CHAIRED BY: Piero Scaruffi

EVENT Info

November 10 @ 6pm PDT (UTC-7) Find your timezone HERE

Register via ZOOM here or here

PROGRAM

• Albert Russell Ascoli (UC Berkeley/ Literature) on "Dante and the Invention of Italian, Italians, and Italy" (on the 700th anniversary of his death)
• Kat Mustatea (Playwright & Technologist) on "Augmented Reality and the Decaying Book"
• Neil Shubin (University of Chicago) on "Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA"  

About the speakers

Albert Russell Ascoli is Terrill Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published widely, and in particular "Dante and the Making of a Modern Author" (Cambridge University Press, 2008). His current work focuses on Giovanni Boccaccio's "Decameron", and Ludovico Ariosto's chivalric epic, "Orlando Furioso". He is a past president of the Dante Society of America.

Kat Mustatea is a playwright and technologist whose language and performance works enlist absurdity, hybridity, and the uncanny to dig deeply into what it means to be human. Her TED talk, about puppets and algorithms, unpacks the meaning of machines making art. She co-curates EdgeCut, a live performance series that explores our complex relationship to the digital, and is a member of NEW INC, the art and tech incubator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Her most recent hybrid work, Voidopolis, won the Arts and Letters Unclassifiable Prize for literature and the Dante Prize for art, and has been exhibited internationally in a variety of digital and physical formats, including at Ars Electronica 2021 in the form of an AR book meant to disappear. Her mixed reality play, Lizardly, will premiere at MAXLive: The Neuroverse, co-produced by New York Live Arts, in fall of 2021. She speaks and writes frequently about cutting edge technology and art.

Neil Shubin is the Robert R. Bensley Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, Associate Dean of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and Professor on the Committee of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago and the Provost of the Field Museum of Natural History. He is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist. Raised outside Philadelphia, Shubin earned a A.B. from Columbia College of Columbia University in 1982 and a Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University in 1987. He also studied at the University of California, Berkeley. Shubin was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2011.

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The Leonardo/ISAST LASERs are a program of international gatherings that bring artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together for informal presentations, performances and conversations with the wider public. The mission of the LASERs is to encourage contribution to the cultural environment of a region by fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and opportunities for community building to over 40 cities around the world. To learn more about how our LASER Hosts and to visit a LASER near you please visit our website. @lasertalks