CHAIRED BY: Piero Scaruffi

Program

7:00-7:25:  Liat Berdugo (Media Artist) on "Technologies of Power, Access, and Freedom"

7:25-7:50:  Ronald Zuckermann (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) on "The Molecular Building Blocks of Life"

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:  Ken Goldberg (UC Berkeley Robotics & Digital Artist) on "The Uncanny"

8:35-9:00: TBA

Speakers

Liat Berdugo is an artist, writer, and curator who studied mathematics and philosophy at Brown University, and design at Rhode Island School of Design. Berdugo has been exhibited in galleries and festivals nationally and internationally, and her book, The Everyday Maths, was published by Anomalous Press in 2013. She is the net art and special programs curator for Print Screen, Israel's international festival of digital art; co-founder and curator of the Bay Area's Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly new media art salon; co-founder and curator of World Wide West, an annual summit, exhibit, and performative new media event, among others. She collaborates widely with individuals and archives. Her work has won several awards, including fellowships at the Hambidge Center, the Vermont Studio center, and a year-long residency in Tel Aviv, Israel, through the Dorot Foundation. Current research projects include a series of works that interrogate citizen video archives in zones of conflict. Specifically, Berdugo has been researching citizen surveillance and counter-surveillance in Israel/Palestine, and writing a series of essays on the politics of visibility in amateur videography. More at liatberdugo.com.

Ken Goldberg is an artist and professor UC Berkeley. Ken is a pioneer in internet-based robotic telepresence and Cloud-Based Robotics / Automation and has published over 200 peer-reviewed technical papers on algorithms for robotics, automation, and social information filtering; his inventions have been awarded eight US Patents. He is Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE), Co-Founder of the African Robotics Network (AFRON), Co-Founder of the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), Co-Founder and CTO of Hybrid Wisdom Labs, Co-Founder of the Moxie Institute, and Founding Director of UC Berkeley's Art, Technology, and Culture Lecture Series which has hosted over 150 presentations by artists and curators. Ken's artwork has?been exhibited at Ars Electronica, ZKM, Centre Pompidou, ICC Biennale, Kwangju Biennale, Artists Space, The Kitchen, and the Whitney Biennial.

Piero Scaruffi is a cultural historian who has lectured in three continents and published several books on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, the latest one being "The Nature of Consciousness" (2006). He pioneered Internet applications in the early 1980s and the use of the World-Wide Web for cultural purposes in the mid 1990s. His poetry has been awarded several national prizes in Italy and the USA. His latest book of poems and meditations is "Synthesis" (2009). As a music historian, he has published ten books, the latest ones being "A History of Rock and Dance Music" (2009) and "A History of Jazz Music" (2007). His latest book of history is "A History of Silicon Valley" (2011). The first volume of his free ebook "A Visual History of the Visual Arts" appeared in 2012. His latest book is "Intelligence is not Artificial" (2013). He has also written extensively about cinema and literature. He founded the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) in 2008 and the Life Art Science Tech (LAST) festival in 2014. Since 2015 he has been commuting between California and China, where several of his books have been translated.

Ronald Zuckermann is a Sr. Scientist and Facility Director of the Biological Nanostructures Facility at the Molecular Foundry at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He obtained a Ph.D. in Chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1989, and worked as a research scientist in the biotechnology industry for 16 years developing combinatorial drug discovery technologies. He was named a Chiron Research Fellow in 2003, and an LBNL Sr. Scientist in 2011. He invented sequence-defined peptoid polymers, and works on folding them into precise nanoscale architectures. He adapts structural design rules from biology and applies them to the world of materials science. More info at: http://www.ronznet.com

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.