Leonardo Art/Science Evening Rendezvous of October 12, 2016

Exploring the Frontiers of Knowledge and Imagination, Fostering Interdisciplinary Networking
UC Berkeley, October 12, 2016 - 7pm
Soda Hall (corner of Hearst and LeRoy), Room 380
NOTE: Use the WEST-entrance of SODA Hall entering from Etcheverry Plaza.
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. 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. This event is kindly sponsored by the Minerva Foundation.
Where: UC Berkeley
Soda Hall, Room 380
NOTE: Use the WEST-entrance of SODA Hall entering from Etcheverry Plaza.
Campus map
What (the order of the speakers might change):
  • 7:00-7:25: Michal Gavish (Visual Artist) on "Visualizing DNA" "Visualizing DNA" is a collaboration between a Stanford geneticist and a visual artist... Read more
  • 7:25-7:50: Henry Segerman (Oklahoma State/ Mathematics) on "Visualizing Mathematics with 3D Printing" Visualizing mathematical objects in the medium of 3D printing... Read more
  • 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: Luciano Chessa (Composer) on "After the noise intoners" A contemporary take on the futurist manifesto... Read more
  • 8:35-9:00: John Law (Cacophony Society, Burning Man) on "Chaos, Cacophony and the Counterculture - How the San Francisco Underground made your life weirder" The Suicide Club, the Cacophony Society and the Burning Man Festival were typical of the spontaneous creativity of the Bay Area... Read more
  • Discussions, networking You can mingle with the speakers and the audience

See also...
  • Other LASER series
  • Leonardo ISAST
  • Art, Technology, Culture Colloquia
  • Other LASER series
  • ScienceSchmoozer
  • LAST Festival
  • Other recommended events
    Bios:
    • Luciano Chessa is a composer, performance artist, conductor, pianist, and musical saw/Vietnamese dan bau soloist who has been active in Europe, the U.S., and Australia. Recent compositions include the experimental opera Cena oltranzista nel castelletto al lago produced for the TRANSART Festival in Bolzano, Italy: a work lasting 60+ hours (including 55 hours of fasting) and accessible in its entirety via a 24hrs/day live streaming; they also include Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze!, a large-scale work on MelvilleÎéÎ÷s Moby Dick; and A Heavenly Act, an opera with original video by Kalup Linzy commissioned by SFMOMA. Former compositions include a large orchestral work commissioned by the Orchestra Filarmonica of Torino "Ragazzi Incoscienti Scarabocchiano Sulla Porta Di Un Negozio Fallito" "TomBoy" for piano and a video by Terry Berlier, and "Movements", a multimedia work for 16mm film, dan bau and amplified film projectors produced in collaboration with filmmaker Rick Bahto. Chessa has just composed "Come un'Infanzia", a guitar + string quartet piece for the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and is collaborating with performance artist Kalup Linzy and the Ensemble Parallele on an opera commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art premiered in 2011. As a music historian Chessa has written "Luigi Russolo, Futurist. Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult" (UC Press, 2012). In 2009 Chessa supervised the first reconstruction of Russolo's "intonarumori" orchestra. His recordings include: Humus Destination X (1997), Entu (2000), Tryptique pour Gerard (2008), Peyrano (2008) Money is Money and Time is Time (2008) the dvd Tom's Heart (2008) The Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners Vol. 1 (Sub Rosa, 2012), Petrolio (2015).
    • Michal Gavish is a Bay Area Multimedia artist and art writer. With an MFA from SFAI and a PhD in Physical Chemistry she bases her current work on scientific collaborations with Prof. Brandman from Stanford University. She exhibited her work recently at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the last Zero1 Biennale and an extensive solo museum show in Budapest, Hungary. Gavish also lectures extensively in the Bay Area on contemporary art issues and writes art reviews on the blogs Square Cylinder and SF Artnews.
    • John Law (Cacophony Society, Burning Man) was a member of the Suicide Club, a primary member and principal organizer of the Cacophony Society, and a co-founder of the Burning Man festival. He co-authored "Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society" (2013) and has spoken internationally about the San Francisco counterculture.
    • 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 "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). 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.
    • Henry Segerman is a mathematician, working mostly in three-dimensional geometry and topology, and a mathematical artist, working mostly in 3D printing. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at Oklahoma State University.

    Extended abstracts:

    Segerman
    In recent years, I have been working on visualizing mathematical objects in the medium of 3D printing. The idea is to translate abstract mathematical concepts into tangible, tactile experiences. I have collected much of this work into a new popular mathematics book with the same title as this talk. I'll discuss some of the themes of the book, and explore different strategies to effectively use 3D printing for visualization in ways that distinguish it from other media.
    Chessa
    From the San Francisco Weekly tribute: "Luciano Chessa has had a long, rich career as both musicologist and musician. Now, after releasing six albums and spending thirty-plus years as a composer and performer, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is rewarding him with his own retrospective on April 30,2016. Born on the Italian island of Sardinia in 1971 to scientist parents, Chessa listened to Giuseppe Verdi records as a four-year-old, which inspired him to pursue a life in music. After attending the Conservatory of Bologna, he moved stateside and earned a PhD in Musicology from the University of California at Davis. Along the way, he was exposed to the work of German-American deconstructionist Geoffrey Hartman, whose aim to blur the line between the artistic and academic showed Chessa that there was an alternative to the dry traditionalism of his younger years."
    Law
    A quick walk through some of the fringe movements of the Bay Area that contributed to keep alive its creative spirit during the 1990s and 2000s.
    Gavish

    Visualizing DNA is a collaborative project on the perceptional border between art and science. Using data on protein synthesis investigations from Prof. Onn Brandman's lab at Stanford University, Bay Area artist Michal Gavish, creates installations and animations for which Brandman composes an original music score. Brandman's work, which was recently published in collaboration with a team of scientists in Science Magazine*, investigated the ways which proteins are synthesized. Their new results challenged the textbook assumption that the major protein synthesis machinery requires a genetic blueprint to create a protein. While these findings originated from basic science research, they could have future applications in areas connected to health and to the body repairing its own damaged systems. Gavish, with a background of a PhD Physical Chemistry, explores the notion that due to its small, single molecule-scaled size, almost our entire perception of molecular biology is based indirectly on experimental observations that illuminate a gestalt of disparate features. Beginning with imagery from scientific data, the installation pursues the path of indirect perception to its imaginary interpolation into an artistic space.


    Photos and videos of this evening

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