This evening will feature three presentations:

- Sam Kriegman (Harvard Medical School) on "Computer-designed Organisms"

- Rachel Rossin (Media Artist) on "The vocabulary of art in the age of virtual and crypto cultures"

- Laura Marks (Simon Fraser Univ) on "Soul-Assemblage Media"

Sam Kriegman is a computer scientist with a joint postdoctoral appointment at the Wyss Institute at Harvard and the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts. 

His research draws inspiration from the origin and subsequent evolution of life, and applies the underlying mechanisms of self-organization ("order for free") and natural selection ("survival of the fittest") to the creation of novel autonomous machines: robots, in all manner of shapes and sizes, that act on their own, without remote control. He is the co-creator of the world's first computer-designed organisms ("xenobots").

Rachel Rossin, who lives and works in New York, is a multimedia artist and self-taught programmer who works in painting, installation and virtual reality. She draws together traditional art-making techniques, such as painting, with new technologies such as virtual reality and hologram projections to examine the slippage between the real and the digital, between perceptual and embodied space.

Laura U. Marks works on media art and philosophy with an intercultural focus and an emphasis on appropriate technologies. She is the author of four books, most recently Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image, and her Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics: From Your Body to the Cosmos is under contract with Duke University Press.

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.