LASER—An Introduction

Abstract

I called cultural historian Piero Scaruffi recently to chat about the beginnings of the Leonardo LASER (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) program, a program that began in 2008 at the downtown campus of San Francisco State University and, at the time of my writing this introduction, has close to fifty host sites throughout the globe. Piero’s and my memories of the program’s beginning somewhat differ, but we both recalled a nascent LASER event in the spring of 2007 at Swissnex [1] in North Beach, San Francisco, although it wasn’t called a LASER then. This proto-LASER was facilitated by Christian Simm, who was then CEO of Swissnex-SF and a member of the Leonardo Governing Board. As chair of the now-defunct Leonardo Scientists’ Working Group (SWG), I, along with Piero and Christian, invited the SWG “members”—really just a database of scientists with a committed and serious connection to the arts that I gathered by word of mouth and by perusing the publications by scientists in Leonardo journal—to attend our event with the aim of beginning to build a community for scientists who, as the email invite stated, “work/think/imagine/engage at the intersections of the arts and science.” Twenty people attended that event, including Nobel Prize physicist Saul Perlmutter and, here I am relying on Piero’s memory, Leonard Shlain, physician and author of Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light. The next year the Leonardo 40th anniversary symposium “Remix: From Science to Art and Back in the Digital Age” took place at the Berkeley Art Museum and included presentations by scholar Steve Wilson, visual artist Camille Utterback and composer/musician Chris Chafe, among other luminaries.These were the events that launched a thousand LASER ships, or more accurately led Piero to start the now-worldwide LASER program [2]. As its name implies, the program’s intention is to “bring artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together for informal presentations, performances and conversations with the wider public” [3]. This bringing-together has included bimonthly LASERs in a classroom at the University of San Francisco, my home institution, and Jill Scott’s LASERZurich, which often takes place in the more intimate space of Café Salotto. As you can imagine during this time of COVID, this bringing-together has shifted many of the LASERs from their in-person communities to Zoom and, in tandem, from a local to a global audience. As I sit in front of my computer in September 2021 I now have the option of zooming into Piero’s Stanford University (U.S.A.) LASER on 1 September, Aalto University’s (Finland) contribution to the Leonardo LASER Garden program taking place at this year’s Ars Electronica Festival on 9 September and the National Academy of Sciences’ (Washington, D.C.) 17 September DASER (aka DC-LASER) on Art, Empathy and Climate Change, among others.As evidenced by the article that follows, “Liverpool LASER Talks: A Community ‘Studio-Laboratory’?,” the LASER concept has now expanded beyond live or virtual gatherings to include the written: a special LASER section in Leonardo to create a global space for dialogue among local LASER hosts, audiences and the larger journal readership. To this end, Mark Roughley and Caroline Wilkinson, faculty at Liverpool John Moores University and the hosts of the Liverpool School of Art and Design LASER program, have auspiciously shared their vision of a LASER “that sought to increase the visibility of art-science interactions locally” while simultaneously exploiting technologies that extended their reach to the international LASER community. This article is the first to be published in this special section; it summarizes the first year of their LASER program, which occurred prior to COVID and therefore in person at various sites in Liverpool, allowed their chosen venues to “[become] learning spaces for interconnection—a core value of the studio-laboratory—where attendees could engage beyond traditional public lectures with complex scientific research, new technologies and challenge art-science concepts.” This vision, like the LASER programs themselves and this special section, encompasses the unique place where locality and interconnection blur and expand the art-science discourse.