Upcoming Artist Talk - September 10th at USF
Leonardo ISAST and USF invite you to a meeting of the Leonardo Art/Science community. The event is free and open to everybody. Like previous evenings, the agenda includes some presentations of art/science projects, news from the audience, and time for casual socializing/networking. See below for location and agenda.
Program (the order of the speakers might change):
7:00-7:25: Stephen Auger (Media Artist & Light Theorist) and Benjamin Smarr on "Interstellar Hallucination"
Visualization of patterns that inform nearly all shamanic and archaic traditions.
7:25-7:50: Anja Ulfeldt (Media Artist) on "Subjective Infrastructure: Experiential art employing civic, domestic, and personal infrastructure as it relates to physical and auditory experience."
Art that helps navigate the built environments of the future.
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: Lucia Aronica (Stanford Prevention Research Center) on "Epigenetics, Nutrition and your Health"
Nutrition today is slowly shifting from a one-size-fits-all approach to precision nutrition.
8:35-9:00: Discussions, networking
You can mingle with the speakers and the audience
Bios:
Lucia Aronica is a Lecturer in Nutritional Genomics at the Stanford Prevention and Research Center and at Stanford Continuing Studies. She is is currently leading the epigenetic analysis of the Stanford DIETFITS study by Prof Christopher Gardner — the largest randomized clinical trial ever undertaken to compare low carb vs. low fat diets for the design of personalized weight loss strategies. The focus of her research is investigating how diet affects the epigenome, and whether we can use epigenetic biomarkers to design personalized weight loss plans. Lucia serves also as an advisor for companies active in the personal genomics and precision health field. Lucia received her PhD from the Universitaet Wien, and has research experience from the University of Oxford, University of Southern California, and University Federico II of Naples. She has published research papers in top-ranked peer reviewed journals such as Cell, Genes and Development, and the EMBO Journal.
Stephen Auger has worked as a Cross-disciplinary artist and light theorist for over four decades. He trained in physics and neuroscience at Hampshire College and The Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. Auger's paintings explore the boundaries of visual perception encouraging viewers to experience "sensing" as a conscious mode of perception. His pursuit of the enigmatic sensory qualities experienced in the light of dawn and dusk led him into collaborations with Dr. Margaret Livigstone and Dr. Benjamin Smarr. Auger's exploration time-base perception and self-organizing pattern and form emanate from his work with the dynamic interaction of matter with vibration and elemental forces of nature. Auger's mentors include Edwin Land, Joseph Albers protege Arthur Hoener. His paintings and sculptures are in private, corporate and museum collections internationally, including Yale University, Andrew Lloyd Weber, Malcolm Forbes Jr., The Carnegie Institute of Science. Stephen is currently involved in several collaborative curatorial, teaching, and research projects. Auger lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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. Since 2015 he has been commuting between California and China, where several of his books have been translated.
Benjamin Smarr studies the temporal structures that biological systems make as they move through time. He is a NIH-funded postdoctoral fellow with a Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of Washington, Seattle. He joined the UC Berkeley Kriegsfeld Lab in 2013, where he works to understand how physiological dynamics like sleep, circadian rhythms, and ovulatory cycles are shaped by the brain, and how disturbances to those cycles give rise to disease. He uses comparative physiology and neuroendocrinology approaches coupled with data analytics and sensor design to build predictive models for use in personalized medicine and education optimization efforts. Dr. Smarr is also an advocate for scientific outreach, and routinely gives public lectures and visits K-12 classrooms to help promote the idea that by understanding the biology that guides us, we can live more empowered lives. Dr. Smarr's collaboration with Cross-disciplinary artist Stephen Auger address the fundamental relationships between aesthetic perception, sensory well-being and the dynamic movement of light over time, which are central to Auger's artistic vision.
Anja Ulfeldt is an artist, educator, and curator with a hybrid practice that floats between interactive installation, performance, and unconventional art facilitation with a focus on the current and future state of human infrastructure as it relates to the body. Through haptic interaction, her work considers technology- both simple and advanced- as it relates to ideas around stability, mobility and personal agency. Stemming from an underlying fascination with invention, Ulfeldt's work looks at the ephemeral nature of resources and infrastructure that feed, house and nurture our bodies directly. This includes simple technology such as plumbing, refrigeration and climate control as well as less tangible resources such as time, creative space, and community. Anja is currently a full time lecturer at Stanford University in the areas of Sculpture and Emerging Technology. She has exhibited in the Bay Area at SLAC National Laboratory, Pro Arts Gallery, Kala Art Institute, SOMArts, Root Division, the San Mateo Maker Faire, and in venues in New York, London, Salzburg and Berlin. Ulfeldt's work has been collected by the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco, Esplora National Interactive Science Centre in Malta, and Recology San Francisco. She has been an artist-in-residence at Recology San Francisco, the Exploratorium Museum, Lost & Foundry Oakland and currently at Stochastic Labs.
