeles are experiments in brain rhythm using time studies of daily activity logs and sleep charts. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Frick lives and works in Austin, Texas and Brooklyn, New York.
    • Walter Kitundu is an artist and designer, instrument builder and photographer. He is a Senior Design Developer for the Studio Gallery at the Exploratorium. In this capacity he helps to design and build environments for learning, develops and facilitates activities, and provides artistic direction. As an artist he has created hand built record players powered by the wind and rain, fire and earthquakes, birds, light, and the force of ocean waves. Walter has performed and been in residence at art centers and science museums internationally. He has performed with the renowned Kronos Quartet, bassist Meshell Ndegeocello, the electronic music duo Matmos, and the legendary Marshall Allen - in venues from Carnegie Hall to a high school library in Egilstaadir, Iceland.
    • Bob Ostertag has published 21 CDs of music, two movies, two DVDs, and three books. He has performed at music, film, and multi-media festivals around the globe. His radically diverse collaborators include the Kronos Quartet, avant garder John Zorn, heavy metal star Mike Patton, jazz great Anthony Braxton, transgender chanteuse Justin Bond, and others. He is rumored to have connections to the shadowy media guerrilla group The Yes Men. In March 2006 Ostertag made all of his recordings available as free digital downloads. He has a new book in press about labor organizing in Nevada, and is working on another about the construction of human identities through technology. He is currently Professor of Cinema and Technocultural Studies and Music at the University of California at Davis.
    • Jennifer Parker is an Associate Professor of Art and Digital Arts and New Media at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her research is rooted in sculpture, interactive and kinetic art, and cross-disciplinary and collaborative research. Current and past projects explore new methodologies for art making that engage art and science thinking. She is co-founder and director of The OpenLab Network at UCSC and has been working with Barney Hyanes since 2008 developing the SonicSENSE interactive art platform. She has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. Local venues include Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF Camerawork; The Lab; Gray Area Foundation for the Arts; Kala Art Institute; and ZER01:10SJ Biennial.
    • 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). His latest book of history is "A History of Silicon Valley" (2011). He has also written extensively about cinema, literature and the visual arts.

    Address and directions:


    University of San Francisco
    2130 Fulton Street
    SF, CA 94117
    Room: Fromm (FR) building, Berman Hall

    See the campus map and directions


    Photos
    Extended abstracts

    The OpenLab Network is a new research initiative at the University of California Santa Cruz. The OpenLab Network targets a complex education issue of national significance regarding the ability of art and science researchers to collaborate on research endeavors. The goal of the OpenLab Network is to help change the current status by providing shared research facilities and create a network for collaborative discourse fueled by academic communities, arts and science communities, and industry. The OpenLab Network project is currently pursuing the physical development of new collaborative laboratories on campus as spaces to foster this research and establish an on-line social networking system for faculty and students to create projects. Laboratories and studios in both the arts and the sciences will be accessible to users in the OpenLab Network. Within this immersive environment, we will conduct research to acquire skills and knowledge that crosses disciplinary boundaries between science, education, and the arts while sharing expertise in collaborative research methodologies. Current OpenLab members include: Drew Detweiler, Jack O'Neill, Amy Boewer, Kyle McKinley, Caroline Morley, Noar Movshovitz, John Peters, Uliana Popov, Leslie Thompson, Joile Ruelle, Lyes Belhocine, Sudu Tewari, Claire Dorman, Morgan MacLeod, Bruce Kirk, James Guillochon, Raja Guhathakurta, Jennifer Parker, Nina Mccurdy, Erik Asphaug, Anahi Caldu Prima, Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, Jonathan Fortney, Nathan Kandus...


    Laurie Frick has been delving deep into sleep, she uses the data to create art works and installations that incorporate the abstractions that emerge from sleep monitoring and she creates rhythmic abstractions that feel sprawling and musical. The project is called Quantifying-me. Sleep is a very active state. If you're sick, you heal. You build procedural memory, grow taller, resolve conflict, reorder and organize long-term memory. She has been conducting research on herself. She has been measuring my nightly sleep using an EEG headband for over a year, and found a definite pattern to the brainwaves. It is weirdly comforting and reaffirming to receive a sleep score everyday. She is interested in sleep as one more method of self-tracking that she believes we will all do in the future as a way to passively measure our patterns and behaviors. What if walls could produce ambient patterns of how we're doing, where we subtly adjust behavior in response to those measurements? She's transforming these scores and data into physical representations. She set out to map a language to convey self-quantifying metrics. Numbers are abstract concepts, but our brains recognize pattern intuitively. She is working on the vocabulary and grammar of pattern for self-tracking that's more visceral and direct.


    An interview with Walter Kitundu (video)