Berkeley Big Bang 2008

Berkeley Big Bang 2008 is a three-day symposium and festival of new media and art hosted by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and the Berkeley Center for New Media. Leonardo/ISAST will host a full day of panels and events on Tuesday, June 3rd, including an exhibition of student artwork, organized by Piero Scaruffi.

"Remix: From Science to Art and Back in the Digital Age"
co-hosted by Leonardo/ISAST and the Berkeley Art Museum

Schedule of events:

Introduction by Steve Wilson, Leonardo board member since 1983, celebrating forty years of Leonardo: The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology.

"Osmosis": What Can the Arts Do for the Sciences?

Art-Science interaction is a two-way process. The impact of science and technology on the arts is much discussed and well-documented. This panel seeks to examine the influence of the arts on the sciences, and the benefits that science can derive from the arts.

"Osmosis" Panelists:

- Bronac Ferran, Writer, Researcher, Instructor at Royal College of Art in London, Past director of the Interdisciplinary Arts at Arts Council England
- Melinda Rackham, Executive Director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology
- Jim Crutchfield, Complexity and Chaos Researcher, Professor of Physics at UC Davis, Co-founder and Scientific Director Art and Science laboratory
- Chris Chafe, Composer, Duca Family Professor at Stanford University, Director Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics

Brilliant Noise: How Data Becomes Experience for Artists and for Scientists

Most information about the world we live in is now mediated by instruments. This data is often visualized and sonified, both to aid analysis and to communicate with other researchers, but artists, too, can make this data meaningful and "sensual." The same data sets can lead to very different kinds of work. One person's noise is another person's sound.

Brilliant Noise Panelists:

- Camille Utterback, Interactive Video Artist, Inventor, and Founder of Creative Nerve
- Michael Joaquin Grey, New Media Artist and Inventor
- Laura Peticolas, Geophysical Researcher at Space Sciences Lab, UC Berkeley
- Douglas Kahn, Auditory and Sound Culture Historian, Director of Technocultural Studies, UC Davis

Free-form meeting of interested audience members with Leonardo ISAST board members during the lunch break.

The New Sensuality: Epistemologies of the Very, Very Small

Human cognition is bounded by the inadequacy of human senses to allow us sensory contact with the world on scales larger or smaller than ourselves. To perceive the nano world one needs extended senses or new senses. The nano world requires a new ontology and a new epistemology.

The New Sensuality Panelists:

- Ruth West, New Media artist, Director Visual Analytics and Interactive Technologies National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research Center, University of California, San Diego
- Wayne Lanier, Microbiologist, San Francisco Exploratorium
- Jennifer Frazier, Project Director of the Visualization Laboratory, San Francisco Exploratorium

Closing event of the two-day conference for the audience to mingle with the speakers of the various panels and with Leonardo board members. Winners of the first Leonardo Art/Science Student Contest will also be presented.