In progress

1. Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous
since january 2008
www.scaruffi.com/leonardo1

2. Leonardo Art/Science Evening Rendezvous
Since January 2008
usfcalendar.usfca.edu (LASER)
events.stanford.edu (LASER)
www.nasonline.org (DASER)
http://dma.ucla.edu (LASER)
www.unex.berkeley.edu (LASER)
www.leonardo.info
2

3. Bay Area LASERs of 2013
www.lasertalks.com
• 14 january
• 6 february
• 11 march
• 4 april
• 13 may
• 6 june • 5 june
• 8 july
• 8 august • 7 august
• 9 september
• 10 october • 9 october
• 4 november
• 12 december • 11 december
If you are not on the Art/Science mailing lists, email
3
p@scaruffi.com (piero scaruffi)

4. Leonardo Art/Science Evenings
March 11, 2013
• Terry Berlier (Artist) on her “Where the
beginning meets the end”
• Curt Frank (Stanford) on "Historical
Pigments: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"
• Deborah Gordon (Stanford) on "Anternet:
How ant colonies use interaction networks"
• Katharine Hawthorne (Choreographer) on
“Choreography as Research”
If you are not on the Art/Science mailing lists, email
4
p@scaruffi.com (piero scaruffi)

5. Leonardo Art/Science Evenings
April 4, 2013
• Jesse Houlding (Visual Artist) on
"Phenomena as material"
• Chris McKay (NASA) on "The Curiosity
Mars Mission"
• Vijaya Nagarajan (USF) on "Embedded
Mathematics in Women's Ritual Art Designs
in southern India"
• Niki Ulehla (Puppet Maker) on "Marionettes,
forms and relationships"
If you are not on the Art/Science mailing lists, email
5
p@scaruffi.com (piero scaruffi)

6. At the National Academy of Sciences
March 21, 2013
oHali Felt, Author of Soundings
oKevin Finneran, Director, Committee on Science,
Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP)
oConnie Imboden, Photographer
oHeather Spence, Marine Biologist
Organizer:
JD Talasek
http://www.cpnas.org/events/daser-032113.html6

7. Los Angeles LASERs
Imagining Nature
Thu, March-07-2013
Speaking Your Mind
Organizer: Thu, April-18-2013
Victoria Vesna
Space and Place
Thu, May-09-2013
http://artsci.ucla.edu/?q=laser
7

8. LASERs of 2013
UC Berkeley New York
USF
Stanford
Washington
UCLA
San Francisco: Jan 2008
Silicon Valley: Feb 2009
Washington: Mar 2011
New York: Sep 2011
UCLA: Jan 2013 8
Berkeley: Jun 2013

9. A History of Silicon Valley
The Greatest Creation of Wealth in History
(a moral tale)

10. How it all Started
• 1891: Leland Stanford
• 1930s: Fred Terman
• 1956: Bill Shockley
10

11. Culture
• Artistic renaissance
– 1907: Frederick Meyer (founder,
California College of the Arts and
Crafts, 1907)
– 1913: Ralph Stackpole (founder,
California Society of Etchers/
California School of Fine Arts)
– 1921: Ansel Adams’ photographs of
Yosemite
11

12. Culture
• Artistic renaissance
– 1935: the San Francisco Museum of Art, the
second museum in the USA devoted
exclusively to modern art
– 1939: Villa Montalvo’s artist residency
program, the first one in the Western United
States
– 1946: Frank Stauffacher’s "Art in Cinema" at
the Museum of Art, the first time in the USA
that an art museum presented a series of
experimental films
12

13. Musical renaissance
• Henry Cowell
– Atonality, non-Western modes,
percussion ensembles, chance
– The first electronic rhythm machine
(1930)
• Lou Harrison (studied with Cowell)
– Chinese opera, Native-American folk,
jazz, gamelan…
• John Cage too studied with Cowell…
13

14. Meanwhile elsewhere…
• The automated office:
– typewriters (a field dominated by Remington
Rand),
– adding machines (a field dominated by
Burroughs),
– tabulating machines (a field dominated by
IBM)
– cash registers (a field dominated by NCR)
• Midwest and East Coast industries dominate office
automation
14

15. Meanwhile elsewhere…
• Main centers for research on electronic
computing:
– Boston (Harvard and MIT),
– Philadelphia (Moore School of Electrical
Engineering, BRL),
– New Jersey (Bell Labs, Princeton, RCA Labs),
– New York (Columbia and IBM)
– and Europe
15

16. Meanwhile elsewhere…
• AT&T Bell Labs’ transistor (1949)
16

17. Culture
• The “beats”
• Eastern philosophy
• 1951: Zen apostle Alan Watts
moves to San Francisco
• 1952: the literary magazine titled
“City Lights” and the first all-
paperback bookstore in the USA
• 1955: Allen Ginsberg‘s recitation
of his poem “Howl”
• 1956: Jack Kerouac moves to San
Francisco 17

18. Society
• Esalen Institute at Big Sur (1962)
• Free Speech Movement (1964)
• Ken Kesey’s “Merry Pranksters”
• First hippie festival (1965)
• The "Summer of Love" (1966)
• Black Panther Party (1966)
• Monterey’s rock festival (1967)
• Stewart Brand’s "Whole Earth Catalog“ (1968)
• The first “Earth Day” is held in San Francisco
(1970)
• Gay Pride Parade (1970)
18

19. Society
• All these movements are hostile to
technological progress
19

20. Integrated Circuits
• Fairchild spinoffs: Amelco (Jean Hoerni),
Molectro (James Nall), General
Microelectronics (Don Farina), Intersil
(Jean Hoerni); AMD (Jerry Sanders ), etc
• Texas Instruments, Motorola and RCA do
not spawn a similar genealogical tree of
semiconductor startups
• A commune
20

21. High-tech Creativity
• SRI
– Doug Engelbart’s NLS (1968): a
graphical user interface and a
hypertext system running on the
first computer equipped with a
mouse and connected to a remote
computer (9 Dec 1968)
– Not artificial intelligence but
augmented intelligence
21

22. High-tech Creativity
• Xerox PARC (1970) :
– Alan Kay’s Dynabook and
Smalltalk
– Not faster computation but better
interaction
– Casual, informal and egalitarian
workplace
– The equivalent for a workplace of
the alternative lifestyle preached
by the hippies
22

23. The Home Computer
• The Homebrew Computer Club
(1975)
• Another Bay Area community of
counterculture
• Journalists and store owners are
the real visionaries
23

24. Unix
• Unix ethics and philosophy a good match
for the Bay Area’s utopian ideology
• A technology ignored by the big computer
manufacturers and left in the hands of a
community of eccentric independents
24

25. The Internet
• Just like the personal computer and the
Unix, the Internet too was largely shaped by
a community of eccentric independents
• The consumer is the producer
• E-mail itself is a user invention, never
planned by the Arpanet's bureaucracy
25

26. Homework for you
Why did it happen here and not elsewhere, and why
it is still not happening anywhere else?
26