The LASERs (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) are an international program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversation with an audience. See the program for the whole international series and the dates for the Bay Area.
Send an email to "scaruffi at stanford dot edu" if you want to be added to the mailing list for the LASERs.
Where:
LiKaShing LK120
There should be ample parking in the structure on corner of Campus Drive West and Roth Way (355 Roth Way).
Parking is mostly free at Stanford after 6pm.
Stanford events page
Program (the order of the speakers might change):
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Bryan Day (Instrument inventor and sound sculptor) on "Unreasonable Instruments"
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Roger Blandford (Stanford/Physics) on "Extreme Physics from Black Holes and Neutron Stars
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TBA (affiliation) on ""
- Discussions, networking
You can mingle with the speakers and the audience
Bios:
- Roger Blandford is the Director of the Simons Collaboration on Extreme Electrodynamics of Compact Sources at Stanford. He graduated from Cambridge University, carried out postdoctoral research at Cambridge, Princeton and Berkeley, joined Caltech in 1976 becoming the Tolman Professor in 1989 and in 2003 became the first Director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford. With Kip Thorne he co-authored "Modern Classical Physics". His research interests include compact sources, cosmic rays, cosmology, and astrobiology. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences. He chaired the 2010 Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He was awarded the 1998 AAS Heineman Prize , the 2013 RAS Gold Medal, the 2016 Crafoord Prize for Astronomy and the 2020 Shaw Prize for Astronomy.
- Bryan Day is a sound artist, instrument inventor, and conceptual artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Using scavenged electronics, repurposed mechanical components, and amplified materials, he reimagines them as constructivist sound sculptures. Since the late 1990s, he has built over a hundred sound devices ranging from amplified measuring tapes and hacked radio transceivers to electromechanical installations using magnets, hard drives, and pendulums. His recorded work spans noisy electroacoustic improvisation, droning minimalism, and audio collage, featured in projects such as Euphotic, Collision Stories, and Seeded Plain. He has performed, taught workshops, and built sound installations across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. By day, he works as a museum exhibit and software developer at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
- Piero Scaruffi is a cultural historian who has lectured in three continents and 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 World-Wide Web for cultural purposes in the mid 1990s. His poetry has been awarded several national prizes in Italy and the USA. His latest books of poems and meditations are "Synthesis" (2009) and "Dialogue of the Lovers". As a music historian, he has published ten books, the latest ones being "A History of Rock and Dance Music" (2009) and "A History of Jazz Music" (2007). His latest book on technology are "A History of Silicon Valley" (2011, revised edition in 2022) and "Intelligence is not Artificial" (2013, expanded edition 2019). The first volume of his free ebook "A Visual History of the Visual Arts" appeared in 2012. "A Cultural History of California" appeared in 2026. He has also written extensively about cinema and literature. He founded the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) in 2008. Since 2015 he has been commuting between California and China, where several of his books have been translated.
Photos and videos of this evening
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