LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous)
following an interactive demo by Toni Dove
Thursday Apr 21st 2016
7-9pm
Presentation Room,
5th floor CNSI

Video recording:

Featuring:

TONI DOVE - Featured Art|Sci Artist - Considered one of the pioneers of interactive cinema, New York-based artist Toni Dove creates unique hybrids of film, installation, experimental theater and gaming. Participants interact with video, using motion sensing and other embodied interface strategies to “perform” on-screen avatars. Major projects include: Artificial Changelings, an interactive cinema installation in which viewers navigate between two centuries, debuted at the Rotterdam Film Festival, 1998, Spectropia, a feature length live-mix movie performance for two players debuted 2008 Wexner Center, Lucid Possession, a live mix video performance with multiple robotic screens and musical performers, premiered Roulette, NYC, 2013. The Dress That Eats Souls, a robotic cinema installation is currently in development and will premiere at a retrospective of Dove’s interactive work at the Ringling Museum in Fla., 2018 2000/2003 – Dove served on a Government Advisory Committee on Information Technology and Creativity, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council, USA. Grants and awards: Rockefeller Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Langlois Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, The LEF Foundation, MediaThe Foundation, and the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts from M.I.T. http://www.tonidove.com/

TAYLOR AUBRY received her Bachelor of Science degree from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. After that, she moved to sunny Los Angeles, California to research new solar cell technologies. She is currently a second year PhD student in Ben Schwartz’s lab at UCLA in the materials division. Her work focuses on improving the performance of polymer solar cells by seeking to understand the fundamental physics and property-structure relationships within these devices.

CLARISSE BARDIOT is a speaker, consultant, art director or editor in various institutions and cultural events. A PhD on Virtual Theatres , she is an associate researcher at CNRS and professor at the University of Valenciennes (laboratory Devisu). She obtained in 2005 the stock market researcher resident of the Daniel Langlois Foundation in Montreal for research on 9 Evenings, Theatre & Engineering . It contributes to international project DOCAM (Daniel Langlois Foundation - Montreal) on documentation and archiving works of art with a technological component. From 2009 to 2010, as Deputy Director of manège.mons / CCDS (Belgium), coordinates two European projects (CECN2 and Transdigital), led many projects of training and artist residencies around the arts and technologies and is the editor of the journal Patch , which creates the editorial. In 2010 she founded with Annick Bureaud Cyril Thomas and Jean-Luc Soret platform Nunc . In 2011, she created Substrate , a publishing house dedicated to contemporary creation in the form of printed and electronic publications, and in 2013 opened a gallery in Brussels. Her publications include arts and digital technologies: digital performance , Collection Basic, Leonardo / Olats June 2013; 9 Evenings, Theatre & Engineering , website of the Daniel Langlois Foundation, May 2006. It is currently developing Rekall , an open-source environment to document, analyze the creative process and simplify the recovery works.Curator, Editor, University of Valenciennes (FR). http://www.clarissebardiot.info/

LAURA CHECHANOWICZ is a PhD student in Media Arts and practice at USC. She is a mixed media artist dedicated to sound and production design, among other interests. Her training includes experience in the Los Angeles film industry and higher level education. She received her BA with honors from the University of Michigan with majors in Film & Video, Psychology and German; her MA in Film Studies from the University of Iowa; her MFA in Animation from the University of Southern California; and she began her PhD in Media Arts and Practice at USC this fall, where she worked as the Sound Lead for the Advanced Game Project Miralab this past year. As a sound designer, Laura is committed to crafting rich environments and creating emotional experiences through experimental and musical sound design. She is highly influenced not only by media and history, but also by neuroscience and psychology. http://worldbuilding.usc.edu/people/bio/laura-cechanowicz/

ERKKI HUHTAMO is a UCLA professor between the Departments of Design Media Arts, and Film, Television, and Digital Media. He holds a PhD in Cultural History from the University of Turku, Finland. He is a media archaeologist, author, and exhibition curator. At DMA his areas are the history and theory of media culture and media arts. He is internationally known as a pioneer of an emerging approach to media studies called media archaeology. It excavates forgotten, neglected and suppressed media-cultural phenomena, helping us to penetrate beyond canonized "grand narratives" of media culture. http://www.erkkihuhtamo.com/

MARCO PINTER creates artwork and performances which fuse physical kinetic form with live visualizations. He has a PhD in Media Arts and Technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an undergraduate degree from Cornell University. His work integrating graphics with robotic sculpture is supported by grants from the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the Santa Barbara Arts Collaborative, and the UC Institute for Research in the Arts. He has exhibited artwork and performances at cities around the world, including Dubai, New York, Montreal, Tehran, Hong Kong, Anaheim, San Diego and Santa Barbara. Wired magazine’s online UK site published a feature on Pinter’s work that explores perception through kinetic sculpture and graphics. Pinter is a contributing author to The McGraw Hill Multimedia Handbook and The Ultimate Multimedia Handbook. He is an inventor on over 70 patents, issued and pending, in the areas of live video technology, robotics, interactivity and telepresence. http://www.marcopinter.com/

SHANNON WILLIS is a multi-disciplinary artist residing in Santa Barbara California. From very early on, her artistic family fostered her visual imagination by immersing her in a creative environment. Her work continues to evolve and push boundaries. Currently she is finishing her Masters of Fine Art at University of California Santa Barbara. She shows her expansive multi-media installations and artwork internationally, recently exhibiting a video installation during International Digital Arts Week in Paris France. Shannon's work explores the exchange between philosophy, quantum physics, spirituality, and emotions. Working with video, tactile sculptural objects, projection, and viewer interaction, as the tangible results of those converging ideas. The art work becomes an event. She creates the objects and the script, providing spaces for the viewers to become engaged, entertained, and entangled in the phenomena of being alive. http://www.artbyshannonwillis.com

Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous
February 4, 2016 7-9pm
Presentation Space, CNSI 5th floor

Live Stream:

Confirmed Speakers:

ANNA DUMITRIU (artwork pictured above) is a British artist whose work fuses craft, technology and bioscience to explore our relationship to the microbial world. She is artist-in-residence on the Modernising Medical Microbiology Project at the University of Oxford and exhibited at venues such as the V&A Museum, London and The Picasso Museum, Barcelona. She has recently undertaken a residency in the Liu Lab for Synthetic Evolution at University of California Irvine. www.normalflora.co.uk

ALEX MAY is a British artist exploring a wide range of digital technologies, most notably video projection onto physical objects (building on the technique known as video mapping or projection mapping by using his own bespoke software), also interactive installations, generative works, full-size humanoid robots, performance, and video art.
www.alexmayarts.co.uk

PRATIK SHAH earned his Ph.D. at the Center for Synthetic Biology of the University of Copenhagen, where he developed and applied a number of impressive technologies for detecting microRNAs. Pratik currently researches the biochemistry of orthogonal replication and explores its use for replicating XNA in the Liu Lab for Synthetic Evolution at University of California Irvine.

KATHY HIGH is an interdisciplinary artist working in the areas of technology, science, speculative fiction and art. She produces videos and installations posing queer and feminist inquiries into areas of medicine/bio-science, and animal/interspecies collaborations. She hosts bio/ecology+art workshops and is creating an urban nature center in North Troy (NATURE Lab) with media organization The Sanctuary for Independent Media. High is Professor of Video and New Media in the Department of Arts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. She teaches documentary and experimental digital video production, history and theory, as well as biological arts.
www.kathyhigh.com

AMISHA GADANI is an artist, educator and illustrator based in Los Angeles. She is interested in unique animal morphologies and adaptations; from swarming behaviors and elegant defense mechanisms, to superorganisms and animals of the deep sea. Her work ranges from unsettling beak-less bird paintings and underwater videos to her on-going series of interactive animal-inspired defensive dresses that can, for example, inflate like a blowfish when the wearer is intimidated. She has spent over four years working at the art and science focused Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco in education, exhibits and illustration; and two years working at UCLA in two biology labs as an illustrator producing over fifty scientific illustrations featured in journals and research papers and as an outreach educator using drawing and sculpture focused workshops to explain scientific concepts to local elementary school students. Her work has shown in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Pittsburgh, New York City, and Tokyo; has been featured in The New York Times, Fast Company, and Scientific American; and has been published in LIMN magazine, the journal Method Quarterly and the book "Future Fashion: Innovative Materials and Technology" by Barcelona-based maomao publications. Amisha earned a B.F.A in Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007.
www.amishagadani.com

VICTORIA VESNA (artist and Director of the Art|Sci Center) presents her recent collaborative work on Birdsong Diamond Japan, created with Dr. Charles Taylor (evolutionary biologist, UCLA), Dr. Takashi Ikegami (physicist, Univ. of Tokyo), Dr. Hiroo Iwata (engineer, EMP), and EMP PhD students. Bird Song Diamond is an interactive installation based on long-term research (2011-present) allowing multifaceted, interdisciplinary perspectives — uniquely connecting the nodes of evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, spatial sound, mechatronic art and interactive technologies.