CHAIRED BY: Piero Scaruffi

Program (the order of the speakers might change):

7:00-7:25:  Audrey Shafer (Stanford Univ/ Medicine) on "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: The First 200 Years." Why is this novel, known as the first science fiction text, so generative...

7:25-7:50:  Qifeng Chen (Intel Labs) on "Photographic Image Synthesis with Cascaded Refinement Networks." An A.I. approach to synthesizing photographic images.

7:50-8:10: BREAK. Before or after the break, anyone in the audience currently working within the intersections of art and science will have 30 seconds to share their work. Please present your work as a teaser so that those who are interested can seek you out during social time following the event.

8:10-8:35:  Robert Buelteman (Camera-less photographer) on "Photography after the Digital Revolution: Now What?" Are today's technical marvels providing humanity any greater access in interpreting the world?

8:35-9:00:  Carlo Sequin (UC Berkeley) on "Klein bottles and Super-Bottles" Super-Bottles are topological models that can yield artistic creations.

Speakers:

Robert Buelteman is a fine-art photographer whose works connect audience to subject in an emotionally transcendent manner, in the tradition of eastern wisdom and western revelation. Buelteman developed his affection for nature as a child growing up in a small town on the peninsula south of the city of San Francisco. From his family home he looked out on the Santa Cruz Mountains, whose deep canyons, redwood groves, and daily tides of ocean-borne fog inspired the veneration of life and light that appear in his work today. He has published fifteen photographic portfolios over his forty years in photography, and three of these, The Unseen Peninsula (1994), Eighteen Days in June (2000), and Signs of Life (2009) were published as award-winning monographs. In 1999, Buelteman left photographic tradition behind in creating Through the Green Fuse, a portfolio of energetic photograms made without cameras, lenses, or computers. Working directly with large sheets of photographic film, living plantsare used as a filter through which high-voltage electricity and fiber-optically-delivered light are passed. The resulting images open a window on life’s mystery, and were compared by the Los Angeles Times with photographs of our universe made by the Hubble Telescope. Because of this new work, Buelteman was invited to be a guest at the world-renowned Santa Fe Institute in 2003. Three years later, he completed work on two new portfolios, Sangre de Cristo, the flora of Santa Fe, and Rancho Corral de Tierra, the flora of his hometown of Montara, located on the North coast of California. From 2010 - 2014 he was a guest at Stanford University’s highly restricted Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Since 2010 his art has been the subject of dozens of essays in 26 languages on six continents around the globe, and can be found in public and private collections worldwide, including the Yale University Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Accel-KKR, Bank of America, Abingworth, Adobe Systems, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Stanford University, Xerox, and Nikon.

Qifeng Chen received Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 2017, and a bachelor's degree in computer science and maths from HKUST in 2012. He does research in computer vision, deep learning, optimization, and computer graphics at Intel Labs. Three of his papers were selected for full oral presentation in ICCV 2015, CVPR 2016 and ICCV 2017. In 2011, he won the 2nd place worldwide at the ACM-ICPC World Finals. He earned a gold medal at IOI 2007.

Carlo Sequin has been a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1977. His research interests lie in the fields of Computer Graphics, Virtual Environments, and Computer Aided Design Tools. He has built CAD tools for the layout of integrated circuits, for the conceptual phase in architectural design, for the design of mechanical systems, and -- most recently -- for artists who create abstract geometrical sculptures, and for mathematicians who want to construct tangible visualization models.

Audrey Shafer (Stanford Univ/ Medicine) is Professor of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine / Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System; founder and director, Stanford Medicine & the Muse Program, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics; co-director, Biomedical Ethics and Medical Humanities Scholarly Concentration; and co-founder of Pegasus Physician Writers. Courses she teaches include Medical Humanities and the Arts, and The Art of Observation Skills. Medicine and the Muse is hosting a yearlong initiative, Frankenstein@200, including film, courses and events. She is the author of The Mailbox, a children's novel on posttraumatic stress disorder in veterans. Her poetry on anesthesia, health humanities and family life has been published in journals and anthologies and heard on NPR.

SPONSORS:

LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) Talks is Leonardo's international program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversations. LASER Talks were founded in 2008 by Bay Area LASER Chair Piero Scaruffi and are in over 30 cities around the world. To learn more about how our LASER Hosts and to visit a LASER near you please visit our website. 

The mission of the LASERs is to provide the general public with a snapshot of the cultural environment of a region and to foster interdisciplinary networking.