LASER Talks at Tempe: Solving wicked problems | Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University

LASER Talks at Tempe: Solving wicked problems

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The Leonardo/ISAST LASERs are a program of international gatherings that bring artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together for informal presentations, performances and conversations with the wider public. The mission of the LASERs is to encourage contribution to the cultural environment of a region by fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and opportunities for community building to over 40 cities around the world.

LASER Talks at Tempe


 

Solving Wicked Problems

 

A Conversation with Julian Bleecker, Jonathon Keats, and Stacey Kuznetsov 

Leonardo May 13, 10am MST, AZ time. Find your timezone here!

 

The world seems full of intractable problems: pandemics, global warming, racial injustice, economic upheaval. These are huge problems that will require thinkers who are able to consider  these topics expansively thinkers who take risks, make unusual connections, thinkers who think inside of the box because so many others struggle to think outside of it. Today we are celebrating three people who are hard to put labels on. Yes, they are artists, but they are also philosophers, engineers, designers, technologists. Ultimately, they are problem solvers. Jonathon Keats, Stacey Kuznetsov, and Julian Bleecker will be talking about their work and the innovative ways that they are approaching the world’s problems.

As Albert Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

 

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SPEAKERS BIOS

About Jonathon Keats Acclaimed as a “poet of ideas” by The New Yorker and a “multimedia philosopher-prophet” by The Atlantic, Jonathon Keats is an artist, writer and experimental philosopher based in the United States and Europe. His conceptually-driven transdisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society, adapting methods from the sciences and the humanities. He has exhibited and lectured at dozens of institutions worldwide, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to Stanford University to the Triennale di Milano, and from SXSW to CERN to UNESCO. He is the author of six books on subjects ranging from science and technology to art and design – most recently You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future, published by Oxford University Press – and is the author of a weekly online art and design column for Forbes. He has been an artist-in residence at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics, UC Berkeley's Sagehen Creek Field Station, and the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, a Black Mountain College Legacy Fellow at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, an Imaginary Fellow at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, and a Research Fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art + Environment. He is currently a Polar Lab artist at the Anchorage Museum, a Flux Exchange Artist at Flux Projects, a visiting scholar at San Jose State University’s CADRE Laboratory for New Media, a research associate at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, and an artist-in-residence at both the SETI Institute and UC San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center. He serves as co-director and principal philosopher for Earth Law Center’s Interspecies Technology Transfer Consortium and co-director of the Alien Hybrid Garden at Arizona State University, and he is the founding director and curator of the Museum of Future History in partnership with Museum of Tomorrow International. A monograph about his art, Thought Experiments, is forthcoming from Hirmer Verlag. He is represented by Modernism Gallery in San Francisco.

Stacey Kuznetsov is an assistant professor at the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering at Arizona State University.Her research explores the role of technology in collective efforts to construct knowledge and address issues. Her work applies HCI (Human Computer Interaction) and design methods to the study of current and future systems for science and technology. She develops low-cost tools and bottom-up design methods for citizen science, community activism, and (DIY) biology.

She holds a doctorate from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Earlier, she worked for a small startup company (Google). She received a bachelor's from New York University with a double major in Philosophy and Computer Science.

Julian Bleecker - PhD UCSC, MSEng UW, BSEE Cornell University. Julian Bleecker is a designer, engineer, researcher, product designer and futurist. He is the Founder of the Near Future Laboratory, a discovery-based design practice that helps its clients analyze imminent futures to guide strategic and tactical decision making.

He has been a professor at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, and a designer-engineer at Nokia’s Advanced Design Studio, and consultant on future-facing thorny problems for many clients and partners including Google, Ikea, Nokia, Facebook, Nike, Warner Bros, Boeing, Electronic Arts and many, many others over his 30 year professional career.

Julian has a Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, a Masters Degree in Engineering (Interface Design, Virtual Reality) from the University of Washington. He did his doctoral work on the intersection of design, science-fiction and technology which formed the bedrock for defining Design Fiction, the Near Future Laboratory's discovery-based approach for revealing, analyzing, and creating futures. Julian is also Founder and CEO at Omata, Inc., a design-forward product company.

 

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The Leonardo/ISAST LASERs are a program of international gatherings that bring artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together for informal presentations, performances and conversations with the wider public. The mission of the LASERs is to encourage contribution to the cultural environment of a region by fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and opportunities for community building to over 40 cities around the world. To learn more about how our LASER Hosts and to visit a LASER near you please visit our website. @lasertalks

When
May 13th, 2021 from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM
Location
Sound stage 117
Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts
50 N. Centennial Way Mesa, AZ 85201
Online / Tempe, AZ 85201
United States