An Interdisciplinary Tour of the Human Condition in Three Stages: Time, Life, and Mind

An Interdisciplinary Tour of the Human Condition in Three Stages: Time, Life, and Mind

Over the years, artists, scientists, engineers, and humanities scholars have explored the grand themes that define the human condition from radically different perspectives. Too infrequently, they are given the opportunity to listen to each other and engage in conversations that cross boundaries and mix up categories.

During three quarters of this academic year, we are hosting an evening program featuring some of the most exciting thinkers in the Bay Area, inviting them to talk together about one or another modest slice of the human experience. We started in the Fall with "Time," we now continue with "Life," and will wrap up with "Mind" in the Spring. We have no idea in what directions these conversations will go, but we can guarantee that they will be mind-expanding and memorable. We hope you will join us.

Each presenter will provide reading, viewing, or listening material that will be posted online before the event and that will constitute "homework" for the audience. A brief audio interview with each of the presenters will also be posted on the web as an introduction to the presenter. Please visit http://www.scaruffi.com/stanford/tour2011.html

Panelists for this event include:

PAUL RABINOW
Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley Paul Rabinow is the director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC), and former director of the Human Practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) at UC Berkeley. He is the author and editor of eighteen books, including most recently, The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary, Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary, and Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment. A former lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he was named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1998 and was awarded the visiting Chaire Internationale de Recherche Blaise Pascal at the École Normale Supérieure for 2001–02.

CHRISTINE PETERSON
Christine Peterson's The Foresight Institute is a public interest group that educates the community and policymakers on forthcoming powerful technologies such as nanotechnology. Peterson serves on the Advisory Board of the International Council on Nanotechnology and the Editorial Advisory Board of NASA's Nanotech Briefs. Her work is motivated by a desire to help Earth's environment and traditional human communities benefit from advances in technology. She is a co-author of Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution and Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work.

LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON
Lynn Hershman Leeson is Professor Emeritus at UC Davis, and was A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell. She is a multimedia artist and filmmaker whose works include the first interactive laser artdisk (LORNA), three award-winning feature films (Strange Culture, Teknolust, and Conceiving Ada), and interactive installations that use the Internet and artificial intelligence software. A book on her work, The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson, was published in 2005.

JEREMY BAILENSON
Associate Professor of Communication, Stanford
Jeremy Bailenson, the founder and director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), is a cognitive psychologist who focuses on digital human representation, especially in the context of immersive virtual reality. He explores the manner in which people are able to represent themselves when the physical constraints of body are removed, and designs collaborative virtual reality systems that allow physically remote individuals to meet in virtual space. His findings have been published in more than seventy academic papers, and he is co-author of Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution (2011).

PIERO SCARUFFI, Moderator
Piero Scaruffi's education and professional life took him from theoretical physics to cognitive science and the Internet, while writing on music, cinema, and the arts as well as publishing his own poetry. He has published several books and articles, including The Nature of Consciousness; A History of Rock and Dance Music; Synthesis: Essays, Photographs, Poems; and A History of Silicon Valley.

Thursday, January 19
7:00 pm
Cubberley Auditorium, School of Education
FREE; no registration is required

The "Mind" program on April 19 will include multimedia artist Deborah Aschheim, CCRMA's director Chris Chafe, Stanford cognitive neuroscientist James McClelland, and virtual-reality pioneer and music composer Jaron Lanier. Look for additional information in the Spring 2012 Continuing Studies catalogue.AuthorChair, Film Department, San Francisco Art InstituteCo-founder and President, The Foresight Institute