The LASERs (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) are an international program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversation with an audience. See the program for the whole international series and the dates for the Bay Area.
Send an email to "scaruffi at stanford dot edu" if you want to be added to the mailing list for the LASERs.
Where:
The Hub at Stanford Research Park (3215 Porter Dr, Palo Alto)
Free parking at 3165 Porter (map)
This is two LASERs in one. The online portion will take place at lunch-time and will host speakers from the East Coast.
The in-person portion will take place at the Stanford Research Park.
Register here for the online LASER: 12pm California time.
Program for the online LASER:
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Sarah Cole (Columbia Univ) on "100 Years of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway"
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
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John Wehrle (Muralist and Photographer) on "Visual Stories, Public Works and Private Thoughts"
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
Program of the in-person LASER, not necessarily in this order (no need for RSVP - just show up at the venue):
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Judy Dater (Photographer) on "Tell me who you are: My Life in Photography"
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
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Daiane Lopes da Silva (Kinetech Arts) on "DanceHack - The Intersection of Dance and Technology"
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
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Danika Cooper (UC Berkeley) on "Dry Matters: How desert landscapes are essential to our collective futures"
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
Discussions, networking
You can mingle with the speakers and the audience
Bios:
- Sarah Cole is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. A specialist in literary modernism, she is the co-founder of the NYNJ Modernism Seminar and publishes widely on literary modernism and on war and peace. As Dean, she founded and directs the Humanities War and Peace Initiative and the Climate Humanities initiative at Columbia. She is the author of three books, Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century (Columbia, 2019), At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (Oxford, Modernist Literature and Culture series, 2012) and Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (Cambridge, 2003), and has published articles in journals such as PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Modernist Cultures, Modern Fiction Studies, and ELH, and in edited collections. For her work on H. G. Wells, she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
- Danika Cooper is associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where the core of her research centers on the geopolitics of scarcity, alternative water ontologies, and designs for resiliency in the global aridlands. Aridlands have largely been underexplored in landscape architecture — her work offers multiple ways of knowing, being, and engaging with desert landscapes to better inform current environmental and landscape architecture discourse and practice. This is especially important as populations in these regions increase and as the climate becomes drier and hotter. Through her scholarship, Cooper traces the ways that nineteenth-century, Euro-Western environmental theories and ideologies continue to influence cultural perceptions, policy frameworks, and management practices within US desert landscapes today. Throughout U.S. history, the desert has largely been imagined in contradictory terms — at times considered “empty,” “barren,” and “worthless” while at other moments brimming with economic potential. Her research shows how environmental discourse in the U.S. is directly tied to a set of colonial beliefs and physical transformations aimed at deliberately exploiting the desert’s value for economic and political power. Her research highlights alternatives to prevailing 19th-century conceptions that the aridlands should and can be physically transformed through technocratic solutions. Contemporary climate realities promise that technocratic solutions, especially the implementation of hydraulic infrastructure that brings water from wetter places to the aridlands, are responsible for both exacerbating extreme climates and contributing to aridification (the long-term process by which environments become drier and hotter). Her work underscores the need for embracing aridity and designing with dry ecology, rather than attempting to forcefully change or thwart it. Cooper's research and creative output has been published and exhibited across the world, and she has practiced architecture and landscape architecture both in the United States and in India. Prior to joining Berkeley, she was the 2015–2016 designer-in-residence teaching fellow at the University of Illinois, Department of Landscape Architecture.
- Judy Dater is a photographer and a feminist. She uses photography as an instrument for traditional conceptions of the female body. She was influenced by the vital cultural intersection of photography, feminism and the second wave of feminism which started in the 1960s and lasted up until the 1980s. Dater is also known for her self-portraits. She often creates characters that embody the conscious and the unconscious concerns that women have. Dater was born in 1941 in Hollywood and grew up in Los Angeles. Her father owned a movie theater, so movies became the prism through which she viewed the world and they had a profound influence on her photography.[2] She studied art at UCLA from 1959 to 1962 before moving to San Francisco and received a bachelor's degree in 1963 and a master's degree in 1966, both from San Francisco State University.[4] It was there she first studied photography with Jack Welpott, whom she later married. In 1975, they published a joint work, titled Women and Other Visions. They were divorced in 1977. In 1964, Dater met the photographer Imogen Cunningham at a workshop focusing on the life and work of Edward Weston at Big Sur Hot Springs, which later became Esalen Institute. Dater was greatly inspired by Cunningham's life and work. They shared an interest in portraiture and remained friends until Cunningham's death in 1976. Three years later, Dater published Imogen Cunningham: A Portrait, containing interviews with many of Cunningham's photographic contemporaries, friends, and family along with photographs by both Dater and Cunningham. Dater became part of the community of the west coast school of photography, primarily represented by the photographers Ansel Adams, Brett Weston, Wynn Bullock and Cunningham. They all took an interest in her work and encouraged her to pursue photography as a career. Other books by Dater include Judy Dater: Twenty Years (1986), Body and Soul (1988), Cycles (Japanese version: 1992, American version: 1994), and Only Human: Judy Dater 1964 to 2016 Portraits and Nudes (2017). Dater is also known for her self-portraits. She often creates characters that embody the conscious and unconscious concerns that women have. Her self-portrait series includes titles like "Ms. Cling Free" and "Leopard Woman."[5] She also does portraits of other women, using natural light.[4] She worked only in black-and-white photography until 1979, when she began some work in color.[4]
- Daiane Lopes da Silva (Dai) is the co-founder and artistic director of Kinetech Arts, where she explores the intersection of dance, science and technology. Daiane often incorporates biometric devices and nondeterministic technologies in her work, reflecting upon societal issues in relationship to the human body. Since 2013, she has created 12 full-length performances, which have been performed in South America, Europe and the U.S. She has been commissioned by SSU, UC Davis, Robert Moses’ Kin, Dance Brigade, and UC Berkeley Dance Project. She was a resident artist at Lucas Artists Residency Program, Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, ODC Theater, 836M, Estalagem da Ponta do Sol in Madeira, Dancing Lab at NCCAkron, among others. Daiane studied at P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) in Brussels and at Escola Municipal de Bailados in São Paulo. She has a B.A. in Psychology from SFSU. Founded in 2013 by choreographer Daiane Lopes da Silva and scientist Weidong Yang, Kinetech Arts is a non-profit organization that brings together dancers, scientists, and digital artists to explore the intersection of movement, science, and technology. Our artistic journey delves deep into the ever-changing relationship between humans and technology, contemplating its profound impact on the human-machine ecosystem. Our vision at KA is to unite the performing arts, science, and tech communities through immersive live performances and interdisciplinary collaborations to empower innovative ideas on a cutting-edge platform.
- John Wehrle was raised in Texas and studied art at Texas Tech in Lubbock, where he was cartoonist for the student newspaper. Commissioned a Lieutenant in the US Army, in 1966 he was chosen to be the leader of the first “combat artist” team sent to cover the war in Vietnam. Paintings from this experience are now part of the permanent collection of the National Army Museum. John completed his MFA at Pratt insBtute in Brooklyn, taught as an assistant professor at CCAC in Oakland and later built a wilderness log cabin in central Montana. He began his career as a public artist under the CETA program, in 1975 at the de Young Museum with "Positively Fourth Street". For more than forty-seven years, John has created gargantuan narrative paintings and installations throughout California and beyond. John’s work has transformed public and private spaces in West Coast cities from Los Angeles and San Francisco to Washington State; schools, libraries, civic centers, firehouses, train stations, banks, building walls and freeways. John has painted murals inside and outside museums and was one of ten artists chosen to paint murals for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. John created a series of signature paintings for Bay Area Biotech Firms and a number of prominent public artworks for the City of Richmond. Many of these monumental works have become urban landmarks. "Knockout", painted in situ at Kate Mantilini Restaurant, was recently awarded historic status by the City of Beverly Hills. "Mak Roote", "Scribes" and other works have received civic awards for excellence. John’s work has been featured in numerous books on Murals and Public Art, and "Mur, Mur', a film by Agnes Varda.
- 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 books of poems and meditations are "Synthesis" (2009) and "Dialogue of the Lovers". 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 on technology are "A History of Silicon Valley" (2011, revised edition in 2022) and "Intelligence is not Artificial" (2013, expanded edition 2019). The first volume of his free ebook "A Visual History of the Visual Arts" appeared in 2012. "A History of California" appeared in 2025. He has also written extensively about cinema and literature. He founded the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) in 2008. Since 2015 he has been commuting between California and China, where several of his books have been translated.
Photos and videos of this evening
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