Leonardo Art/Science Evening Rendezvous of August 2020

Online Edition: the L.A.S.T. Dialogues


Exploring the Frontiers of Knowledge and Imagination, Fostering Interdisciplinary Networking

Hosted from Stanford during August 2020
by Piero Scaruffi

A L.A.S.E.R. was planned for August 2020 and a L.A.S.T. Festival was planned for 2020. Since we cannot hold the physical events, we invited the speakers to switch to an online presentation, and, since we don't need to book a room in a building, we let the speakers pick the best date for their talk. In most cases it will be a "fireside chat" rather than the traditional lecture. The Life Art Science Tech (L.A.S.T.) dialogues

(Note: All times are California time)


  • August 24 @ 6pm:
    Historian Steve Harris (SFSU), art historian Dawna Schuld (Texas A&M Univ), physicist Saul Perlmutter (Lawrence Berkeley Lab) and cultural historian Piero Scaruffi on "Revolution (in politics, art and science)".
    Register here or here
    If you missed this dialogue, you can view it by clicking on the image:
    . What is a revolution? When does it happen? When is it successful? Is there any revolution that is not just evolution? What is the meaning of the word in politics, art and science? What is the role of revolutions in the transmission of ideas across space and time? Do art and science cross pollinate revolutions? Are revolutions still possible? Desirable? Revolutions in Physics are based on facts, on empirical data: on what are they based in art? (In popular music often it's a new instrument that causes a revolution: the electric guitar, the synthesizer, the drum machine, ...) Do revolutions in art equal "ism". Are there new isms or is the age of isms over? If so, is that a revolution, an "ism" of no isms? We'll discuss these questions with a historian, a scientist and an art historian.

    Dawna Schuld is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History in the Department of Visualization, Texas A&M University. Her research concentrates on points of intersection between art, technology, and biology, with an emphasis on how the perceptual phenomena of human experience are implemented in art and art systems. In her writings, she has focused especially on the ways that light and space manifested as sculpture in 1960s and 1970s American art. She is the author of "Minimal Conditions: Light, Space, and Subjectivity" (The University of California Press, 2018), and co-editor, with Cristina Albu (University of Missouri, Kansas City), of Perception and Agency in Shared Spaces of Contemporary Art (Routledge, 2018). Dr. Schuld is the 2019-20 Dana and David Dornsife Research Fellow at the Huntington Library Pasadena, California and was previously a Senior Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.

    Steve Harris lectures at the Department of History of San Francisco State Univ and has researched revolutions in history. His focus is modern European history considering ideas, institutions and practices in a global context. He co-leads with Professor Trevor Getz the "History of the 21st Century" project to re-conceive introductory college history courses. His interests focus on legal and political activities and ideas as expressed in the system of states and empires and their shared culture. This encompasses such issues and topics as international law, sovereignty, revolution and how states and their economies/societies interact. His dissertation "Between Law and Diplomacy: International Dispute Resolution in the Long 19th Century" addressed the development and implications of public international arbitration as a tool of the states' system from the end of the 18th century to World War I. He is currently working on the use of pre-printed, fill in the blank treaties by the British during the "Scramble for Africa" in the late 19th century.

    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. 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.

    Saul Perlmutter is a 2011 Nobel Laureate, sharing the prize in Physics for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe. He is the director of BIDS, a professor of physics, where he holds the Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Chair, and a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is the leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project, and executive director of the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics. His undergraduate degree was from Harvard and his PhD from UC Berkeley. In addition to other awards and honors, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Perlmutter has also written popular articles, and has appeared in numerous PBS, Discovery Channel, and BBC documentaries. His interest in teaching scientific-style critical thinking for scientists and non-scientists alike led to Berkeley courses on Sense and Sensibility and Science and Physics & Music.


  • August 26 @ 6pm:
    Stanford epidemiologist Julie Parsonnet on "Covid-19: Where we stand" in conversation with Piero Scaruffi.
    Register here or here
    If you missed this dialogue, you can view it by clicking on the image:
    . Julie Parsonnet is the George DeForest Barnett Professor in Medicine and Professor of Health Research and Policy at Stanford University. She specializes in adult infectious diseases. She also has an active research enterprise in which she studies the way infections contribute to the development of chronic diseases including cancer, allergy and obesity.

    We will discuss the state of the science on the current pandemic: an update on what we learned about the disease in the last few weeks and on the treatments and vaccines under development.


  • August 27 @ 6pm:
    Codame founders Bruno Fonzi and Jordan Gray, visual designer Don Hanson and computational artist Char Stiles on "New Paradigms and Spaces for Artistic Expression" (aka "Imagining the Post-pandemic Art World")
    Register here or here
    If you missed this dialogue, you can view it by clicking on the image:
    . Computational forms of art have become widespread, especially among the younger generation of artists/inventors, and at the same time the pandemic is forcing us to rethink art forms for an online world. This evening will focus on three examples of how the process and format of making and exhibiting art is changing.
    Codame is an art and tech platform and organization founded in 2010 in San Francisco by Bruno Fonzi and Jordan Gray. Codame has staged public events such as festivals and exhibitions that have cemented a community of more than 200 artists and inventors. It has recently opened its own online exhibition gallery on newart.city.
    Bruno Fonzi has been in the software industry since he was a teenager, selling his first software product when he was 15. Born in Italy, he studied in London and Sydney before landing in Silicon Valley where he founded his first start-up, Lanica, a mobile gaming solution. He is currently a Director of Engineering at Salesforce.
    Jordan Gray has pioneered digital distribution of music and manga. Under the staRpauSe alias Jordan performs audiovisual sets. He licenses his output under the Creative Commons to encourage remix culture. staRpauSe sause has been reused in movies, games, VR, and multimedia installations. Jordan's work has featured in New York Times, Vice, Engadget, and more. Jordan has also led technology, prototyping, and innovation projects for Fortune 500 companies including Walmart, AT&T, Wells Fargo, Intel, Tesla, and Google.
    Don Hanson is an Internet artist, electronic musician, hardware hacker, graphic designer, visual jockey, gif maker, and new media art researcher based in Oakland. In 2020 Hanson created the online exhibition space newart.city that has been used for major exhibitions of online art by Gray Area and SJSU CADRE.
    Char Stiles is a digital artist, educator and programmer. Using computational systems and algorithms she is producing pieces that span disciplines such as video, dance, interactive installation, performance and online works. She has given talks and lead workshops at Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University, MIT and NYU. She was recently granted an NEA-funded artist residency at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University to develop an open-source toolkit for artists. She is currently giving a series donation based creative coding workshops at CODAME.


Photos and videos of this evening


The Stanford LASERs are sponsored by the Stanford Deans of: Engineering; Humanities & Sciences; and Medicine; by Continuing Studies.