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 6:30 p.m. followed at 7 p.m. with presentations by marine biologist Nicole Crane, artist Elaine Gan, film archivist Rick Prelinger, and astrophysicist Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz.

Nicole Crane “One People One Reef: combining culture, context and science to manage changing ecosystems”
Elaine Gan “Making Time Appear”
Rick Prelinger “Inconvenient Materialities”
Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz “Turning Stars into Gold”

This event is FREE and open to the public.

Parking ($4) is available in the Performing Arts Lot adjacent to Digital Arts Research Center.

Nicole Crane is Professor of Biology, Cabrillo College and a Senior Conservation Scientist at the Oceanic Society. Her research focuses on long term monitoring, with an emphasis in ecology of coral and temperate reefs with the aim of conservation and protection of marine resources. Crane’s field work includes temperate and tropical reef monitoring, fish biology, stream ecology, plant communities, and marine mammal ecology. With the Oceanic Society, she works with communities to set up monitoring programs, looking at habitat and fish populations on reefs and leading natural history expeditions.

Elaine Gan is a doctoral candidate in the department of Film & Digital Media at UCSC and also serves as art director of Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA) in Denmark. She has been a fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts and a graduate fellow of the Science & Justice Center at UCSC. Recent interdisciplinary projects include co-curating an exhibition titled DUMP! Multispecies Making and Unmaking at Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark (2015); running a seminar series on multispecies technologies in the Anthropocene at Haus der Kulturen der Welt/HKW Berlin (2016); and co-editing an anthology, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Stories from the Anthropocene (forthcoming 2016).

Rick Prelinger is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. An archivist, writer, filmmaker and educator, his collection of 60,000 ephemeral films was acquired by Library of Congress in 2002. Beginning in 2000, he partnered with Internet Archive to make a subset of the Prelinger Collection (now 6,500 films) available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. His archival feature Panorama Ephemera (2004) played in venues around the world, and his new feature project No More Road Trips? received a Creative Capital grant in 2012. His Lost Landscapes participatory urban history projects have played to many thousands of viewers in San Francisco, Detroit, Oakland, Los Angeles and elsewhere. He is a board member of Internet Archive and frequently writes and speaks on the future of archives and issues relating to archival access and regeneration. With Megan Shaw Prelinger, he co-founded Prelinger Library in 2004.

Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz is Professor and Chair of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. He is also Director of Theoretical Astrophysics Santa Cruz Institute, Executive Director and Founder UCSC’s OpenLab, and the Sophie and Tycho Brahe Visiting Professor at the Niels Bohr Institute. His research focuses on the violent universe with an emphasis on stellar explosions, gamma-ray bursts, and accretion phenomena near compact objects. Ramirez-Ruiz is the youngest person to be inducted into the Mexican Academy of Sciences and has earned numerous awards including a Packard Fellowship and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award.