NY LASER

a Leonardo/ISAST In-Person Rendezvous Event
 

Sunday, February 4, 2024 - 3:00-6:00PM ET

LevyArts: 40 E 19 Street, #3R NYC

Please RSVP here and note that late admittance past 3:30PM cannot be accommodated: olynyk@wustl.edu

The NY LASER program is a series of lectures and presentations on art, science, and technology-related projects and an affiliate of Leonardo/International Society for the Arts, Science and Technology (ISAST). Ellen K. Levy, PhD, artist, writer, and co-editor of the "Science and the Arts since 1750" Routledge Press book series, and Patricia Olynyk, artist, writer, and Florence and Frank Bush Professor of Art at Washington University co-chair the NY LASER program to foster high-level dialogue on topics of leading interest to our network of artists, scientists, humanists, and scholars. Feature speakers include Carl Craver, Dan Jay, Zoe Jenkin, and Elizabeth King.

Carl Craver is a philosopher of neuroscience trying to understand how minds fit in a world of causes. His 2007 book, Explaining the Brain, considered a locus classicus in the new mechanistic philosophy, develops a philosophically grounded but scientifically attentive model of how we explain things by describing their mechanisms at multiple levels of organization. His 2013 book in collaboration with Lindley Darden, In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries Across the Life Sciences extends his work on explanation by exploring how scientists make discoveries in mechanistic sciences. More recently, Craver is pursuing topics in psychiatric genetics and neuropsychology, and his neuropsychology research with Shayna Rosenbaum at York University studies individuals with episodic amnesia to discover how remembrance figures essentially in the lives distinctive of persons. Craver’s talk will discuss his recent work.

Dan Jay has a mission to inspire where art and science meet. He is both a scientist and artist, being a Professor of Developmental, Molecular and Chemical Biology (and until recently Dean) at Tufts University. Over the last ten years, he has combined them and had solo shows of this work at museums, universities, and cultural centers across the world. He is currently working with the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund to develop ENFOLD Sci-Art a Sci-Art Nexus to catalyze Art-Science partnerships to impact the planet. His presentation: “ARCHEMY at the Interface Between Art and Science” will discuss his use of scientific materials to make art that reflects science and social justice issues, and new efforts to bring scientists and artists together to both enhance transformative creativity and address unsolved problems facing humanity.

Zoe Jenkin is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on the nature of human perception and reasoning, as well as on our rational evaluations of those mental processes. She is currently working on a book titled The Epistemic Self that explores how many of our seemingly automatic first impressions and intuitions result from unconscious reasoning. Her talk: “Epistemic and Aesthetic Conflict” will discuss her recently published paper, "Epistemic and Aesthetic Conflict" (The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2023), which considers how truth and beauty can pull us in opposite directions. She will present examples of both curatorial practice and artistic design in which deception and self-deception improve our aesthetic experience, while hampering our understanding of the work of art itself.

Elizabeth King is a sculptor and writer interested in the ways artists have crafted the human form, from sculptural traditions across cultures, to medical models, puppets, and automata. She works in wood, porcelain, and bronze, and often animates her precisely movable sculptures in stop-motion film. Museums that own her work include the Hirshhorn Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is the author of Attention's Loop: A Sculptor's Reverie on the Coexistence of Substance and Spirit (Abrams, 1999). She will discuss her new book, Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend (Getty Publications, 2023), co-authored with W. David Todd, Associate Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, with photographs by artist Rosamond Purcell.

SPONSORS:

NY LASER is a series of lectures and presentations on art and science projects, in support of Leonardo/ISAST’s LEAF initiative (Leonardo Education and Art Forum). Former LEAF Chairs Ellen K. Levy and Patricia Olynyk co-organize these presentations on behalf of the Leonardo community and Washington University in St. Louis.

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 50 cities around the world. To learn more about how our LASER Hosts and to visit a LASER near you please visit our website. @lasertalks