Life Art Science Tech (LAST) Festival

http://www.lastfestival.org/

The 4th Life Art Science Tech Festival (LAST festival) will take place on April 7th and 8th, 2017 at the prestigious SJSU Hammer Theatre Center in downtown San José. The 4th LAST is being produced in collaboration with San Jose State University’s Paseo Public Prototyping Challenge and Festival ~ https://paseoprototyping.org/

The L.A.S.T. festival is an interdisciplinary event that combines art, tech and science. The L.A.S.T. festival presents interactive multimedia art installations, inspirational talks by luminaries on cutting-edge technology and science, and interdisciplinary panels on how technology and science impact society. Previous editions of the festival took place at ZERO1, at The Lab and Stanford University.

The 4th LAST Festial will converge this year with the Paseo Public Prototyping Challenge and Festival, a public arts, culture and technology festival held at the newly opened SJSU/ Hammer Theatre Center in downtown San José, CA.

Stay tuned for the full list of participants, panelists and artists.
Artist selection is underway. The whole theater will turn into a playground of art installations.
The two days will include many activities, performances and talks.
Below (as a teaser) just a partial line-up for the talks and panels of April 8 afternoon.
Check these websites for updates on the program:

LAST Festival
www.lastfestival.org

Paseo Public Prototyping Challenge and Festival
https://paseoprototyping.org/

Best,
Piero Scaruffi
Founding Director, LAST Festival
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April 8, 2017 - Hammer Theater - San Jose
“Homo Digitalis” program – Saturday 12pm – 4pm
MC: Anna Davidson (UC Davis & San Francisco Art Inst)
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Can an artificial intelligence be Creative? When A.I. makes it, is it still "Art"? As "deep learning" and other A.I. technologies increase the power of machines to perform like humans, where is the border between "us" and "them"? In 2016 an A.I. made art that was sold at an auction. When does creativity end and mechanical procedure begin? Can we build machines capable of finding creative solutions to complex problems?
• Maya Ackerman teaches Computational Creativity and Machine Learning at San Jose State University. Her work has been featured on NBC Mach and New Scientist, and her research appears at top academic venues, including AAAI, NIPS, IJCAI, and JMLR.
• Mark Stephen Meadows has worked in A.I., especially with chatbots (from IBM Watson to Amazon Alexa), virtual reality (he is currently building conversational avatars or "emotional user interfaces"), and cryptocurrencies, but has also been artist-in-residence at Xerox PARC. His books include "I, Avatar" and "We, Robot".
• Piero Scaruffi has a background in Math, Physics, A.I. and Cognitive Science and, but now he is mostly a cultural historian. His most recent books are "Thinking about Thought", "Intelligence is not Artificial" and "Human 2.0", but he has also written extensively about (un)popular music. He is the founder of both the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASERs) and of the Life Art Science Tech (LAST) Festival.
• Lisa Winter has been designing and building robots for 20 years and is a pioneer of the Internet of Things movement. She has competed in all U.S. Robot Wars and BattleBots competitions since 1996. She is currently developing a smart wearable baby monitor at Mattel.
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Artificial Humanity? What happens when we edit your genes? Why should we do it? Next year is the bicentennial of Frankenstein: will it also be the year that Frankenstein becomes reality instead of fiction?
• Drew Endy, director of the Endy Lab for Synthetic Biology at Stanford, and president of the BioBricks Foundation, was named by Esquire magazine as one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century. Drew's students pioneered the redesign of genomes and invented the transcriptor, a simple DNA element that allows living cells to implement Boolean logic (i.e. to become computers). He helped start the newest engineering major, bioengineering, at both MIT and Stanford.
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Technology for Peace: Which technologies of the future can enhance trust and empathy? How can we make sure that today's accelerating progress will lead to a more peaceful, collaborative and empathic society?
• Melissa Day is an interdisciplinary artist and educator, currently at San Jose State University. Her recent work explores the role of singing in civic engagement, deepening dialogue among potentially insular groups. Day is currently building a "Wall of Song" with artist Michael Namkung, a massed singing of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.
• Fabiola Hanna, an artist from Lebanon who is currently at UC Santa Cruz, is a thinker, artist, documentarian and interactive-media programmer. She explores ideas that might strengthen communities through art and technology. Her current work is about post-colonial activism in relation to ideological constructs of history, nation, community and political struggle.
• Mark Nelson, a former relief-worker and social entrepreneur, is founder and co-director of the Peace Innovation Lab at Stanford, that researches collective positive human behavior change based on a quantitative definition of peace in terms of technology-mediated engagement. He is also a member of Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab.
• Susana Ruiz, an artist who has exhibited worldwide and whose work traverses the intersections of cinema, games, art, ethics and activism, teaches film and digital media at UC Santa Cruz, specializing in games as forms of activism and art. She co-founded the award-winning studio Take Action Games (TAG), situated at the confluence of game design, participatory culture, social justice, and transmedia storytelling.
• Rieko Yajima works for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC but is on loan to Stanford where she is conducting research on applying design thinking to science and society. Yajima was elected to the Global Young Academy that encourages young scientists from around the world to address topics of global importance.

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Why do we need Space Exploration? How can it help solve problems on our planet and help us understand who we are?

Chris McKay is a Planetary Scientist with the Space Science Division of NASA Ames. His current research focuses on the evolution of the solar system and the origin of life. He is also actively involved in planning Mars missions including human exploration. Chris been involved in research in Mars-like environments on Earth, traveling to the Antarctic dry valleys, Siberia, the Canadian Arctic, and the Atacama desert to study life in these Mars-like environments. He is the deputy program scientist for Constellation, the NASA program for future human exploration of the Moon and Mars.
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Silicon Valley and the Bay Area Counterculture: Why did Silicon Valley "happen" here instead of New York or London? What was special about the Bay Area that the rest of the world didn't have? Where does Creativity come from?
• Daniel Kottke was a college friend of Steve Jobs and one of the first employees of Apple.
• John Law was a member of the Suicide Club, a primary member and principal organizer of the Cacophony Society, and a co-founder of the Burning Man festival. He co-authored "Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society" (2013) and has spoken internationally about the San Francisco counterculture.
• Piero Scaruffi, founder of the LAST Festival, is a cultural historian who has written both "A History of Silicon Valley" and "A History of Rock Music".
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Virtual/Augmented Realities and Social Engineering: from telling stories to immersive experience as a tool to build community. Buckminster Fuller (of "geodesic dome" fame) envisioned global virtual reality as accelerating human imagination...
• Andrew Blanton, a media artist and percussionist, teaches digital media art and data visualization at San Jose State University while conducting research at UT Dallas' ArtSciLab.
• Hsiao-Yun Chu , who teaches design at San Francisco State University and writes about design and design history, is the author of two books on Buckminster Fuller.
• Meredith Drum, a New York-based video and animation artist, often collaborates with dancers, architects, writers, urban planners, computer programmers and scientists on location-based public projects and augmented reality apps (including kinesthetic Augmented Reality iOS apps). With artist Rachel Stevens, she co-created The Oyster City Project, a constellation of events (including augmented reality and games) that draw attention to urban planning, neighborhood life, politics, economics and environment.
• David McConville, a media artist and scholar, is co-chairman of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, an organization facilitating convergences across design, art, science, and technology to address complex global challenges, and a co-founder of the Elumenati, a design and engineering firm specializing in immersive visualizations.