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Ian Hodder on prehistory, Miriam Dym on pattern-based art, Vijaya Nagarajan on kolam art/math

During the covid pandemic, the Life Art Science Tech (L.A.S.T.) dialogues, chaired by cultural historian Piero Scaruffi, replace the Leonardo Art/Science Evening Rendezvous that have been running at Stanford for ten years.

Ian Hodder (Stanford/ Anthropology) on "What we learn from studying Çatalhöyük, one of the world's earliest societies"
Miriam Dym (Visual Artist & Systems Thinker) on her visual art based on infinitely variable and interactive pattern systems
Vijaya Nagarajan (Univ. of San Francisco/ Theology and Religious Studies) on "Embedded Mathematics in Southern India's Ritual Art of the Kolam"

Ian Hodder taught at Cambridge Univ until 1999. In 1999 he moved to teach at Stanford University n the Department of Anthropology and Director of the Stanford Archaeology Center. His main large-scale excavation projects have been at Haddenham in England and at Çatalhöyük in Turkey where he worked from 1993 to 2018. His main books include Reading the past (1986), The domestication of Europe (1990), The leopard's tale (2006), Entangled (2012).

Miriam Dym is a visual artist who messes around with systems. While printing textiles, Dym invented an embodied, algorithmic system they've named Decision Fields. Through the actions of conscious agents, Decision Fields fosters the emergence of infinitely variable patterns on a plane. This has been their main focus since 2018. Dym has shown at museums and galleries in the USA and abroad.

Vijaya Nagarajan is an associate professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies and in the Program of Environmental Studies. She is the co-founder of The Recovery of the Commons Project and the Institute for the Study of Natural and Cultural Resources. Her book, "Feeding A Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual and Ecology in India, an Exploration of the kolam" was published by Oxford University Press in 2018.

See www.lasertalks.com for more details

Dec 3, 2020 06:00 PM in Pacific Time (US and Canada)