PANEL
Blurring Boundaries: The Interface Between Communications and Theatre
Admission: Free
Presented in partnership with Luminato
Date: 1:00 pm Saturday June 13th
Location: Isabel Bader Theatre, 93 Charles St. West
Full Pass Holders to Subtle Technologies will receive a 10% discount to Continuous City by The Builders Association Thursday June 11th .
http://www.continuouscity.org/
Summary
Subtle Technologies partners with Luminato to present a conversation between scientist Lee Smolin, theatre director Marianne Weems and mathematician/playwright John Mighton. The discussion will delve into the art and a science of our networked lives.
In-Depth
Subtle Technologies is excited to partner with Luminato to present a conversation between scientist Lee Smolin and the artistic director of the multimedia theatre company The Builders Association, Marianne Weems. The conversation will be moderated by mathematician and playwright John Mighton. As part of this years Luminato Festival, The Builders Association’s production of Continuous City will be staged at the Isabel Bader Theatre. “CONTINUOUS CITY is a meditation on how contemporary experiences of location and dislocation stretch us to the maximum as our “networked selves” occupy multiple locations” . The conversation between Lee, Marianne and John will delve into the science and art behind our networked lives.
LEE SMOLIN
Lee was born in New York City in 1955 and raised there and in Cincinnati. After leaving high school early, he attended Hampshire College and the University of Cincinnati, graduating from Hampshire in 1975 with a degree in Physics and Philosophy. He attended Harvard University for graduate school receiving a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1979. He held postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, The Institute for Theoretical Physics (now KITP) in Santa Barbara and the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. This was followed by faculty positions at Yale, Syracuse and Penn State Universities, where he helped to found the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry. He also held visiting positions at varioous times at Cambridge and Oxford Universities and at SISSA and the Universities of Rome and Trento in Italy. He was a Visiting Professor at Imperial College from 1999 to 2001. In September of 2001 he moved to Canada to be a founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, where he has been ever since.
Lee’s main contributions to research are so far to the field of quantum gravity. He was, with Abhay Ashtekar and Carlo Rovelli, a founder of the approach known as loop quantum gravity, but he has contributed to other approaches including string theory and causal dynamical triangulations. He is also known for proposing the notion of the landscape of theories, based on his application of Darwinian methods to Cosmology.
Lee is currently involved in the development of agent-based models to better understand economics and financial systems. These models draw on ideas from the theory of complex systems and networks. He has contributed also to the foundations of quantum mechanics, elementary particle physics and theoretical biology. He also has a strong interest in philosophy and his three books, Life of the Cosmos, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity and The Trouble with Physics are in part philosophical explorations of issues raised by contemporary physics.
Lee’s hobbies include jazz guitar and dingy sailing.
MARIANNE WEEMS
Marianne Weems is artistic director of the Builders Association http://www.thebuildersassociation.org/ and has directed all of their productions since the company was born in 1994. She currently serves on the boards of Art Matters, APAP, and Yaddo. In the distant past, she has worked with David Byrne, Jan Cohen-Cruz, Disney Imagineering, Susan Sontag, The Wooster Group and many others. She is the co-author of Art Matters: How The Culture Wars Changed America (NYU Press 2000.)
JOHN MIGHTON
John Mighton is a mathematician, author, playwright, and the founder of JUMP Math. John completed a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Toronto and was awarded an NSERC fellowship for postdoctoral research in knot and graph theory. He is currently a Fellow of the Fields Institute for Mathematical Research and an Adjunct Professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto.
John is also a playwright: his plays have been performed across Canada, Europe, Japan, and the United States. He has won several national awards including the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama, the Dora Award, the Chalmers Award and the Siminovitch Prize. As a mathematician and a playwright, John believes that there are more connections between the arts and the sciences than people generally think, and that scientists and mathematicians are often led by a sense of beauty or elegance, and describe their work in artistic terms. He has made the statement, “If the two worlds communicated more, we’d have much richer art and science as a result.”
Website