CHAIRS: Tami Spector and Piero Scaruffi

Program

7:00-7:25:  Patricia G. Lange (California College of the Arts) on "Is Ranting Ever a Good Idea?"

7:25-7:50:  Reza Zadeh (Stanford Institute for Computational Mathematics) on "Computer Vision Made Simple"

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:  Rhonda Holberton (Media Artist) on "Best of Both Worlds: Physical Ramifications of Digitally Engineered Reality(s)"

8:35-9:00:  Chip Lord (Media Artist) on "Space, Time, and Architecture"

Speaker Bios

Rhonda Holberton's multimedia installations make use of digital and interactive technologies integrated into traditional methods of art production. Holberton received her MFA from Stanford University and her BFA from the California College of the Arts. She was a distinguished lecturer at Stanford University and is currently a professor of Digital Media Art at San Jose State University. Holberton was a CAMAC Artist in Residence at Marnay-sur-Seine, France and awarded a Fondation T‚not Fellowship, Paris, France. Her recent solo exhibitions include Transfer Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions (San Francisco, CA), City Limits Gallery and Royal Nonesuch (Oakland, CA), and the Berkeley Art Center (Berkeley, CA). Holberton's 3D Animation, Best of Both Worlds, was recently acquired by SFMOMA and her work is included many notable private collections. She was recently nominated for a three person exhibition for the National Museum of Women in the Arts, curated by SFMOMA's Curator Jenny Gheith. Holberton has been included in exhibitions at the Yerba Center Center for the Arts, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and the San Francisco Arts Commission and was selected for a solo presentation in ZONA MACO SUR 2016 in Mexico City. Her work has been featured in Paper Journal, Terremoto Magazine, PLASMA, SFAQ, Art in America, Art Practical and Daily Serving, among others. Holberton is represented by CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions.

Patricia G Lange is an Anthropologist and Associate Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts (CCA). Her work focuses on technical identity performance and use of video to express the self. She is the author of Kids on YouTube: Technical Identities and Digital Literacies (Routledge, 2014). She also produced and directed the film Hey Watch This! Sharing the Self Through Media (2013) which provides a diachronic look at the rise and fall of YouTube as a social media site. Hey Watch This! was screened in Paris at Ethnografilm (2014), an international film festival showcasing films that visually depict social worlds. Her work has appeared in seminal collections such as The YouTube Reader and Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, as well as numerous publications and journals. She was also named an early influential vlogger and invited to reflect on her work in the Online Lives 2.0 issue of Biography. She also teaches undergraduate courses in: digital cultures; anthropology of technology; new media and civic action; space, place & time; and ethnography for design.

Chip Lord (Media Artist) holds a M.Arch degree from Tulane University, and was a founding partner of Ant Farm in 1968. With Ant Farm he produced the video art classics Media Burn and The Eternal Frame and the public sculpture, Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo Texas. His work moves between video, photography and installation, often in collaboration with other artists. Video works by Lord are in the collections of MOMA, New York; SFMOMA; The Pompidou Centre, Paris; the Tate Modern, London; LACMA; the FRAC Centre, Orleans, FR; and other museums. He lives in San Francisco and is Professor Emeritus in the Film & Digital Media Department at U C Santa Cruz.

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. Since 2015 he has been commuting between California and China, where several of his books have been translated.

Reza Zadeh is CEO at Matroid and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University. His work focuses on Machine Learning, Distributed Computing, and Discrete Applied Mathematics. Reza received his PhD in Computational Mathematics from Stanford under the supervision of Gunnar Carlsson. His awards include a KDD Best Paper Award and the Gene Golub Outstanding Thesis Award. He has served on the Technical Advisory Boards of Microsoft and Databricks. As part of his research, Reza built the Machine Learning Algorithms behind Twitter's who-to-follow system, the first product to use Machine Learning at Twitter. Reza is the initial creator of the Linear Algebra Package in Apache Spark. Through Apache Spark, Reza's work has been incorporated into industrial and academic cluster computing environments. In addition to research, Reza designed and teaches two PhD-level classes at Stanford: Distributed Algorithms and Optimization (CME 323), and Discrete Mathematics and Algorithms (CME 305).

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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.