CHAIRS: Tami Spector and Piero Scaruffi

Program

7:00-7:25:  Deneb Karentz (USF/Biology) on "Considerations of Antarctic Ozone Depletion"

7:25-7:50:  Neeraj Sonalkar (Stanford/ Design) on "What improvised theater, jazz and design thinking have in common"

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:  Mauro Ffortissimo (Media Artist, Poet and Piano Deconstructor) on "What is a Piano?"

8:35-9:00:  Karen Ande (Documentary Photographer) on "Witness - A photographic chronicle of the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa and its impact on orphaned children"

Speakers

Karen Ande is a social documentary and portrait photographer based in San Francisco, California. In 2002 she began chronicling the AIDS epidemic and its effects on children in sub-Saharan Africa. Her work took her from rural villages to city slums in Kenya and Rwanda, where she photographed people who daily face the challenges of AIDS and its impact on those they know and love. This work culminated in the award-winning 2010 book with journalist Ruthann Richter: Face to Face: Children of the AIDS Crisis in Africa. Since then she has turned her attention to projects closer to home, partnering with the American Academy of Pediatrics on publicizing childhood hunger in the USA. Her work--"Who's Hungry? You Can't Tell by Looking"-- was part of a campaign that resulted in the AAP recommending that all US pediatricians screen routinely for childhood hunger.

Mauro Ffortissimo was born in Argentina in 1962, and emigrated to the USA in 1981. He has been living, working and making art in San Francisco and the greater Bay Area since that time. Trained in classical piano, self-taught in painting and sculpting, he has worked in multiple media’s including, sheet metal and, most prominently: de-constructed piano assemblages. Mauro has pioneered the “Piano Liberado”; bypassing the keyboard and playing directly on the strings to liberate the instrument from the traditional constraints of the 12-tone scale. He is a co-founder of the music/arts organization Sunset Piano.— a live performance company that takes pianos and places them into unexpected naturalistic and urban outdoor spaces. For three years running he has co produced a major summertime piano installation in the San Francisco Botanical Garden called Flower Piano. His work is the subject of the documentary film "Twelve Pianos" by Storyfarm's Dean Mermell, highlighting Mauro's work. The film premiered as the closing film at Green Film Festival in SF’s Castro theater and will soon be available online. Mauro also writes poetry and hosts a poetry and music salon at Specs Bar in North Beach, the second Wednesday of each month.

Deneb Karentz is a professor of Biology and Environmental Science at University of San Francisco. Karentz became involved in Antarctic research in 1986 as a volunteer on a field team studying the photophysiology of springtime phytoplankton in McMurdo Sound. Karentz's research focuses on the ultraviolet photobiology of marine organisms: identifying strategies for protection from UV exposure and understanding mechanisms for repair of UV-induced damage. Her work has contributed to investigations of the ecological implications of Antarctic ozone depletion. Over the past 30 years, she has made the trip to Antarctica over 20 times. From 1986 - 2018 her research has been conducted at Palmer and McMurdo Stations, and aboard several research cruises in the Bellingshausen Sea and the Ross Sea. Since 1994 she has also been an instructor for the NSF advanced international integrative biology course taught at McMurdo Station and Palmer Station for early career scientists from across the world. She served for two years as the associate program manager for the Biology and Medicine Program at the U.S. National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs. She has served as a U.S. representative to the Group on Life Sciences for the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, and is currently the second US delegate to SCAR. She is also (since 2011) a private sector advisor for the US delegation to the Committee on Environmental Protection under the Antarctic Treaty System.

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.

Neeraj Sonalkar is Research Associate at Stanford's Center for Design Research. The question that motivates his research is: how do engineering design team co-create new product possibilities? His research is focused on investigating how team behavior influences the generation and propagation of ideas into products. The Human Innovation Engineering group at the Center for Design Research conducts empirical and field research oriented towards acceleration of radical innovation by teams, organizations and regional ecosystems. We study and model how humans innovate both at the interpersonal interaction level and at the broader level of an organization or a regional innovation ecosystem such as the Silicon Valley. This research furthers our understanding of innovation as the outcome of an integrated system spanning individual mindset, interpersonal interaction dynamics, and the underlying physical, institutional, financial and knowledge infrastructure.

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.