June LASER EVent - San Jose

Join us for the launch of San José State University's LASER Art + Science talks at the SubZERO Festival - Saturday, June 3rd, 2017 at The Forager, 420 South 1st St. San José, CA. Event begins at 7pm, talks start promptly at 7:30pm.

We have an incredible lineup of artists and scientists, with live talks and performances featuring SJSU faculty. This inaugural LASER event is the first of a series of art/ science talks at SJSU starting in 2017.

Introduction by Piero Scaruffi, Founder of the LASER Talks

Michael Kaufman, Physicist
Water Factories in Space: How Nature Conspires To Make Lots Of It

The universe contains abundant raw materials for making water, and the regions around young and old stars are ideal for producing lots of it. I’ll discuss how this happens and how we know. I will also discuss the curious phenomenon of naturally occurring space lasers.

Maya Ackerman, Computer Scientist, Opera Singer
Composed by an Artificial Intelligence: Soprano and Violist Perform Machine-Made Songs

Songwriting is one of the newest frontiers tackled by Artificial Intelligence. We will present AI-based machines that compose music and lyrics. A soprano and violist will perform songs created with these machines.

Speaker and Soprano: Maya Ackerman
Violist: Sheila Hu
Joint work with David Loker, James Morgan, Joshua Palkki, Chris Cassion, Rafael Perez y Perez, and Divya Singh.

Rhonda Holberton, Artist
Still Life: Reality has Always Been Augmented

Roughly 60% of the brains resources are devoted to processing vision. What we see shapes what we know. I will discuss my explorations into reality making using processes that pull real object into virtual space and translate them back again.

Andrew Blanton, Artist and Percussionist
M0DULATOR and WAVEGUIDE

As an exploration of sound and software, Andrew Blanton will present two of his compositions M0DULATOR and WAVEGUIDE. Beginning his studies as a classical percussionist, Andrew builds software and visuals as a new media artist exploring signal processing and visualization.