The LASERs (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) are an international program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversation with an audience. This evening, chaired by cultural historian Piero Scaruffi, will feature three talks:

- Patricia Alessandrini (Stanford) on "Ada's Song: Artistic Research in Robotics from a (Cyber)Feminist Perspective"

- Rohini Devasher (Media Artist live from India) on "Between Wonder and the Strange"

- Joon Park (Stanford) on "Smallville: Illustrating Our Lives with Generative Agents"

- Richard Lowenberg (Artist and Eco-cultural Activist) on "Telluride 2024 - The Nature of Information"

Patricia Alessandrini teaches at Stanford CCRMA. She is a composer/sound artist, educator and researcher actively engaging with notions of canonicity, representation, interpretation, perception and memory, often in a social and political context, through work which is for the most part interactive and/or intermedial. She will speak about her work as a composer/sound artist, from the design of interfaces and instruments for inclusive performance to the development of the Piano Machine, a system that mechanically excites piano strings using Machine Learning processes in response to live performance. She will also discuss her new project employing soft robotics in a cyberfeminist, futurist installation and performance.

Rohini Devasher, based in India, is a media artist who works with video, painting, printmaking, drawing and installation. Her expansive projects create worlds that emerge from deep research and scientific explorations, illuminating and complicating the subjects at hand.  Devasher will share work that maps the complexities of ecology, cosmology, and technology viewed through the twin lenses of wonder and the strange. The theoretical grounding of her work draws from the history of science, astronomy, philosophy and speculative fiction.

Joon Sung Park is a computer science PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing groups at Stanford University. His work introduces the concept of, and the techniques for creating generative agents -- computational agents that simulate human behavior. His work has won best paper awards at UIST and CHI, as well as multiple best paper nominations and other paper awards.

Richard Lowenberg has spent over 50 years creatively integrating understandings and grounded involvements in non-profit .org development, architecture, environmental/ecosystems design, interspecies communication, rural community + networked society planning, performance, new media and eco-arts/sciences practices. He has dedicated his creative life to realization of works exploring and setting examples for an ‘ecology of the information environment’ and resulting opportunities for growing a vibrant cultural economy.

No RSVP required

Detailed bios at: www.lasertalks.com 

The LASERs (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous), chaired by cultural historian Piero Scaruffi, are an international program of evening gatherings that bring together artists, scientists, inventors and scholars in a variety of disciplines for informal presentations and conversation with an audience.

The Stanford LASERs are co-sponsored by the deans of Humanities and Sciences, Engineering and Medicine