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News

IN MEMORIAM: BEATRIZ DA COSTA (1974-2012)

Beatriz Da Costa, UC Irvine professor and interdisciplinary artist known for her work at the intersection of contemporary art, science, engineering and politics, died in New York in December 2012. Da Costa was a full-time member of the Art Department and an affiliate faculty member in the Informatics Department as well as in the Culture and Theory Ph.D. program. Her professional background and practice drew students from a wide variety of disciplines to work with her. Over the course of her career she worked in the areas of robotics, micro-electronics, installation, sculpture, performance, interactivity, net art, photography and video—and often some combination thereof. She also considered writing to be an important part of her practice, co-editing the 2008 MIT Press anthology Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience (part of the Leonardo Book Series) with UC Irvine faculty member Kavita Philip. Da Costa was especially interested in creating work that bridged the arts and sciences, and she frequently engaged the public by running workshops that translated challenging new technical and scientific developments into something accessible to a more general public. Da Costa will be remembered for her contributions as an artist and as an educator. Find out more

Events

INAUGURAL UC DAVIS LASER: 3 OCTOBER

The UC Davis Art/Science Fusion Program at the University of California, Davis presents its inaugural Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) on 3 October 2013, 6:30 p.m. Speakers include the co-founders of the UC Davis Art/Science Fusion Program, artist/educator Donna Billick and scientist Diane Ullman, on "Fusion and Perception"; composer/performer/author/media artist Bob Ostertag speaking about his work; artist Meredith Tromble and physicist/programmer Jordan Van Aalsburg on "The Vortex Touches Down"; and scientist Jim Crutchfield of the Complexity Sciences Center speaking about his work and interests. Location: 3001 PES (Plant and Environmental Sciences Building), UC Davis. Find out more

INAUGURAL UC SANTA CRUZ LASER: 8 OCTOBER

The new Institute of the Arts and Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz will host the launch of UCSC’s LASER series on 8 OCTOBER, 6:45 p.m. At this inaugural event, artists, scientists and scholars will lay the foundation for the series by speaking about the intertwining of art and science. Questions like "why art and science" and "why now" will provide context for the series as a local forum for presenting creative, original and interdisciplinary art-and-science projects underway throughout the University of California, the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Presenters include Ken Goldberg, New Media, UC Berkeley; Jennifer A. González, History of Art and Visual Culture, UCSC; Gregory Laughlin, Astronomy and Astrophysics, UCSC; Piero Scaruffi, Founder, LASER Series; and Gail Wight, Art and Art History, Stanford. Location: UCSC, Digital Arts Research Center (DARC) Rm. 108. For more information, contact the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at ias@ucsc.edu. Find out more

NEXT UC BERKELEY LASER: 9 OCTOBER

Join us for the next UC Berkeley LASER on 9 October 2013, 6 p.m. Presenters include former NASA scientist Zann Gill on "Resolving Prediction’s Paradox: Collaborative Intelligence Ecosystems"; UC Santa Cruz professor Jennifer Parker on "Publishing in Public: Breaking Down Academic Silos to Create Trans-Disciplinary Research"; composer Cheryl Leonard on "Music from High Latitudes"; and Wayne Vitale of Balinese gamelan ensemble Gamelan Sekar Jaya on "Between Ancient Text and Three Screens." Location: Barrows Hall, Room 110. Find out more

NEXT STANFORD LASER: 10 OCTOBER

>Join us for the next Stanford LASER on 10 October 2013, 6 p.m. This LASER event will take place at Stanford’s Center for Research on Computer Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) and will be followed by Transitions, an evening of outdoor, under-the-stars electronic music showcasing works from the CCRMA community and celebrating the start of the 2013 season. Presenters include visual artist Taraneh Hemami on "Theory of Survival"; visual artist Kate Nichols on "Misadventures in Art and Nanoscience"; choreographer Katharine Hawthorne on "Choreography as Research" and Sasha Leitman of Stanford CCRMA on "Research in Computer Music at Stanford’s CCRMA." Find out more

NEXT NYC LASER: 17 OCTOBER

Join us for the next NYC LASER event on 17 October 2013, 6:30 p.m. at LevyArts in New York City. The evening’s program includes presentations by Meredith Tromble, past Leonardo Board member, on the collaborative work she is doing with a geobiologist at the KeckCAVES visualization facility at UC Davis, and Dr. Jill Scott, of the Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts at ZhdK (Zurich, Switzerland) and Co-Director of the Artists-in-Labs Program. Scott will describe AURALROOTS, her current neuroscience residency with SymbioticA in Perth in the Audiology Lab at the University of Western Australia. Space is limited; to reserve your place, send an email to levy@nyc.rr.com. Find out more

KASA GALLERY: CLOUD BANKS

Cloud Banks, Mark Amerika’s new exhibition at Kasa Gallery (Istanbul, Turkey), will explore the way artists, political and economic theorists, metaphysical philosophers and people in business use language as a tool to construct their vision of the world as they see it. As with much of Amerika’s conceptual net art, the title is a pun, one that refers to both a weather phenomenon—a layer of clouds seen from a distance—and the recent rise of both cloud computing and too-big-to-fail banking systems. Clouds obscure and diffuse the light of the sun, much as banks obscure and confuse the effects of contemporary financial realities. The clouded visuality of the words in Amerika’s artworks becomes a way to let the viewer perceive the clouded visuality of the world. Cloud Banks is the representation of a human failure to understand, reconnect and re-contextualize histories, ideologies and contemporary realities. Lanfranco Aceti and Ozden Sahin curated the exhibition, which closes 31 October 2013. Find out more

Publications

NOW AVAILABLE: LEONARDO 46:5

Inside Leonardo 46:5 (2013): A sunlit romance: Science, fiction and myth have puzzled over how Earth and Moon got together—and where this is going. Soft Moon channels Calvino, Lem et al. on this primordial odd couple. See article by Jane Grant. Wearing your welcome: We’re drawn to those who "mirror" us—and now technology can help us all do that better. Accessorize to harmonize in patterns of LEDs and pungencies with new Light Perfume. See article by Yongsoon Choi et al. Is it art all the way down? If ideas of an independently verifiable reality are gone like exhaust from a perpetual motor, maybe the installations, sculptures and media here can make this notion more . . . real. See article by Lynden Stone. Interactive narrative: a tough nut to code: Too little user control makes for a set story with "OK" buttons. Too much: a random walk with intertitles. Our designers call upon Divine Providence. See article by Joan Llobera et al. Find out more

Call for Papers: LMJ 24: < 40: Emerging Voices

It’s time to stand on our tiptoes and peer over the horizon. For Volume 24 of Leonardo Music Journal we solicit articles (papers of up to 3000 words) and shorter statements (750 to 1000 words) from artists born after 1975, addressing the impact of emerging technological resources on new aesthetic movements. We are particularly interested in contributions from artists from underrepresented communities. Interested artists are invited to submit a short proposal by 15 October 2013 to Editor-in-Chief Nic Collins at ncollins@saic.edu. Deadline for rough proposals or queries: 15 October 2013. Deadline for submission of finished articles: 2 January 2014. Find out more Find out more

Opportunities and Community Announcements

VIDEO ONLINE: THE DATA BODY ON THE DISSECTION TABLE

On 4 June 2013, Leonardo/Olats co-organized a roundtable discussion entitled "The Data Body on the Dissection Table. Arts, Humanities, Medicine and Complex Networks" with the Medical Museion in Copenhagen. Video of the presentations and the articles are now available online. Speakers include Albert-László Barabási, Distinguished Professor and Director of Northeastern University Center for Complex Network Research, Boston; François-Joseph Lapointe, artist and professor at the Biological Sciences Department, University of Montreal; Annamaria Carusi, associate professor in Philosophy of Medical Science and Technology at the University of Copenhagen; and Jamie Allen, artist and Head of Research at CIID/Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. Find out more

CALL FOR PAPERS: EVOMUSART 2014

EvoMUSART 2014 is the 12th European event and the 3rd International Conference on Evolutionary and Biologically Inspired Music, Sound, Art and Design. The main goal of EvoMUSART 2014 is to bring together researchers who are using biologically inspired computer techniques for artistic tasks, providing the opportunity to promote, present and discuss ongoing work in the area of art/science. The event will be held in April 2014 in Baetha, Andalusia, Spain, as part of the evo* event. EvoMUSART is seeking papers on the topics of the use of biologically inspired computer techniques in the generation, analysis and interpretation of art, music, design, architecture and other artistic fields. Accepted papers will be presented orally or as posters at the event and included in the EvoMUSART proceedings, published by Springer Verlag in a dedicated volume of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Deadline to submit: 1 November 2013. Find out more

CONNECTING CITIES 2013: NETWORKED CITY

In the framework of the European project Connecting Cities 2013: Networked City, the metro esplanade Comte de Flandre/Graaf van Vlaanderen and its surroundings will be connected to Liverpool (UK) for two days, 4–5 October 2013, through a series of surprising, participatory and playful artworks accessible to all in the public space. Through urban, mobile and connected art pieces, organizers and artists aim to explore, to question and to stimulate emerging technologies and mediums beyond the traditional formats of digital art. Artists include Sander Veenhof, Vavara Guljajeva and Mar Carnet Sola, Jeremy Bailey and media hacktavist/venture communist collective Telekommunisten. Find out more

ISMAR 2013: Transreal Topologies Exhibition

Transreal Topologies is an exhibition exploring the field of mixed and augmented reality art (MARart) and will present artists who are contributing to the development of a unique language for MARart as both a medium and an area of inquiry. The exhibition focuses on modes of representation that deal with the augmentation of data beyond traditional surfaces in order to merge the virtual and the real. The exhibition will take place 1–4 October 2013 as part of the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality at the University of South Australia located in Adelaide, Australia. Find out more

PRISM BREAKUP

On 4–6 October 2013, Eyebeam will host PRISM Breakup, a series of art and technology events dedicated to exploring and providing forms of protection from surveillance. This event came about in part as an outgrowth of Eyebeam’s mission to support the work of artists who critically expose technologies and examine their relationship to society. The gathering will bring together a wide spectrum of artists, hackers, academics, activists, security analysts and journalists for a long weekend of meaningful conversation, hands-on workshops, and art installations. Find out more