UCSC’s Institute of the Arts and Sciences invites you to the final LASER of the academic year Tuesday, May 6! Leonardo Art/Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) is a national program of evening gatherings that bring artists, scientists, and scholars together for informal presentations and conversations. Please join us in the Digital Arts Research Center (DARC) 108 for refreshments at 6:45 p.m. followed at 7 p.m. with presentations by:
 

Paul Koch, “Conservation Paleobiology: Mining the Past to Plan for the Future”
Norman Locks, “Photographic Social Landscape Narratives by an Abstract Realist”
Elaine Sullivan, “Old Places & New Technologies: Visualizing an Ancient Egyptian Temple in 4D”
Ronaldo V. Wilson, “Art Digital—Ars Poetica”
 

Paul Koch is Dean of Physical and Biological Sciences and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UCSC. His research focuses on vertebrate paleoecology and evolution, which he places in environmental context through reconstruction of ancient ecosystems and climates. Koch’s work often includes biogeochemical analysis of animal tissues (teeth, bones, fur, skin, etc.) or environmental samples (soil minerals, fossil plants, etc) to study environmental changes over the Cenozoic (the last 65 million years.) In this talk, Koch will discuss how the study of Paleobiology is used in thinking about, and planning for, the environmental future.

Norman Locks is a photographer and Professor of Art at UCSC. He has exhibited his photographic works widely around the United States, Japan, and the Czech Republic and published numerous essays and photographic portfolios. His talk will discuss current and past projects including “Digital Narratives,” an ongoing series of landscape panoramas designed to pose questions about human, social, environmental concerns. In “Digital Narratives”, Locks makes reference to both the forms within art history and to poetic forms to narrate the past, current, and future entanglements between people and landscapes.

Elaine Sullivan is Assistant Professor of History at UCSC. Sullivan is an Egyptologist and a Digital Humanist whose work focuses on applying new technologies to ancient cultural materials. Her talk will discuss the Digital Karnak Project, a multi-phased 3D virtual reality model of the famous ancient Egyptian temple complex of Karnak. Sullivan will show imagery from the model and discuss how geo-temporal exploration of ancient places offers completely new ways to look at archaeological sites.

Ronaldo V. Wilson is a Assistant Professor of Poetry, Fiction and Literature in the Literature Department at UCSC. He is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh, 2008), winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry in 2010. His latest book is Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other (Counterpath Press, 2013). This talk/screening will explore the activities between poetry, art, dance, and visual art, exemplified through Wilson’ mixed-media video series TEAR-E-AVATAR, recently completed during his tenure as a 2014 artist-in-residence through the Center for Art and Thought (CA+T). Wilson will explore the ways that digital technologies (video, audio recordings, movie and music software) complicate and help to render, and ultimately reveal what’s possible as both the poem’s form and its formation.