Leonardo ISAST and SETI Institute invite you to a meeting of the Leonardo Art/Science community. See below for location and agenda. The event is free and open to everybody. Feel free to invite relevant acquaintances. Please RSVP to p@scaruffi.com . Admission is limited. Like previous evenings, the agenda includes some presentations of art/science projects, and time for casual socializing/networking. In order to facilitate the networking, feel free to send me the URL of a webpage that describes your work or the organization you work for. I will publish a list on this webpage before the day of the event so that everybody can check what everybody else is doing. (Not mandatory, just suggested). See also... Art, Technology, Culture Colloquia Art/Science Fusion at UC Davis Previous Art/Science Evenings When: August 12, 2009 Where: SETI Institute 515 N. Whisman Road, Mountain View, California, USA What: 6:45pm-7:00pm: Socializing/networking. 7:00-7:30: Rachel Beth Egenhoefer (USF) on "Knitting Code" Knit cloth is tangibly constructed from series of knit and purl stitches. Code is constructed from intangible sets of zeros and ones strung together. I also started working with the idea of motion, the motion to knitting, typing, wearing cloth, working at a computer and translating what these motions could look like. Two projects to be shown and discussed include Virtual Knitting and KNiiTTiiNG. In Virtual Knitting users are able to knit with custom made electronic knitting needles in both physical and virtual space at the same time, constructing both tangible and intangible cloth. KNiiTTiiNG uses the Nintendo Wii to knit with. 7:30-8:00: Zann Gill on "What Daedalus told Darwin" Tracing a thought path from Leonardo da Vinci's little-known Codex Trivulzianus, through Adam Smith's neglected Theory of Moral Sentiments, which was overshadowed by his Wealth of Nations, highlights cultural biases that may explain why we emphasized a half interpretation of Darwin's theory of evolution, making the Tragedy of the Commons an inevitable outcome of evolutionary dynamics. Recent findings in cell biology raise questions about pure Darwinism (random variation and environmental selection) as the exclusive driver of evolution's ingenious designs. Mythical inventor/ architect Daedalus tells the great scientist Charles Darwin that Intelligent Design has diverted us from the full meaning of "design" - its role in life's past and future evolution toward an eco-sustainable planet. 8:00-8:30: BREAK 8:30-9:00: Presenter (Affiliation) on "Title" Abstract 9:00-9:30: Wayne Vitale (Gamelan Sekar Jaya) on "The Aesthetics of Oscillation in Balinese Music" The gamelan orchestras of Bali are famous for their brilliant ensemble virtuosity. Underlying the metallic flash is an aesthetic sensibility of periodicity or oscillation that affects every aspect of the music. Based on Hindu cosmology, the Balinese concept of rwa bhineda---interdependent opposites---is manifest in the tiniest details of musical elaboration and interlocking melodies, in the paired tuning system of "detuned" unisons, and in extended gong periods several minutes long. This presentation gives an overview of the Balinese sense of beauty-in-oscillation. 9:30: Piero Scaruffi on the next Leonardo Art/Science evening I will simply preview the line-up of speakers for the next Leonardo evening. 9:30pm-10:00pm: Discussions, more socializing You can mingle with the speakers and the audience Bios: Rachel Beth Egenhoefer is an artist, designer, writer, and educator. Her work explores the intersections between textiles, technology, and the body on historical, constructional and conceptual levels; and often incorporates tactile elements such as candy, knitting, and machines to represent intangible computer codes and conceptual spaces. Egenhoefer is currently an Assistant Professor in Design in the Department of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco. Presenter 3 is Zann Gill started her career as a researcher for Buckminster Fuller. Early interest in Fuller's concepts for "World Game" to achieve environmental sustainability and "design science" sparked her focus on cross-disciplinary innovation, including a networked system of urban innovation as a complex adaptive system. She moved to Australia in 1989 to work on a proposal from the Japanese government to the Australian government to build an IT "city of the future", the so-called Multifunction Polis (MFP). At NASA she developed plans for an Institute for Advanced Space Concepts (IASC), a collaboratory BEACON (Bio-Evolutionary Advanced Concepts) and the astrobiology program for NASA University. Zann is currently working with Australia's National ICT Center Excellence (NICTA) to reposition the "eco-sustainable city of the future" initiative to harness smart systems technology, ubiquitous computing, and social networks. Piero Scaruffi is a cognitive scientist 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. As a music historian, he has published ten books, the latest ones being "A History of Rock Music" (2003) and "A History of Jazz Music" (2007). He has also written extensively about cinema, literature and the visual arts. An avid traveler, he has visited 121 countries of the world. Wayne Vitale is a composer, performer, teacher, recording engineer, and instrument conservator in the field of Balinese music. He is the director of Gamelan Sekar Jaya (www.gsj.org), a group of sixty musicians and dancers recognized internationally for its cross-cultural work. His gamelan compositions have directly impacted the evolution of Balinese kebyar music. His recording label, Vital Records (www.vitalrecords.ws), releases critically acclaimed CDs of Balinese music. He is currently working with the International Center of the Arts at SF State University, on PLANETS, a multimedia work combining new music for Balinese gamelan with video projections of NASA and other space imagery. Address and directions: 515 N. Whisman Road, Mountain View, CA 94043. Phone: 650-961-6633 Directions to SETI Confirmed so far: