Here’s a short list of Art & Science resources in the Bay Area.
It is not comprehensive, and I will augment it as I go!
In San Francisco
Grey Area (2665 Mission Street) is a space dedicated to art and technology (lots of VR and visual art.) The
Exploratorium (Pier 15) has a lot of very neat experiments that do have an artistic component to them, while the
Cal Academy of Science (Golden Gate Park) sometimes run events based on art and technology.
For 2018-2019, the French Embassy is assembling a series of events around arts and science called
After Tomorrow. There’s been events at the Cal Academy of Arts and Gray Area, but oftentimes they’re here to promote a French artist, rather than giving a systematic treatment of art and science.
There’s also
Leonardo/ISAST (International Society for Art, Science and Technology), which is based in the Bay Area and organizes event, such as the
LASER talks,
The Convening (for their 50th birthday.)
At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
There is a large source of content at
Berkeley Lab, especially given it’s the host of national user facilities:
I’ve been collecting data (art-at-lbl-gov goes straight to my mailbox,) and I have a bunch of scientific friends who are themselves artist, such as Sinead Griffin. I even ventured into this myself; the following picture was made by superimposing partially coherent light on atomic scale variations of a substrate seen with an x-ray microscope (a tribute to “Suprematist Composition: White on White” by Vladimir Malevich):
Incoherent on Coherent (Antoine Wojdyla, 2015)
I believe there are many cool things in tandem with
BAM/PFA or
SFMOMA, or even
CalPerf: the music venue should try to get closer to what people are doing in the EECS department — and I believe the University of Michigan should do the same with
UMS.
I’m not very familiar with what happens at UC Berkeley or Stanford in that field, apart from are a few independent events, such as
this one. I would love to invite
David Stork,
Edward Tufte and others, and I’m sure that there are many ways to bring in other national labs,
Bell Labs (Bell Labs researchers basically fled to national labs when things went down, but there seems to be a revival nowadays.)