EPISODE NOTES

Sarah Meyohas, an artist who centers her practice within emerging technologies, talks about art on the blockchain, including BitchCoin, crypto currency backed by her own photography. Jussi Parikka reviews Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel.

Related reading: “Crypto Art: A Decentralized View” by Massimo Franceschet et al., upcoming in Leonardo journal (August 2021). An early release version of this article is available through the MIT Press: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02003.

LASER Boston, a Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous host site, is presented by swissnex Boston and SciArt Initiative. Find out more about the LASER Talks program including a list of host cities and upcoming events at www.leonardo.info/laser-talks. Laura Antonietti hosts.

Leonardo Reviews is a scholarly review service published since 1968 by Leonardo/ISAST. It is the work of a dedicated team of editors led by editor-in-chief Michael Punt. Reviews are posted monthly at www.leonardo.info/reviews. Jussi Parikka’s review of Critical Zones is found at www.leonardo.info/review/2021/06/critical-zones-the-science-and-politics-of-landing-on-earth.

Find Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel at MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/critical-zones

Host:Erica Hruby
Production: Tinatswe Mhaka
Theme music: Wyatt Keusch is a musician living in British Columbia, Canada. His work can be explored in detail at jazz.fish(link is external).

Find all episodes of Between Art and Science at www.leonardo.info/podcast.

CONTRIBUTORS

French-American artist Sarah Meyohas centers her practice within emerging technologies. Working in media from cryptocurrency to augmented reality, she enlists the natural world as references, network as medium, and the specular as a mode of contemplation. Rose petals act as a metaphor for the binary language of digital communication, augmented reality birds flock in accordance with the stock market index, and foliage is visually pulled into a boundless void through the artist’s ongoing two-way mirror photographic series. By merging traditional mythologies and clichéd objects of beauty with contemporary digital mediums, Meyohas enacts a visual language for the systems, algorithms, and technologies that influence our daily lives. Meyohas exhibits her work internationally, with solo exhibitions in New York at Red Bull Art Center and 303 Gallery. Her work has traveled to institutions including the Barbican in London, the Jameel Arts Center in Dubai, the Ming Contemporary Art Museum in Shanghai, and the New Museum in New York. Meyohas holds a B.S. in finance from the Wharton School and a B.A. in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania, and in 2015 received an M.F.A. from Yale University. https://sarahmeyohas.com.

Jussi Parikka is Professor at the Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton) and Docent of Digital Culture Theory at the University of Turku. At WSA, Parikka is the founding co-director of AMT, the Archaeologies of Media and Technology research group. He is also Visiting Professor at FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague where he leads the project Operational Images and Visual Culture (2019-2023, funded by the Czech Science Foundation). Parikka’s website/blog is at http://jussiparikka.net and you can find him on Twitter as @juspar.

TRANSCRIPT by Otter.ai

Erica Hruby  00:19

You have found the space between art and science. I'm your host Erica Hruby. Today's episode features artist Sara Meyohas exploring the artistic potentials of the blockchain, including her own cryptocurrency BitchCoin. Later, Jussi Parikka reviews the recent title critical zones the science and politics of landing on earth edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Sarah Meyohas speaks within the context of LASER Boston's event the crypto Canvas. the Leonardo Art Science Evening rendezvous presented by swissnex and ArtSci Initiative is a virtual adventure exploring the worlds of blockchain and its wide range of possibilities. Over the past few years, public attention has turned to this decentralized technology. What do cryptocurrencies and art have to do with it?

Laura Antonietti  01:11

I am Laura Antonietti and I am the swissnex Boston's arts programming associates here in our consulates in Boston. And on this event moderating with me will be Julia Buntaine from SciArt initiative, and Laura Stalder. From swissnex in New York. swissnex Boston is this where science and technology consulates, we focus on creating networks between Switzerland and the East Coast of the United States as part of a worldwide network. And we create those networks in the areas of research, education, innovation, and the arts. We support designers cultural institutions and art schools and expanding their reach here in North America. We also help them find the right partners and platforms to show their works, and show their talent. Laura, please introduce our second speaker.

Laura Stalder  02:08

Absolutely. Thank you so much. Our next speaker is Sarah Meyohas. So it's my pleasure to introduce you to her. She's a French American artist. She centers her practice within emerging technologies working in media from cryptocurrency to augmented reality. She exhibits her work internationally, with solo exhibitions in New York City at Red Bull Art Center and 303 Gallery. Her work has traveled to institutions including the Barbican in London, the Jamil art centers in Dubai, the main Contemporary Art Museum in Shanghai and the new museum here in New York. She's been featured in The New York Times Time magazine wire advice out forum in the Atlantic, and her film cloud of petals has been screened at various film festivals including the Minneapolis simple International Film Festival slamdance and the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. Sara, the floor is yours. Thank you for being with us today.

Sarah Meyohas  03:11

Hello, Hello, everybody.

Sarah Meyohas  03:13

I'm going to tell you a story essentially about an an art piece that I made a long time ago now, I was still in grad school. And I created a cryptocurrency in 2014. And I called it BitchCoin and I long launched it in February 2015. And these dates are important because, you know, etherium, launched five months later in July 2015. So this is really crypto antiquity and NF T's, you know, just didn't even exist. And I am not the most advanced technologist. So I did this. Often when I use technology, it's part of a narrative. And so I designed BitchCoin as a cryptocurrency backed by my photography at a fixed exchange rate of one BitchCoin to 25 square inches of photographic prints. So as my work changes in value over time, so should the relative value of BitchCoin, and the release of 200 bitcoins was matched with the placement of a corresponding set of prints as per the exchange rate in a safety deposit box at a bank. And so a BitchCoin holder can trade or convert their coins into any of my prints and to put it in more financial terms. This is essentially creating an asset backed security collateralized by my current and future artistic output. And so why would I do this because this was this was really a conceptual artwork in line with you know, relational aesthetics, which was something I was interested at the time turning the artist into a currency and that it also happens to be one of the First examples of tokenizing art on the blockchain, I think just goes to show that generally artists can point towards the future. Right. And that is the, that's the beauty of, you know, artistic experimentation. But at the time, just to give you my rationale, I was just entering the art market. And the truth is that it's incredibly financialized. And what I was seeing is that cultural value and monetary value are in a tight feedback loop. For you know, ever gold is a primary example of that, and that how something exchange is exchange affects how value, you know, is determined. And this is not the the rationale behind doing something like this and doing some of the other projects that had to do with financial manipulation later on, is essentially taking the logic of a system to the extreme. And that's a way of making making it visible, you know, capitalism and money are like these great abstractions that have very real effects. blockchain too. And so I'm basically pushing something to the extreme, inserting myself into a system and then you know, making it more visible so. So I did this at the time, I only sold 200 coins, but the idea just like, circulated, it was, you know, I was unknown at the time. But suddenly, I gave people certificates. Nobody, at the time wanted to download a client that I had, you know, developed with a developer. So I had these physical certificates, which is quite quaint of the public key, with the private key on the back. This was the Bitcoin wallet.

Sarah Meyohas  06:46

This was the print that went into the bank. And it's, and this was the first photograph that backed it. And it was the beginning of a series called speculations, and arguably, speculations have now been the greatest use case of BitchCoin. And we'll get back to speculation, but I made these with two way mirrors. And that is, you know, my body and essence, I'm, you know, creating space, metaphorically, you know, there was a mine that was mining, and this is this was a photograph backing it. And the interesting thing about photography is that, and this will dovetail I do want to address this craze and NFT these days, is that photography for a long time has not been valued as richly as painting, because it's endlessly reproducible. And so what the market has done is, you are allowed to print a photograph and edition it, and then that makes it materially scarce, which goes against its nature, essentially. And, and it's kind of like, you know, how government's government's printing money, like rendering something more or less materially scarce. And that was how the market ascribed value to photography, but even so photography has never reached the levels of financial accumulation that you see in paintings, right. And paintings. When you look at an $100 million painting, you're partly looking at an image, and you're partly looking at the spectacle of like that much financial accumulation in such a small physical piece. And it's worth noting that the financialization of the of the art world was accompanied by the growth in the like logistics and storage, right? Because you both need that unique material for value to accumulate. But then you need to kind of abstract that away for exchange to happen. And so what NF T's now do, right, is that you are really just value now can accumulate in the token completely separately, from what the image is, the image now is, you know, the art is as de materialized as possible. It's practically just an excuse for tokens to become this, like speculative vehicle and exchange has been so smooth, that, you know, it's like, it just makes sense in how it's designed now, that, that it would be so speculative. It's interesting, because I created Bitchcoin at the time to make a commentary on the art world. And since then, it's kind of become reality right now. The truth is that these NF T's are very much like Bitcoin. The only difference is that they're not they're supposedly unique. They're non fungible, though, when an artist mints in addition of 700 of the same image, that image gains currency. And it's also worth noting that the artists that have become most popular engage in what this practice they call every day's posting every day, which is Kind of like, you know, I think that's, that's like a totally ridiculous thing. But it does mean that, that they work against that type of currency. And and so it's now kind of become become reality, you know, for better or for worse. It's kind of amazing. I would love questions because dialogue rather than lecturing is my is my Mo.

Laura Antonietti  10:25

Thank you so much, Sara, your wonderful presentation very interesting. I'm very sure everyone agrees. So there is right now one question for you. And it is Bitcoin still making returns for you?

Sarah Meyohas  10:39

Yeah, this is a very funny question. Because the fact that it's backed by my photography means that there is essentially a built in exchange rate, in a sense, because I sell my photography for dollars in traditional galleries. And so in essence, Bitcoin has has increased in value, it's like doubled, right, in the last sort of few years. And at the time, it was like, somewhat inflated, given that you could, you know, buy a small piece anyways, so it has increased, but I haven't released new ones. And I am like, totally on edge about whether I should or not, I'm like, totally on edge about whether I should kind of mid some as NF Ts or if that's kind of just cashing in, or I have some other ideas about playing with, like, the medium of NF T's. And the way, you know, these auctions are like, are these you know, like performative moments where people are just, you know, bidding each other, you know, bidding up the price, you know, people arguably people is like, the Donald Trump of the art world, you know, he's just like, came in, broke all the systems. Like, he's like watching Fox News and CNN, and it's like, regurgitating our media landscape back to us. And the buyers of that people, like workers, previous buyers, and so there's a complete price manipulation in that, as well. So I'm, like very hesitant about getting back into the fray of it. The question is, what's your view of the future of ni, NF? t? Well, first thing we are in, like maximum hype, you know, this is there's gonna be a crash, there's part of it is because Bitcoin and Ethereum have had such an increase in their price, that that has second order effects where anything associated with it also kind of becomes more expensive. So that is, so it's going to crash. But that doesn't mean that any fees are going to go away, they're going to stay in my opinion. I mean, I have some predictions, I don't think I hope that things can be that there won't be one company like Facebook, you know, that becomes a dominant platform where all transactions happen, I do think that there can be kind of niche niches and that's the hope for, like web 3.0. Um, and I do think that NF T's, like can work with that. I think it's very exciting, to be honest. Right now, it's just for like digital pictures and videos. But it's going to extend to text to music. And it's going to allow like a tighter feedback loop between creators and consumers. You know, right now, there's no good way to consume these things. Like the fact that this has been like a, almost like a financial innovation, in my view means that all of the platforms are just focused on trading and buying and selling. But eventually, there's going to be, you know, fun ways that people will just scrape you know, the Ethereum blockchain for all of the NF T's and create like a searchable web of things over time, you could go from collection to collection, like things things will emerge, that I think will be more geared towards towards consumption and towards non like crypto kind of users. Right now, the audience is very much crypto people, and I do hope that it can expand,

Laura Antonietti  14:19

I am wondering, like, How are your thoughts on the alignment of the actual analog art market and the NFT art market? Or like major, like differences, like where do they meet or Wait, where do they essentially drift? Yeah. Um,

Sarah Meyohas  14:39

so, you know, Christie's did a people sale, Christie's was like the marketing machine here. Like it was kind of, you know, putting the two worlds together and creating a lot of buzz. There's, there's disalignment in the fact that these are completely different audiences, the people buying traditional art and the people buying NF T's are completely different. Is that going to change? Are they going to get closer together? Like maybe definitely the traditional art market is going to cater to these consumers because they are spending meaningful, meaningful amounts of money. And the art world generally has had even just in the last year had have, like, they've had to kind of move more online. So it's, I think it's, they're gonna get closer right now they're worlds apart. But I do think that they, they will get closer.

Laura Antonietti  15:30

So the next question that I'm having here is, Will NFT really changed the art infrastructure if we have to power powerful players like Christie investing into NFT infrastructures?

Sarah Meyohas  15:44

I mean, I Yeah, kind of like this. Um, you know, the question before Christie's is, is good marketing, and they're just trying to get into the, you know, get into the business. I think Christie's is somewhat irrelevant to whether NF T's, you know, take off or not, they're just trying to get a slice for themselves. Um, I, I do think that it will, it will have some changes, mostly in, you know, digital artists, it's not that their work didn't have value before. It's that their work now can become a tool for speculation, just like, you know, 20th century modern art paintings can be a tool for speculation that that's the difference. It's a financial innovation. And, and in a sense, it will draw a lot more attention. You know, more people might make more digital artworks now. Because they hope, you know, that they can be remunerated for it. I do think it's positive. Yeah.

Laura Antonietti  16:46

So the next question is, how are you feeling about resource use and crypto change using p o w, what is a reasonable carbon footprint for art?

Sarah Meyohas  16:58

So, first of all, there's been like a lot of talk, that aetherium, which is what most NF T's are on, will change to, from proof of work to proof of stake, which has, like big implications for the amount that for the carbon footprint. I am, like, not sure how far away This is one this is going to happen. They've been talking about it for a while. It's unclear. So that's one thing. I don't, you know, I've thought about this a while I for a while I have not released any NF T's partly, like for my own kind of guilt of like, do I want to use this much carbon to put up an image, so I haven't stepped into it yet. But, um, but I, I don't think that we should, like stop the development of this. Because we don't have like the most efficient system yet. And we do have so much work on like, creating, you know, on renewable energy anyways to, to do like, this is like such a tiny sliver, it almost feels and you know, so many other things have carbon footprints that we just can't measure as well. So it does feel like a little bit of like self flagellation to be like, no, like, we're not we're gonna stop this. No, it's gonna happen, people are going to do it, we just need to learn how to do it in a better way, and also have a lot more renewable energy available. So that's kind of my my hot take.

Laura Antonietti  18:28

Or a practical question. For all the future NFT artists out there? Is there any special courses that an artist can get online to become able to make NF T's and what platform is the best for usual artists, visual artists.

Sarah Meyohas  18:45

So there are a few I think that if you just Google like how to make an NF t there are definitely primers available. There are a few platforms that some of which you've probably heard of. There's nifty gateway, they're super rare there is open sea, there's foundation and they kind of all have a little bit of a different vibe. You know, open seas kind of like the eBay of NF T's and foundation is much more curated. So nifty gateway is like kind of like where Grimes you know, does a drop so they just have a different vibe and more will pop up I'm sure. So just whatever you make, try to see you know, look around and you know, have fun

Laura Antonietti  19:30

I mean it I know it is very hard at the moments to get into some of them. Well, obviously nifty gateway is like for already like very high end artists were already known and I know of my own experience from artists, friends of mine, it's hard to get into super rare so

Sarah Meyohas  19:50

yeah, well the easiest one is open on open. See, you can create your own profile and put your things up. The question is like, getting your stuff seen, right? You need to, you need to sort of build your own audience in a way. Like instead of having 1000s of people like nifty gateway gets 1000s of people's to bid on drops but um, there

Laura Antonietti  20:16

is less than a second so that makes the purchase very hard.

Sarah Meyohas  20:21

Yeah, yeah, but open sea is open, you know, you can list on open sea. Anybody can. So thank you.

Erica Hruby  20:36

Sara Meyohas enlists the natural world as references network as medium and the specular as a mode of contemplation. by merging traditional mythologies and cliched objects of beauty with contemporary digital mediums Bo has an act of visual language for the systems, algorithms and technologies that influence our daily lives. You can find more information about Sarah Meyohas Leonardo laser talks and swissnex Boston in the Episode Notes at Leonardo dot info slash podcast. For more on this topic, keep an eye out for the August 2021 issue of Leonardo journal for the article crypto art a decentralized view by Massimo Franceschet at all. In this article, the authors propose a collection of viewpoints on crypto art from different actors of the system, artists, collectors, galleries, art historians and data scientists. An early version of the article is available now at the MIT Press website. You'll find a link in the Episode Notes for this podcast. for Leonardo reviews, here is Jussi Parikka.

Jussi Parikka  21:46

Critical zones, the science and politics of landing on Earth, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Critical Jones the science and politics of landing on earth is the edited volume emerging from the sitcom exhibition of almost the same name critical zones, observatories for Earth politics. Well, the book is edited bilateral and viable. The curatorial team of the exhibition included also Martin Dennard bezzina corundum Berg, with Jessica manga. The exhibition even if hit by the covid 19 pandemic, and thus, mostly shown online gathered a lot of attention in its own right, as it featured several existing exciting projects, on mediations of nature, entanglements of technicals, fee and the biosphere and different aesthetic responses to the Anthropocene. The whole project and the burghead exhibition carries with it a strong commitment to the belief that art science collaborations can act as techniques of complexification critical zones announces that we need a quote, new earthly politics, thus echoing luchadores past years of work. In this case, Earth bound becomes specified, however, through the critical zone that itself emerges outside this art curatorial at war complex of thinking, quote, The invention of a few scientists mostly from the earth sciences and geochemistry as a way to bring different disciplines together in order to refresh the study of the thin skin of the living Earth. End of quote. Gaia is never far away in this discourse. But the most interesting part is not terminology. But the focus on particular thickness or thinness of a surface of the earth as a dynamic zone, and its different manifestations from research on expeditions such as Humboldt, the theorization of the biosphere, such as Vladimir nightsky. The collection argues that the critical zone is a perspectival space, even a material texture that is epistemologically significant, it is pitched as a way to break down, quote, picada graphical view of the planet Earth and our quote, while it also meant to interrupt, quote, the legal and political unity of any global view of quote, in an apt formulation that captures the link between material formations of so called nature and technological infrastructures, quote, the figure of a globe doesn't unify what it registers it simply points at some data set, and of quote, in this description of worlds of environmental data, and environment as data, the book several approaches are hard to summarize in one go, the range of works and texts is overwhelmingly large, which leads in also in the usual point about it. deleted collections, they can be somewhat uneven. here though, the different length texts are probably meant as snippets of work in progress as well as catalyzers or particular ideas can be followed up by the reader for instance, outside the book proper. The eight sections of the book is orientation disconnected critical zones Gaia, terrestrial divided, depiction suspended, they are all rich entities. But the with the book close to being 500 pages and designed as massively heavy, large coffee table type of an entity. At least I was left wondering if other formats for instance, three or four shorter books good have been an alternative option. The book is useful as a repository of texts, ideas, interventions, some more useful than others, some more to the point than others. The Interview with Depeche Chopra party is very good in many of its themes and the ability to capture aspects of the historical production of planetary and the earth. Indeed, to quote, the planetary is what the earth comes from the global comes from a historical process that includes European expansion, and the development of the technology that can connect the sphere will live on into a globe for us, and of quote,

Jussi Parikka  26:38

for lotto, and Chakrabarti, this leads into a recursive definition of the global and the planetary, the one discovering the other in an operative chain of techniques. Billions of years of planetary times are included in the negotiation of what counts as historical. It also triggers questions of politics, and how to model a subject where the stakes are in dealing with or getting rid of that lock Ian legacy. So if not the white European property owning subject, often male, what then is the agent of history? Although in this bit of the conversation, when lotto response that I quote, political thought has not tried to build any links between humans and these larger complexes on which humans are also part of, End of quote, one has to ask, really, in other words, decades of new materialism, feminist science and technology studies, and science fiction, critical posts, humanities, these have been among the voices among others that have offered much input to also political thought. But this slight hiccup is balanced with the chapters in the book, and in more detailed way show some of the historical aspects of these questions. A short text by Donna haraway and the collection, written also as a letter to Latour and also in honor of Ursula liquides, always coming home. To quote, also, we live in times of extraordinary Afro futurist and indigenous futurist fiction that is changing the shape of SF for everybody. My puzzlement is why you have not do science fiction early and often. End of quote. This spatial concepts metaphorical but also concrete design epistemic architectural models. underpinning the book, especially interesting. This includes john Leon Salah zealots, focusing on the Anthropocene square meter, as sort of a thought object formulated as a terrarium, that shows the continuum across natural and artificial from soil and Mars to building concrete and plastics, bubbles structures, bubble structure, such as biosphere two are part of the architecture of zones as well. And critical zone itself is a term that specifies materiality into quote, a composite heterogeneous environment of soil gas, water cells, genes all connected, and of quote, but also which triggers that design question. How do we model it and renew the maps, so to speak, is why some of the interventions concerning art and data visualization hold an important part in the book, including for example, Alexandra RNs, RNs is chapter and visualizations and besides critical zone of course, another key example is sight of Observatory, as it recurs. curatorial practices and metaphors of knowledge concerning the Anthropocene. It is a particular architectural site or more like perspectival knowledge that is aesthetic and epistemic. It comes as images and as data. The awareness of the spatial metaphor and concrete exhibition architecture is articulated in chapter by Dennard and Corinthian Berg. The statistical awareness of global abstractions and their materiality are tightly entangled. Or, to quote Pierre sharper near, quote, they are territories that can be drawn on the basis of economic and ecological data of quote, leading into current dilemma of two territories that defined the current problem. Another, quote, the legal and political territory of the nation, state, and ecological and economic territory defined by the space required to mobilize the goods we consume, and awkward. This indeed is then the long term perspective of colonial and imperial ties that defined the logistical underpinning underpinning of the earthly and is unevenly distributed resources.

Jussi Parikka  31:18

One could then also read this into the current and emerging forms of ethno nationalism, that will be building their border policies based on the design of the territory outside from where resources can be extracted, and the territory inside where a tight the filter population enjoys legal and other privileges. Many inspiring chapters could be mentioned. I know right, how my tour and Dilip takuna on water and wetness is excellent. Simon share first perspectives through the history of science are always articulated with flair. Jonathan Gray's take on datafication of forests is a useful, useful overview. Alongside for example, Jennifer gap resist text on sensors and sensing helps to understand earlier mentioned themes about environmental data. Joseph Leo corners nature painting is another text where historicity of representations of nature is brought back to questions of Humboldt expeditions. JOHN trash on coast Cosmo grams, is always enjoyable to read. These are a couple of examples of the many interesting contributions to return to the curatorial context. That said Chi M. And that led to a viable partnership. As a long tradition in these large art science exhibitions. One could say that they were never meant as single exhibitions but aim to they were aiming to create territories have discussions. Remember, for example, I can a clash and making things public atmospheres of a democracy all from early part of 2000s as examples of similar methods that have been carried forward to also critical zones. least two kinds of questions are triggered by these kinds of shows how they have shown ways of incorporating interdisciplinary Humanities Research in art exhibitions, and how the art exhibition has become one major way for scholarly work to reach the broader public. And even more so how can the exhibition act as more than just as dissemination where artistic work can be exhibited in terms of demonstrating method and process? I'm also in this context thinking about Lia Coronavirus, ongoing PhD research project on the question of curatorial shift toward emphasis on labs. So, the perennial perennial question that follows is how these buzzing ideas exhibited in space are continued as supported outside exhibition space as an event, so that the art science and ecology trio does not merely become integrated into the spectacle of contemporary curating. One of the main issues is then to avoid the air of solution ism of add art and science. And emphasize that these shows and the books that come out from them are creating interesting problems without however also fetishizing. The idea of a problem in ways that becomes a continuous self referential means meditation either in other words how To build from such interdisciplinary greggory or setups, more than a reflection of topics, but also reflection and changing modes of curating, for example, in terms of questions of sustainability of the institutional context itself. This concerns energy, travel, logistics, and more.

Erica Hruby  35:34

Jussi Parikka is a writer, media theorist and professor in technological culture and aesthetics at Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton. He is also a visiting professor at the Academy of the performing arts in Prague. The amount of reviews has provided scholarly reviews of books, exhibitions, videos, websites and conferences since 1968. Reviews are published monthly at Leonardo dot info slash reviews.

Tinatswe Mhaka  36:05

between art and science is a production of Leonardo, the International Society for the art Sciences and Technology. Our editorial director is Erica Hruby. This episode's featured discussion as a production of laser Boston, the Leonardo art science evening rendezvous presented by swissnex and SciArt initiative. Leonardo reviews editor in chief as Michael punt. podcast production by Tinatswe Mhaka. I was the music was composed by Wyatt Keusch. visit Leonardo dot info slash podcast for extended episode notes with more information about our contributors, and list of all available episodes, and links to streaming services where we can be found. Find out more about Leonardo publications and our programs at www dot Leonardo dot info