Seeking Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) collaborators

Written on March 9, 2012. Posted in Architecture and Design, Fine Arts, Foundation Studies, Graduate Studies, Updates from & for Faculty.

Dear RISD Faculty,

I’m a Junior at Brown very interested in interdisciplinary collaboration; I myself am majoring in Cognitive Neuroscience and English-Nonfiction Writing. I am writing about a very exciting project I’ve been working on to see if you might be interested in being involved. I’ve recently been in contact with Peiro Scaruffi, a scientist, poet, and all around Renaissance man (his website is a wormhole of information…. http://www.scaruffi.com/). He lives in San Francisco and organizes a bimonthly event called LASER that switches off locations between UCSF and Stanford University. LASER stands for Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous; Leonardo is a pretty well respected journal that works at the boundaries of the arts, sciences, and technology. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Anyway, we were discussing the idea of expanding the LASERs to the East coast, and Brown/RISD in particular. DC has just started their own satellite called DASER… I think it could be an incredibly cool event to have at Brown/RISD, both to make the schools an epicenter of this interdisciplinary conversation and as a way to bring really dynamic artists and scientists to campus to come speak.

What this would mean in reality is to have an advisory board to find speakers for each event. Piero has offered to be on this board and lend us all of Leonardo’s contacts in Boston and NYC, and also provide the template and Leonardo’s letterhead with which to reach out to potential speakers. Ideally, this board would include artists, scientists, curators, administrators, students, etc, and Piero also thinks we should plan the first three off the bat to make sure we can get it up and running. I know the timing is sort of awkward for this semester but I’m hoping to start planning for the fall.

I was wondering if you would be interested in serving on this “advisory board;” I’m trying to put together a coalition of people from both Brown and RISD that are interested and invested in the crossover between the arts and the technical disciplines. It wouldn’t involve much time commitment” probably meeting once or twice a month to choose speakers to reach out to. If you can’t commit to being a part of this, do you know any other faculty or students that might be interested? Or any potential speakers that you think would be valuable to reach out to? The link to the webpage of the previous events is at the bottom. They’ve had some really awesome people and panels over in SF. Please contact me at Gregory_Sewitz@brown.edu if you are interested in helping this project get off the ground!

Best,

Greg

http://www.leonardo.info/isast/laser.html

http://nas.nasonline.org/site/PageServer?pagename=Experience_Future_Events_DASER”