Join Leonardo community members for the fourth in the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) series
SFSU Downtown Center, 835 Market Street, 6th Floor
San Francisco, CA

LASER is a bimonthly series of lectures and presentations organized by Piero Scaruffi on behalf of Leonardo/ISAST

Space is limited. Please RSVP to Piero Scaruffi: p@scaruffi.com

6:00pm-6:30pm: Socializing/networking

6:45-7:15pm: Joaquin Alvarado, Director of SFSU's Institute for Next Generation Internet, on "Economies of Representation and the Rise of Transactional Identity"

Converging platforms and persistent user interactions on the network have created a new tension in communities and communication. Individual agency is now being applied as a quantifiable transaction in the evolving event-horizon of ubiquitous computing. As users continue to deploy mediated actions in abstracted media forms they are inevitably engaging in negotiations with automated agents. This creates a friction point that will deliver the new economics of identity.

7:15-7:45pm: Amy Ione, Director of the Diatrope Institute, on "Art and the Brain"

Art practice and appreciation are generally considered products of human culture, rather than areas for scientific investigation. Yet, perhaps because art that is quintessentially exquisite speaks so deeply to us, it is difficult to see human culture as a map for one1s individual experience with art. Now, with the explosion of brain research on cognition, perception, and sensation we are beginning to explore the nature of art in ways that include neurobiological and neuropsychological questions.

7:45-8:00pm: Roger Malina, CNRS Marseille, on Leonardo ISAST's worldwide activities

8:00-8:20pm: Robert Rich, Electronic and Digital Composer, on "Microtonal Music and Just Intonation"

A brief introduction to the use of tuning systems based upon ratios, focusing on musical examples and audio demonstrations, with just a bit of history and not much math.

8:20-8:40pm: Lynette Cook, Artist, on "Art and the Cosmos"

Known especially for her collaborations with Geoff Marcy and other exoplanet discoverers, Cook has painted many planet portraits, from those of our own solar system to those orbiting other stars. She will explain how she knows what these distant bodies look like.

8:40pm: Piero Scaruffi on the next Leonardo Art/Science evening

8:45-9:45pm: Discussions, more socializing

For more information, visit: http://www.leonardo.info/isast/events.html