The second LAST festival - San Francisco, October 2014

Life Art Science Tech - The LAST festival is a symposium and expo that celebrates the confluence of art with the multiplicity of new media technologies and nascent sciences emerging from the intense cultural ecosystem of the Bay Area.

The second LAST festival - San Francisco, October 2014

The LAST festival is a symposium and expo that celebrates the confluence of art with the multiplicity of new media technologies and nascent sciences emerging from the intense cultural ecosystem of the Bay Area.

This October 2014 edition, part of the Bay Area Science Festival, will feature talks by some of the worlds leading innovators, and host fascinating interactive art installations that break the "Do not touch!" taboo of traditional museums. Saturday's speakers will include world experts on Neuroscience, Nanotech, Infectious Diseases/Ebola, Space Exploration, Artificial Intelligence.

THE LAB

2948 16th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103

The LAST festival will be in San Francisco at The Lab on October 23-26, 2014. This event coincides with the Bay Area Science Festival and includes Saturday's symposium on the science that is shaping the 21st century. This free symposium will be a full event so register to be sure you get a seat.

This event it free and open to the public.

Featured Artists: Emily Martinez, Adam Carlin, Erich Richter, Peter Foucault, SonicSENSE: Jennifer Parker & Barney Haynes, UCSC OpenLab: Sean McGowen, Ian Ayyad, Richard Vallejos, Joel Horne, Gene A. Felice II, & David Kant, Carlos Castellanos, Ludovic DuChateau

Schedule of Events

Thursday, October 23rd, 6pm – 10pm

6:00pm Art Expo opens

7:30pm Artist Talks from 7:30pm - 9pm

Friday, October 24th, 6pm – 10pm

6:00pm - 10:00pm Art Expo

7:30pm Live Performance

Laetitia Sonami A live performance by legendary French-born performer and sound artist Laetitia Sonami (Please register here if you plan to attend Laetitia Sonami's performance)

Saturday October 25th 11:00am – 8pm

11:00am - 2:00pm Art Expo

Saturday October 25th on 2pm – 6pm

Click here to RSVP for this free symposium

Speakers' biographies: Chris McKay, Bruno Olshausen, Christine Peterson, Charles Chiu, Piero Scaruffi

Introduction by Leonardo ISAST

2:00pm Chris McKay (NASA Ames) on Space Exploration and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life

2:45pm Bruno Olshausen (Redwood Institute for Neuroscience) on Neuroscience

3:30pm Christine Peterson (Foresight Institute) on Nanotechnology

4:15pm Charles Chiu (UCSF School of Medicine) on Infectious Diseases and the Ebola epidemics

5:00pm Piero Scaruffi (Author) on Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity

Saturday October 25th on 6pm – 8pm

6:00pm Closing Party of the Art Expo

Artworks

Anti-Apocalypse
Anti-Apocalypse

Anti-Apocalypse explores how the embodiment of memory in networked media influences how we re/ co/ create our worlds and our selves. The project creates an immersive digital cinema in which the mindbody of the spectator bares the task of enacting "worlds" as mediated by an EEG braincomputer interface, custom software, and a digital video database composed entirely of appropriated web content reassembled as animated loops and remixed in realtime by their fluctuating brainwave rhythms. Oscillating between visual perception and mental observation, the viewer navigates a labyrinth of multiple, discontinuous, collective memories, exploring the disorienting and transformative liminal spaces between these virtual records, their material manifestations, and psychic traces.

Emily Martinez

Emily Martinez is a Cuban-born artist working with digital and networked media. Her recent practice and research interests examine the relationship between media, memory, and catastrophe; temporality and the digital archive; and nonrepresentational forms of subjectivity as they arise from within the multiplicities of narratives inherent to globally networked societies. She received her M.F.A. in Digital Arts and New Media from the University of California Santa Cruz in 2012. Currently lives and works in Los Angeles. For more information, please visit somethingnothing.me.

video

Attraction/Repulsion: Longwave
Attraction/Repulsion: Longwave

Attraction/Repulsion: Longwave is an an interactive robotic drawing installation. Viewers interact with a small sensor driven robot to influence the outcome of a large-scale drawing composition that will be created on-site at the LAST Festival. Outer sound pieces that will be occurring simultaneously in the space will also influence the outcome of the drawing creating a multi-artist collaboration/feedback loop.

Peter Foucault

Peter Foucault creates works on paper, videos, and installations that are fueled by his love of drawing and mark making. He has created a series of Drawing-Projects, which utilize systems developed by the artist that produce complex abstract compositions. At the root of these projects is a constant tension between control and the loss of control. Viewer interactivity plays an integral part in his drawing installations, large-scale artworks in which participants influence the outcome of a drawing that is created by a small robot over the duration of an event or exhibition. His work is concept driven, and often utilizes objects that reference printmaking and multiplicities. Foucault has participated in numerous exhibitions nationwide, with recent solo shows at K. Imperial Fine Art, Room Gallery, the SFMOMA Café and the Richmond Art Center (Richmond, CA). His work has been included in group shows at Room Gallery, the Torrance Museum (Los Angeles, CA), Marine Contemporary (Santa Monica, CA), the Smithsonian Institutes' Freer and Sackler Gallery, Kit Schulte Contemporary (Berlin, Germany), The University of Salford (Manchester, England), and The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, CA). Between 2007-2011 his artwork was included in the Art Now Fair Miami Beach, the Bridge Art Fair New York and Miami Beach, the AAF in New York, and the Scope Art Fair Miami Beach. His interactive robotic drawing installations have been presented at The NASA Aimes Research Center, The Lab (San Francisco), Robert Berman E6 Gallery (San Francisco, CA), the Seattle Next50 (Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Seattle Worlds Fair), and the Zero1 Art and Technology Fair (San Jose, CA). In 2010 Foucault received funding from the Creative Work Fund, and a grant from the City of San Jose Public Art Program, and in 2012 he was awarded grants from the City of Oakland's Cultural Funding Program, US Bank, and the Seattle Center Foundation. In 2013 he received a grant from the Zellerbach Family Foundation. Foucault has recently presented lectures at Stanford University, City College, San Francisco University and the SETI Institute (Mountain View, CA). In addition to his own practice, Foucault is the Co-Founder of the Mobile Arts Platform (MAP), a Bay Area based artmaking and curatorial team that creates interactive "pop-up" mobile exhibitions. Foucault's work has been reviewed in The San Francisco Chronicle, The SF Weekly (Pick of the Week), ArtWeek, Wired Magazine, Stretcher Magazine, and Artnet Magazine. In April 2009 his drawing Four Square was featured on the Cover of California Home and Design Magazine. Foucault's work is represented by K. Imperial Fine Art (San Francisco, CA) and Room Gallery (Mill Valley, CA). Selected works are available through the SFMOMA Artists Gallery, Micaela Gallery (Alamo, CA), Chandler Fine Art in San Francisco and Kit Schulte Contemporary in Berlin. He lives and works in Oakland, CA. For more information, please visit peterfoucault.wordpress.com.

Some Thing Grounded
Some Things Grounded

Some Things Grounded is part exhibition, part think-tank. 'Some Thing Grounded' is part of an ongoing program to go beyond simply observing the global community we have at our fingertips and begin to participate in it. Visitors are the artists in this participatory installation. The exhibition room contains a high wall of printers that are continuously spilling out Craigslist 'free' listings from cities everywhere in the world except the United States. Visitors gather items they like and assemble them at work tables into proposals for sculptures. These collage works are then taped to a kind of real life 'bulletin' board to the public. For the duration of the LAST Festival we will be inviting local Bay Area artists to actualize the proposals the public made into physical sculptures. Our world is both confounded and expanded by the tools of our times. We call it networked, emergent, global, but however we define it they engage the world around us along numerous and simultaneous paths. Through them we are able to function in a six dimensional world of space, time, and possibility. What lands momentarily on our doorstep is launched back into the ether to some other place and time. Be it an object, a performance, a participation; these things can no longer be perceived as stationary. Things become images. The images become airborne. They proliferate and wherever they touch ground again they accumulate new knowledge of their surroundings. In this way the things we make grow and travel beyond the community and maker that created them.

Adam Carlin & Erich Richter

Adam Carlin lives and works in Oakland, CA. He is co-director of Some Thing Spacious as well as the founder of Art Maker Avenue, center for visual and performing arts in Oakland, CA. He has a BFA in Sculpture from California College of the Arts and continues to curate exhibitions and create work within the expanded field of that discipline. Carlin works in Social Practice and New Media genres to re-define ideas of locality and to mediate contemporary ways in which we bridge between physical spaces around the world.
Some Thing Spacious is a shifting group of artist and curators led by Adam Carlin and Erich Richter. They have a central location at 2555 Broadway in Oakland, CA which functions as an art space, incubator, workshop, and residency. Some Thing Spacious currently is programing exhibitions that bridge the Oakland art community and the larger art world that we experience via online media. We describe this experiment as a form of six- dimensional activity; enabling artists to concurrently manifest multiple outcomes across spans of time and geography.* Six dimensional space in mathematics refers to objects as 3d, time as 4d, simultaneity as 5d, and possibility as 6d.

Sound Pool
Sound Pool

Sound Pool is a reflecting pool, literally and metaphorically. It is an experiment in interpretation, not just of words and phrases but of ideas and beliefs. Words are curiously enduring antiques. More than just symbols for codifying language, they accumulate history and culture. Selections of spiritual texts are submitted by people both within the exhibition and elsewhere in world via text messaging. Each incoming message activates Chant. The words are then interpreted from language to language through an online translator and a chant begins. Voices reverberate across the water. With each new translation the meaning changes; sometimes only slightly, sometimes radically, always reflecting the cultural understanding embedded in words and idiom.

Erich Richter

Erich Richter is a studio artist and curator with a background in computer science. He identifies himself as a sculptor in conversation, but refers to the practice in the broadest terms. His confrontational works are rooted in decades of craft practice including gold, silver, and blacksmithing, woodworking, and sculpture. He is also a wrestler, and studied composing and arranging at a conservatory in his home town of Los Angeles. He makes ob-jects; things that get in the way. The impulse has led me him literally paint his home off satellite maps using large canvasses, instigate viewers to recite the comments from online news face-to-face on a custom bicycle built for two, and make sidewalk poetry from news selections interpreted through an online translator. Recent work focuses on language, history, and the technological mediation of 21st century life. somethingnothing.me.

Apparition, Young Messenger
Apparition, Young Messenger

Apparition, Young Messenger description

Ludovic DuChateau

Ludovic DuChateau studied visual arts in Paris, France. He spent several years envisioning interactive 3D software using behavioral models, with human-computer interactions as a creative resource. He makes art that reflects on relationships between Western culture and everything it produces and controls, questioning what unites us mentally, physically and spiritually to the world. Conscience and emergence, cohabitating with our creations.

Mobile Bioenergy Lab
Mobile Bioenergy Lab

Mobile Bioenergy Lab is a creative research laboratory for experimentation with emerging bioenergy technologies. MBL consists of a small vendor cart or bicycle, repurposed to serve as bioenergy construction and demonstration station in urban space. MBL is a community research laboratory. The cart (manned by MBL artist-researchers and local volunteers) traverses the city, collecting organic matters for use in constructing simple, diy, bioenergy systems. We also perform interventions and demonstrations to engage citizens in conversations surrounding these technologies.

Carlos Castellanos

Carlos Castellanos is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher with a wide array of interests such as embodiment, cybernetics, ecology, phenomenology, artificial intelligence and art-science collaboration. He has received a National Science Foundation IGERT Fellowship in Interactive Digital Multimedia and was a California State University Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Scholar. His artworks have been exhibited at local, national and international events such the International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA), SIGGRAPH & ZERO1 San Jose. He is also a founding member of DPrime Research, an art-science nonprofit research organization. Castellanos is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art, Kansas State University. He holds a Ph.D. from the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), Simon Fraser University and an MFA from the CADRE Laboratory for New Media, San Jose State University. Castellanos splits his time between San Francisco and Manhattan,

video

BioSensing Garden
BioSensing Garden

BioSensing Garden is a sculptural garden and water-droplet fountain that visualizes data from a Fitbit, (an exercise tracking device). The fountain is made from a re-purposed printer that drips water onto a pane of tilted glass. The droplets are timed and placed precisely so that they create visualize the data from the fitbit as they fall. Imagery will be projected onto the droplet patterns as they fall onto a garden below. The data droplets are the sole source of water for the plants and so their health is a direct reflection of the amount of exercise from the participant.

OpenLab Team:
Sean McGowen, Ian Ayyad, Richard Vallejos, Joel Horne

OpenLab is a new research initiative at the University of California Santa Cruz. The OpenLab Network targets a complex education issue of national significance regarding the ability of art and science researchers to collaborate on research endeavors. The goal of the OpenLab Network is to help change the current status by providing shared research facilities and create a network for collaborative discourse fueled by academic communities, arts and science communities, and industry. The OpenLab Network project is currently pursuing the physical development of new collaborative laboratories on campus as spaces to foster this research and establish an on-line social networking system for faculty and students to create projects. Laboratories and studios in both the arts and the sciences will be accessible to users in the OpenLab Network. Within this immersive environment, we will conduct research to acquire skills and knowledge that crosses disciplinary boundaries between science, education, and the arts while sharing expertise in collaborative research methodologies. For more information, please visit artsresearch.ucsc.edu/openlab/.

Coactive Systems v.1
Coactive Systems v.1

Coactive Systems v.1 is a new collaboration between artists Gene A. Felice II & David Kant. Coactive Systems v.1 is a multi-sensory intervention exploring the relationships between human and non-human communities. This project investigates new modes of interspecies storytelling using sound, light and bodies. Bioluminescent phytoplankton are the subject of our research. These living systems are the base of our ocean and fresh water food webs, producing half the world's oxygen and absorbing 1/3rd of our planet's CO2. They also inspire new modes of art and science collaboration. Our symbiotic relationships with these living systems that we exist within become inspiration through explorations of the air that we breathe, the food that we eat and the worlds that we create.

OpenLab Team:
Gene A. Felice II, David Kant

OpenLab team 2

OpenLab is a new research initiative at the University of California Santa Cruz. The OpenLab Network targets a complex education issue of national significance regarding the ability of art and science researchers to collaborate on research endeavors. The goal of the OpenLab Network is to help change the current status by providing shared research facilities and create a network for collaborative discourse fueled by academic communities, arts and science communities, and industry. The OpenLab Network project is currently pursuing the physical development of new collaborative laboratories on campus as spaces to foster this research and establish an on-line social networking system for faculty and students to create projects. Laboratories and studios in both the arts and the sciences will be accessible to users in the OpenLab Network. Within this immersive environment, we will conduct research to acquire skills and knowledge that crosses disciplinary boundaries between science, education, and the arts while sharing expertise in collaborative research methodologies. For more information, please visit artsresearch.ucsc.edu/openlab/.

OpenLab team 2
SoundPool

SoundPool featuring sound design by Andre Marquetti, is an interactive sound installation for viewers to dynamically interact with the Oakland Museum of California's Natural Sounds archive. The archive of audio recordings is a comprehensive collection of nature sounds with an emphasis on California species and environments. It includes the sounds of specific insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, as well as natural, ambient soundscapes.

SoundPool is a project by SonicSENSE, and interactive art platform and collaboration between Jennifer Park and Barney Haynes.
Jennifer Parker

Jennifer Parker is an Associate Professor of Art and Digital Arts and New Media at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her research is rooted in sculpture, interactive and kinetic art, and cross-disciplinary and collaborative research. Current and past projects explore new methodologies for art making that engage art and science thinking. She is co-founder and director of The OpenLab Network at UCSC and has been working with Barney Hyanes since 2008 developing the SonicSENSE interactive art platform. She has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. Local venues include Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF Camerawork; The Lab; Gray Area Foundation for the Arts; Kala Art Institute; and ZER01:10SJ Biennial. For more information, please visit artsresearch.ucsc.edu/openlab.

Barney Haynes

Barney Haynes has been working in the fields of video art, performance, reactive installation, and interactive media for 30 years. In his art he has adopted an iterative approach to media making, recombining themes and industrial surplus into media machines that evolve and mutate.He is a Professor at the California College of Art in Interdisciplinary Studies, Sculpture, and Fine Art. He has received numerous grants, awards and honors, including but not limited to the California Arts Council Fellowship; University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA), The Arts Research Institute, and the Gerbode Foundation Grant, CCA. His work has been exhibited throughout the Bay Area and internationally in the Czech Republic, Spain, the Netherlands, and throughout Germany. For more information, please visit ultrafuzz.net.

Saturday October 25th

Dates

LAST Festival, San Francisco
October 23-26, 2014

The Lab
2948 16th Street, San Francisco

info@lastfestival.com

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