Friday, April 28th, 6-8pm

This is the second Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous organized by the CoEmergence Lab, and the first at Rochester Contemporary Art Center. The program will discuss making electronic music with oyster mushrooms and wetland ecology and restoration. We will be joined by RIT Professor of Environmental Sciences Christy Tyler and artist and media theorist Eryk Salvaggio. Organized by Carlos Castellanos.

About the Speakers

Christy Tyler is Professor at the Thomas H. Gosnell School of Life Sciences and Director of the Graduate Program in Environmental Science at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY. Her research interests include aquatic ecology, biogeochemistry, invasion biology, wetlands, biodiversity, ecosystem function and aquatic plants. She directs the Tyler Aquatic Ecology Lab at RIT, they explore the interactions between aquatic organisms and their environment that drive ecosystem function. Some current projects include: improving wetland restoration techniques, using remote sensing to predict vulnerability of salt marshes and using artificial intelligence to monitor invasive plants. Christy received her B.S. in Biological Sciences from Cornell University, her M.S. from the University of Virginia, and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.

Eryk Salvaggio is an interdisciplinary design researcher and new media artist. His work explores emerging technologies through a critically engaged lens, testing their mythologies and narratives against their impacts on society, culture, and the environment. His work exposes ideologies embedded into technology, fusing a visual culture & media theory lens, a critique grounded in social impacts, and an early background in media activism. His work has been exhibited at Michigan State University Science Museum, the UN Internet Governance Forum, Eyebeam, CalArts, Brown University, Turbulence, The Internet Archive, and in books including Jon Ippolito & Joline Blais’ At the Edge of Art, Alex Galloway’s Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, and Peter Langford’s Image & Imagination. He has presented talks, keynotes and works at the Systems Research & Design Conference (RSD10&11), the Advances in Systems Sciences and Systems Practice Conference (2022), Melbourne Design Week (2021), MIT Press (2021), the University of St. Gallen (2018), California College of the Arts (2018, 2019, 2020), the University of Maine, RightsCon (2020), and Gensler San Francisco (2017). As a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar at Brown University, he created the article on Algorithmic Bias in 2016. Eryk holds a Masters in Media and Communication from the London School of Economics and a Masters in Applied Cybernetics from the Australian National University. He earned two concurrent undergraduate degrees, in New Media and Journalism, from the University of Maine, where he was listed as visiting faculty as an undergraduate based on his early interactive, online net.art work.

About LASER

The Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) are an international program of gatherings that bring the humanities, arts and sciences together for informal presentations and conversation with an audience. As of 2022, they take place in more than 40 universities and cultural institutions in four continents. Learn more here.

About CoEmergence Lab

The CoEmergence Lab is a flexible, transdisciplinary platform dedicated to exploring new modes of arts research, production and presentation, encompassing a wide range of media and experimental practices that transcend conventional disciplinary boundaries. Learn more here.