- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The event, free and open to the public, will take place from 6:30 to 9 p.m. It will be moderated by Anna Davidson, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Plant Sciences who is studying plant physiology. She has organized and moderated all the LASER events on the UC Davis campus.
The April 7th schedule includes:
6:30-7: Socializing/networking
7-7:25: Christina Cogdell, UC Davis associate professor of design, specializing in history, theory and criticism, will speak on “Growing Living Buildings.”
7:25-7:50: Jesse Drew, UC Davis associate professor of cinema and technocultural studies, will discuss “Who Owns Creativity? Collective Wisdom and Media Innovation”
7:50-8:10 Break. (During the break audience members currently working within the intersections of art and science will have 30 seconds to share their work (a teaser/commercial)
8:10-8:35: Piero Scaruffi, a Bay Area-based cognitive artist, will cover “A Brief History of Creativity from Cheops Pyramid to Silicon Valley: 500 Years of Art Science Misunderstandings.”
8:35-9 p.m.: Wendy Kuhn Silk, UC Davis professor emeritus and art/scientist in the Department of Land, Air, and Water Science, will speak on “Singing about Science.”
The UC Davis Art/Science Fusion Program is co-directed by the founders Diane Ullman and Donna Billick. Ullman is a longtime professor of entomology at UC Davis and associate dean for undergraduate academic programs in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Billick, a self-described rock artist, is also science-based: she has a bachelor's degree in genetics as well as a her master's degree in fine arts from UC Davis.
More on the Speakers
Christina Cogdell, associate professor of design, specializing in history, theory and criticism, and a Chancellor's Fellow at UC Davis, is the author of Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s (2004), winner of the 2006 Edelstein Prize for outstanding book on the history of technology, and is co-editor of the anthology Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s (2006). Her work is included in the anthologies The Politics of Parametricism (forthcoming), Keywords in Disability Studies(forthcoming), Visual Culture and Evolution, I Have Seen the Future - Norman Bel Geddes Designs America, and Art, Sex, and Eugenics, and published in the journals American Art, Boom: A Journal of California, Design and Culture, Volume, Design Issues and American Quarterly.
Over the last few years, Cogdell has been researching her current book project on generative architecture and design in relation to recent scientific theories of self-organization and emergence, development and evolution, and complex adaptive systems. She has received research fellowships from the Mellon Foundation (New Directions Fellowship), the American Council of Learned Societies (Ryskamp Fellowship), the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania. At UC Davis, she teaches interdisciplinary classes in design history/theory/criticism, art history, cultural studies, and American studies. She previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania, College of Santa Fe, and California State University, Fullerton. Cogdell holds a doctorate in art history from the University of Texas at Austin (2001), a master's degree in American studies from the University of Notre Dame (1994), and a bachelor's degree in American studies from the University of Texas at Austin (1991).
Jesse Drew, associate professor of cinema and technocultural studies at UC Davis, teaches media archaeology, radio production, documentary studies, electronics for artists, and community media. He researches and practices alternative and community media and their impact on democratic societies, with a particular emphasis on the global working class. His audio-visual work, represented by Video Data Bank, has been exhibited at festivals and in galleries internationally, including ZKM (Germany), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), Museum of Contemporary Arts (Chicago), Barcelona Cultural Center (Spain), World Wide Video Festival (Amsterdam), Dallas Film and Video Festival. Open Country is his current film project, a feature documentary on the politics of American Country music. His writings have appeared in numerous publications, journals and anthologies, including Resisting the Virtual Life (City Lights Press), Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture (City Lights Press), At a Distance (MIT Press), Collectivism After Modernism (University of Minnesota), West of Eden (PM Press). His new book is A Social History of Contemporary Democratic Media (Routledge). Before joining the UC Davis faculty, he headed the Center for Digital Media and was associate dean at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Piero Scaruffi is a Bay Area-based cognitive scientist who has lectured in three continents, has published several books on artificial intelligence and cognitive science, the latest one being "The Nature of Consciousness" (2006). He pioneered internet applications in the early 1980s and the use of the worldwide web for cultural purposes in the mid 1990s. His poetry has won several national prizes in Italy and the United States. Scaruffi's latest book of poems and meditations is "Synthesis" (2009). As a music historian, he has published 10 books, the most recent: "A History of Rock and Dance Music" (2009), "A History of Jazz Music" (2007) and "A History of Silicon Valley" (2011). The first volume of his free ebook "A Visual History of the Visual Arts" appeared in 2012. He is also the author of "Demystifying Machine Intelligence" (2013) and has written extensively about cinema and literature.
Wendy Kuhn Silk, UC Davis professor emeritus and art/scientist in the Department of Land, Air, and Water Science works on plant-environment interactions, writes songs, and performs with several local bands. In her early work she introduced concepts and numerical methods from fluid dynamics to the analysis of plant development, a field now known as the kinematics of plant growth. Silk's current projects include several collaborations on problems of soil health. To understand the root-soil interactions, she imagines sitting on the growing root tip and hopping off onto neighboring soil particles.
She teaches the course “Earth Water Science Song,” in which students hear lectures in environmental science and write, discuss and perform songs to communicate their understanding of natural history and scientific concepts.
LASER organizer and moderator Anna Davidson, makes bioart using fungus and other living materials as media. As a teacher for the UC Davis Art/cience Fusion Program, she leads the found object and sculpture studio section of the class, "Entomology 1, Art, Science, and the World of Insects." She specializes in curriculum development and teaching at the intersection of biology and the arts.