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:

Giacomo Bernardi “Finding general patterns in the natural world: underwater cuckoos”

Emily Brodsky “Stress in Faults”

Robin Hunicke “The Art of Play”

A. Laurie Palmer “If I were you, I’d call me us”

Bios:

Giacomo Bernardi is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Cruz. His laboratory research focuses on the ecology of coral reefs and understanding speciation mechanisms in marine organisms.​ Bernardi did his undergrad and grad school at the University of Paris where he earned a PhD in Molecular Biology. He did a Post Doc at the Pasteur Institute in Tunis, Tunisia and a Post Doc at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station before being hired at UCSC.

Emily Brodsky is a professor and earthquake physicist at the UC Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on identifying the processes that trigger earthquakes and constraining the forces and processes that occur inside a fault zone during slip. Prof. Brodsky earned her A.B. from Harvard in 1995, Ph.D. from Caltech in 2001 and was a 2001 Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published over 80 peer-reviewed articles and presented over 75 invited lectures or keynote talks. Her work was been featured in major press outlets such as the BBC, NPR, Time Magazine, NY Times, Nature, Reuters, LA Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Robin Hunicke is the Director of the new Art, Games & Playable Media BA program at UC Santa Cruz. A game designer and producer by training, she has a background in computer science, fine art and applied game studies. She has been designing, making and teaching about games for over 12 years (Journey, Boom Blox,MySims, TheSims2). Robin is also the Co-Founder of the independent game studio Funomena, where she is currently working on a puzzling fable called Luna and a joyful and musical physics playground called Wattam. Recognized as an influential Woman in Games, Robin is also an outspoken evangelist for diversity of thought and participation in game design and game culture. In this talk, she will talk about how game developers can create novel, experimental games by designing for feeling.

A. Laurie Palmer is an artist, writer, and teacher. Her work includes sculpture, installation, writing, and public art. She is concerned with material explorations of matter’s active nature as it asserts itself on different scales and in different speeds, and she collaborates on strategic actions that work for social and environmental justice. Her book In the Aura of a Hole: Exploring Sites of Material Extraction (Black Dog, London, 2014) investigates what happens to places where materials are removed from the ground, and how these materials move between the earth and our bodies. Palmer collaborated with the artist group Haha for 20 years on site- and community-based projects. She currently collaborates with Chicago Torture Justice Memorials (CTJM) and the Prison Neighborhood Arts Program (PNAP), both based in Chicago. She has shown her work, both independently and with Haha, at national and international venues.

This event is FREE and open to the public. Parking is available in the Performing Arts Lot adjacent to Digital Arts Research Center.