The L.A.S.E.R.s are an international program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversation with an audience.
The L.A.S.E.R. (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) series was started by Piero Scaruffi in january 2008 as a local forum
for presenting art and science projects underway in the Bay Area, and is coordinated worldwide by
Leonardo ISAST.
The mission of the LASERs is to provide the general public with a snapshot of the cultural environment of a region and to foster interdisciplinary networking.
Each evening, free of charge and open to the public, presents up to four artists, scientists, philosophers, historians, inventors and scholars who are working on paradigm shifts.
See the current locations and schedule of Bay Area LASER series
and
Leonardo ISAST's page for worldwide series.
See the gallery of past presenters from 2008 till 2019.
See the videos of all the presentations.
These events moved online during the Covid pandemic (2020-22), and we temporarily renamed them "The L.A.S.T. Dialogies (Life Art Science Tech)". In 2023 they became both virtual and physical.
Click here for the Bay Area LASERS before 2020.
- June 2020 - Stanford:
June 8, 2020: Catherine Blish (Stanford virologist) on Covid-19 ( video)
June 10, 2020: Mark Jacobson (Stanford energy scholar) on Renewable Energy (video)
June 23, 2020: "Rethinking Art for the Online World: Online Art, Online Exhibitions, Online Audience" with Caroline Jones (MIT), Joel Slayton (curator), Chris Chafe (Stanford CCRMA) (video)
June 24, 2020: "Opportunities for Online Art and Science Collaboration" with Bettina Forget (SETI Inst), Jennifer Parker (UCSC OpenLab), Curtis Frank (Stanford) (video)
June 25, 2020: "Online Art for the Age of Plague" with media artists/inventors/scholars (video)
Jiabao Li, Media Artist (video)
Alex Reben, Inventor and Artist (video)
Craig Hobbs, director of the CADRE Lab at San Jose State Univ (video)
- July 2020 - Stanford:
July 8, 2020: Luis Villarreal (Founding Director, Center for Virus Research, UC Irvine) on "Living in the Virosphere: A Virus-first Theory of the Evolution of Life" (video)
July 9, 2020: Bruno Olshausen (Director of UC Berkeley's Redwood Center for Neuroscience) on "Visual Perception and the Brain: What we know, what we don't know, and what we don't even know we don't know." (video)
- August 2020 - Stanford:
August 24, 2020: Panel on "Revolution" with Historian Steve Harris (SFSU), art historian Dawna Schuld (Texas A&M Univ), physicist Saul Perlmutter (Lawrence Berkeley Lab) and cultural historian Piero Scaruffi (video)
August 26, 2020: Stanford epidemiologist Julie Parsonnet on "Covid-19: Where we Stand" (video)
August 27, 2020: Codame founders Bruno Fonzi and Jordan Gray, visual designer Don Hanson and computational artist Char Stiles on "New Paradigms and Spaces for Artistic Expression" (video)
- September 2020 - Stanford:
September 10, 2020:
Roger Malina on "The Legacy of Frank Popper" (video)
Ilke Demir on "The Science of Generative Art" (video)
AnneMarie Schleiner on "Transnational Play" (video)
September 17, 2020: Yi Zeng of the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences on "Brain-inspired Artificial Intelligence and Ethics of Artificial Intelligence" (video)
September 24, 2020: Margot Gerritsen (Stanford Univ) on "Computational Mathematics gives you wings: how Computational Mathematics powers the modern world" (video)
- October 2020 - Stanford:
October 1, 2020:
Rebecca Rutstein on "Illuminating the Depths: Artist at Sea" (video)
Blanca Bercial on "The paradox of silence within a social and artistic framework" (video)
Pantea Karimi on "The Unbearable Lightness of Mathematics" (video)
October 14, 2020:
Piroska Kopar (Washington Univ) on "Ethics in the Time of Coronavirus" (video)
Milana Trounce (Stanford Univ) on "Pandemic Resilience" (video)
- November 2020 - Stanford:
November 5:
Sachiko Kodama (Visual Artist, live from Japan) on "magnetic fluid sculptures" (video)
Robert Buelteman (Cameraless Photographer) on "The Voice of the Biosphere" (video)
November 12:
Heather Spence (Marine biologists and Composer) on "Underwater Sound Research: Music of Marine Biology" (video)
Cheryl Leonard (Composer and Instrument builder) on "Phantom Limbs: Composing Music Amidst the Sixth Extinction" (video)
- December 2020 - Stanford:
December 3:
Ian Hodder (Stanford/ Anthropology) on the prehistoric settlement of Çatalhöyük, one of the world's earliest societies" (video)
Miriam Dym (Visual Artist & Systems Thinker) on her visual art based on infinitely variable and interactive pattern systems (video)
Vijaya Nagarajan (Univ. of San Francisco/ Theology and Religious Studies) on "Embedded Mathematics in Southern India's Ritual Art of the Kolam" (video)
December 17:
Daniela de Paulis (Artist in Residence at the Dwingeloo Radio Telescope) on her conceptual art based on space exploration and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (video)
Janine Marchessault (Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at York University) on "Media, Utopias, Ecologies" (video)
- February 2021 - Stanford:
Mike Parker Pearson (UC London/ Archeology) on "The World of Stonehenge" (video)
Maryam Razi (Art Researcher) on "Iran's Media Art Scene" (video)
Panel on "The Algorithmic Society" with Irina Raicu (Santa Clara University), Michal Kosinski (Stanford), Simina Mistreanu (China-based journalist) and cultural historian Piero Scaruffi (video)
- March 2021 - Stanford:
Ian Duncan (UC Berkeley) on "The Novel after the Scientific Revolution" (video)
Anastasiia Raina and the Posthuman Mobility team (Rhode Island School of Design) on "Microbial Cosmologies" (video)
Christian Kohler (Lawrence Berkeley Labs) on "Environmental Building Technologies" (video)
Monica Smith (UC Los Angeles/ Anthropology) on "Urban Art: The First 6,000 Years" (video)
Brian Knutson (Stanford/ Neuroscience) on "Toward a Deep Science of Affect, Motivation, and Choice" (video)
Sophia Moskalenko (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism) on "Radicalization and Martyrdom" (video)
- April 2021 - Stanford:
Janine Randerson (Auckland University of Technology, live from New Zealand) on "Weather as Medium" (video)
Jennie Lavine (Emory Univ) on "What is the endgame of the covid pandemic? Will covid become endemic?" (video)
A conversation on "Pulled Apart: Re-engineering and Re-purposing Human Civilization" with Cynthia Hooper (Media Artist)
( video),
Adam Chin (Photographer)
( Adam Chin),
Terry Berlier (Stanford/ Art)
( Terry Berlier),
Glori Simmons (Director, USF Thacher Gallery)
( video),
John Campbell (UC Berkeley/ Philosophy), ( video)
and Piero Scaruffi (cultural historian)
- September 2021 - Stanford:
Carol Strohecker (Dean of Design, University of Minnesota, and cofounder of the SEAD network for Sciences, Engineering, Arts and Design) on "The Kusske Design Initiative"
(video)
Anastasia Raina (Rhode Island School of Design) on "Posthuman Polymythology"
(video)
Warren Sack (UC Santa Cruz/ Digital Media) on "The Software Arts"
(video)
Cindy Cohn (Executive Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation) on "Imagining A Future with Real Digital Privacy"
(video)
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett (University of Southern California) on "Inconspicuous Consumption and Cultural Capital: the New Inequality"
(video)
Alvy Ray Smith (Co-founder of Pixar, live from Montreal) on "A Biography of the Pixel"
(video)
- October 2021 - Stanford:
David Kirby (Cal Poly) on Diegetic Prototypes
(video)
Jessie Liu (UC Berkeley), David Moses (UCSF) & Sean Metzger (UCSF) on Speech Neuroprosthesis
(video)
Alysson Muotri (UC San Diego) on Applications of Brain Organoids
(video)
A fireside chat with Catherine Blish (Stanford/ Infectious Diseases) on Covid-19 and the Virusphere
(video)
Heather Barnett (University of the Arts London) on "Compostulations: stories of interspecies encounters (between art, science and ecology)" (video)
Clare Stanton (Harvard Law School) on "Linkrot and Content Drift: The Irreversible Decay of Internet Content" (video)
- November 2021 - Stanford:
Neil Shubin (University of Chicago) on "Decoding Four Billion Years of Life" (video)
Albert Russell Ascoli (UC Berkeley) on "Dante and the Invention of Italian, Italians, and Italy" (video)
Kat Mustatea (Playwright & Technologist) on "Augmented Reality and the Decaying Book" (video)
- January 2022 - Stanford
Josh Bongard (University of Vermont) on evolutionary robotics and evolutionary computation ( video)
Jessica Angel (Media Artist) on "Integrated Immersive Experiences as Doors to the Metaverse" ( video)
Eran Kahana (Stanford) on "The Metaverse and its Potential Impact on Agency for Artificial Intelligence Entities" ( video)
Pattie Maes (MIT) on "Cognitive Enhancement" ( video)
Sarah Friend (Cryptoartist) on "Systems as Fictions" ( video)
Amelia Winger-Bearskin (Univ. of Florida) on "Visual Storytelling with Bleeding-edge Technologies" ( video)
- February 2022 - Stanford
Sam Kriegman (Harvard Medical School) on "Computer-designed Organisms" (video)
Rachel Rossin (Media Artist) on "On Proxies: the vocabulary of art in the age of virtual and crypto cultures" (video)
Laura Marks (Simon Fraser Univ) on "Soul-Assemblage Media" (video)
- March 2022 - Stanford
Summer Praetorius (USGS Geologist) on "The Heliocene"
Ewa Domanska (Stanford Univ & Adam Mickiewicz Univ) on "Prefigurative Art and Micro-Utopias" (video)
Lily Xiying Yang (Media Artist) on "Creativity and Activism in Extended Reality" ( video)
- April 2022 - Stanford
Yunger, Nicole (Univ of Maryland) on "Quantum Steampunk: The Physics of Yesterday's Tomorrow" (video)
Sargeant, Betty (Media Artist) on "The Art of Collaboration: Decolonising Digital Landscapes" (video)
Zolotovsky, Katia (RISD) on "Spatial design with Engineered Living Materials" (video)
- May 2022 - Stanford
Kris Paulsen (Ohio State Univ) on "Virtual Surrender: Agency and Embodiment in Artists' Virtual Reality" (video)
Doga Cavdir (Stanford CCRMA) on "Movement-based Music-making" (video)
Jerold Chun (Sanford Burnham Prebys) on "Our Genomically Mosaic Brain" (video)
- June 2022 - Stanford
Sarah Cole (Columbia Univ) on James Joyce's "Ulysses" at 100 (video)
- July 2022 - Stanford
Marjorie Perloff (Stanford Univ) on "TS Eliot's 'The Waste Land' at 100" (video)
Laura Splan (Media Artist) on "Recursive Residues: Navigating Interfaces Between Virtual and Biological Worlds" (video)
Bektur Ryskeldiev (Tsukuba Univ, Japan) on "The (near) future of immersive and interactive media" (video)
- September 2022 - Stanford
Julia Scott (Santa Clara Univ) on "Biofeedback Integration into immersive Virtual Reality Experiences" (video)
Marjorie Perloff (Stanford Univ) on "Infrathin: Poetry as Verbivocovisual Art" (video)
Suyash Joshi (Engineer and Magician) on "S.T.E.A.M. Magic" (video)
- November 2022 - Stanford
Kim Anno (California College of the Arts) on "Spectacle of Nature and Iconic Western texts" (video)
Virj Kan (Design Scientist) on "Molecular Design Interactions" (video)
Kal Spelletich (Machine Artist) on "Galactic Scale Inquiries into the Nature of the Cosmos" (video)
Kokichi Sugihara (Meiji University, Japan) on "How to Make Impossible Objects" (video)
- December 2022 - USF
Bill Ayton (Media Artist) on "Interplanetary VR Sustainable Futures" (video)
Annick Bureaud (Curator) on "Art and Science - Out of the Bubble" ( video)
Christa Sommerer (Media Artist) on "The Artwork as a Living System" (video)
Klaus Spiess (Vienna Medical Univ) on "Ecolalia" (video)
- January 2023 - USF
Therese Lahaie (Media Artist) on "Analog and Digital Migration" (video)
Annie Kritcher (Lawrence Livermore Lab) on "The State of Nuclear Fusion Research" (video)
Primavera De Filippi (National Center of Scientific Research, Paris) on "Do blockchains dream of electronic flowers?" (video)
- February 2023 - Stanford
Jennifer Dionne (Stanford Univ) on "Life-speed reads of biological bits with Silicon photonics" (video)
Adegboyega Mabogunje (Stanford Univ) on "Accelerating Innovation: Children, Women, Sex, and Bombs" (video)
Alice Yuan Zhang (Media Artist) on "The Need for Intergenerational Tech" (video)
- March 2023 - Stanford
Christina Jauernik on "Touching Distance - Inter-Views with the Virtual" (video)
Hanna Haslaahti on "Storytelling with Personal Avatars" (video)
Javier Ideami on "Encounters of the third kind with Generative Artificial Intelligence" (video)
- April 2023 - Univ of San Francisco (Click on the title to view the video)
Margaret Geller on "Mapping the Universe"
Roxana Marachi on "How Surveillance Capitalism Ate Education for Lunch "
Piero Scaruffi on "What's in a Transformer: Why ChatGPT works so well"
- May 2023 - Stanford (Click on the title to view the video)
Ravi Majeti on "Stem Cells and Reprogramming in Human Acute Leukemia"
Thomas Haakenson on "Kurt Schwitters and the Space, Sound, Sexuality of Dada Resistance"
David Stork on "Rigorous computer-assisted lighting analysis of the works by Johannes Vermeer"
Paige Emery on "On Divinatory Ecologies for More-Than-Human Time"
- July 2023 - USF (Click on the title to view the video)
Victoria Vesna (UCLA) on "Vibrations Matter: Art & Science of Deep Listening"
Yizhou Dong (Mt Sinai) on "Lipid nanoparticles enabled mRNA therapeutics"
- September 2023 - Stanford (Click on the title to view the video)
Amy Karle (Bio-artist) on "Digital Dreams and Bio-realities: Reimagining Humanity Through Art and Technology"
Eti Ben Simon (UC Berkeley) on "The Emotional Brain in a Sleepless World"
Michal Kosinski (Stanford Univ) on "Theory of Mind Might Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models"
- November 2023 - Stanford (Click on the title to view the video)
Antony Jose (University of Maryland) on "Heredity constrains the nature of living systems"
Curtis Suttle (Univ of British Columbia) on "Viruses and their Role in the Environment"
- November 2023 - Stanford (Click on the title to view the video)
Nina Czegledy (Univ of Toronto)
Anna Frants (Russian curator and artist)
Elena Gubanova (Russian curator and artist)
Natalia Kolodzei (Russian curator and artist)
Olga Shishko (Russian curator and artist)
Discussion
- February 2024 - Stanford (Click on the title to view the video)
Stanley Corngold (Princeton) on "An Interdisciplinary Celebration of Kafka"
Ken Krimstein (Cartoonist) on "An Interdisciplinary Celebration of Kafka"
Claire Pentecost (Media Artist) on "An Interdisciplinary Celebration of Kafka"
- April 2024 - Stanford (Click on the title to view the video)
Sara Morawetz (Media Artist) on "Measuring by Measuring Against: Experimental Methods in Artistic Practice"
Leah Rosengaus (Director of Digital Health at Stanford Health Care) on "Towards Digital Health"
- June 2024 - Stanford (Click on the title to view the video)
Shane Denson (Stanford) on "How is Human Embodiment Transformed in an Age of Algorithms?"
Virginia San Fratello (San Jose State Univ) on "3D Printing the Future/ Out of the Lab and Into the Landscape"
Fiorenza Micheli (Stanford) on "Harnessing the data revolution for ocean and human health"
Tom Mullaney (Stanford) on "The Audacity of Chinese Computing"
- July 2024 - Stanford (Click on the title to view the video)
Patricia Alessandrini (Stanford) on "Ada's Song: Artistic Research in Robotics from a (Cyber)Feminist Perspective"
Rohini Devasher (Media Artist in India) on "Between Wonder and the Strange"
- September 2024 - Stanford (Click on the title to view the video)
Miguel Novelo (Media Artist) on "Technoshamanic Playgrounds"
James Doty (Stanford) on "Mind Magic"
Kristina Dutton (Composer) on "Soundscapes and Nanoscapes"
- October 2024 - Stanford (Click on the title to view the video)
Amy Ione (Diatrope Institute) on "Neuroscience and Art: The Neurocultural Landscape"
Meredith Tromble (Artist and Curator) on "The New College Circle: The Lifelong Impact of a Creative School"
Caroline Jones (MIT Art Historian) on "Impressionism as a Function of Techno-shock"
- December 2024 - Stanford (Click on the title to view the video)
Karolina Karlic (UC Santa Cruz) on "Unseen California: Photography, Place and Environment"
Alberto Salleo (Stanford/ Material Science) on "Soft Polymers for Bioelectronics" at a Stanford LASER
Changhan Chen (Stanford AI) on "4D Audio-Visual Learning: A Visual Perspective of Sound Propagation and Production"
- February 2025 - Stanford (Click on the title to view the video)
Christina Agapakis (UCLA) on "AI as feminist technology: biology, computation, and new paradigms for engineering"
Jason Eshraghian (UC Santa Cruz) on "Larger Language Models on Smaller Budgets"
- March 2025 - Stanford (Click on the title to view the video)
Jennifer Parker (UCSC) on "Collaborating with a Living Organisms, the Algae Society: BioArt & Design Lab"
- April 2025 - Stanford (Click on the title to view the video)
Michael Jewett (Stanford University) on "Revolutionizing Protein Manufacturing with Cell-Free Protein Synthesis"
Patricia Blessing (Stanford/ Art History) on "Water in Islamic Architecture"
Kat Mustatea (Media Artist) on "What does it mean to have a voice? Art in an increasingly algorithmic world"
Will Tavlin (Author) on "Casual Viewing"
- June 2025 - Stanford (Click on the title to view the video)
Christina Hiromi Hobbs (Stanford Arts) on "Collective Histories of the Asian American Women Artists Association"
Kurt Behrendt (Art Historian) on "The Mandalic Aesthetic"
Maya Man (Internet Artist) on "Chance Encounters: Internet Art, Algorithms, and Authenticity"
- July 2025 - Stanford (Click on the title to view the video)
Michael Heaney (Physicist) on "The paradoxes of quantum mechanics"
Paul Max Payton (Computer Scientist) on "Complex Geometry -- Completing the Map of Space"
Greg Niemeyer (UC Berkeley Center for New Media) on "Data Art"
- September 2025 - Stanford (Click on the title to view the video)
Alexander Sorenson (Binghamton University) on "Hidden Hearts: On Selfhood and the (Un)sayable in Rilke's Poetry"
Harpreet Sareen (New School) on "Post-Human Design / The Great Decentering"
Takako Fujioka (Stanford) on "Joint coordination and improvisation in music"
Jason Kelly Johnson (Futureforms) on Futureforms: Digital Craft
- October 2025 - Stanford (Click on the title to view the video)
John Wehrle (Muralist) on "Visual Stories, Public Works and Private Thoughts"
Judy Dater (Photographer) on "Tell me who you are: My Life in Photography"
Daiane Lopes da Silva (Kinetech Arts) on "DanceHack - The Intersection of Dance and Technology"
Danika Cooper (UC Berkeley) on "Dry Matters: How desert landscapes are essential to our collective futures"
Sarah Cole (Columbia Univ) on "100 Years of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway"
Email me if you'd like to be on the mailing list
for these interdisciplinary cultural events.
A video in which i presented the LASERs at UCLA
|