Leonardo LASER Talks Bergen

The Center for Digital Narrative's Artistic Integrated Research node proudly presents Leonardo LASER Bergen: a series of virtual events and presentations that invite creative practitioners, scientists, and researchers, to come together to discuss topics at the art/science/technology nexus. 

Backed by the prestigious Leonardo research network (external link), we broach the topics of more-than-human narratives and communications in digital art, exploring notions that extend our understandings of posthumanism, anthropocentrism, climactic events, and interspecies relations, through practices such as poetry games, interactive art, data visualisations, synthetic authorship, and more.

The talks are organised and hosted by Dr. Alinta Krauth and Professor Jason Nelson.

"This will be a truly global cast of guest speakers from places such as The Norwegian Institute of Nature Research, the Winchester School of Art, Queensland University of Technology, and more," says Krauth.

March 6: Interventions in the creation of nonhuman narratives

How are nonhuman and more-than-human narratives and poetics being engaged by techno-artists in fields of digital poetics, video games, and digital design? We look to practices such as interactive poetry games, AI-assisted making, and sensor-driven interactions to contemplate how historically human-centric digital arts practices can begin to incorporate other ways of seeing. Join us for scintillating conversation from digital artist Julian Stadon, seminal poetry game creator Jordan Magnuson, and seminal digital poet and art games creator Jason Nelson. This event takes a departure from the standard online panel-talk format by taking audiences behind the scenes of how three practitioners each from different fields, design and produce their works. After practice introductions from each presenter, they turn their attention towards chatting through their processes, and might even improvise and design something new together!

Jordan Magnuson

Jordan Magnuson is a game designer and media artist whose work explores how videogames can express experience in poetic and culturally resonant ways. For over fifteen years, he has created award-winning independent games, "game poems," and other interactive works. In 2005, he founded The Independent Gaming Source, a community that helped launch a generation of landmark indie titles including Fez, Spelunky, Papers, Please, and Minecraft. His own games, such as Loneliness, Ishmael, and Freedom Bridge, have been showcased at festivals and galleries across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, archived by the British Library, nominated for honours including the IndieCade Grand Jury Award and the New Media Writing Prize, and featured in publications (external link) including Wired, PC Gamer, and Le Monde. He is the author of Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice (external link) (Amherst College Press, 2023), and leads the Game Poets (external link) Discord community, connecting creators from games, poetry, and the visual arts around the topics of human and poetic game design. https://www.jordanmagnuson.com/ (external link)  

Julian Stadon

Julian is an Australian artist/designer/curator/researcher/educator. First studying Marine Biology, then Fine Arts and a Master of Electronic Art, his current PhD research focuses on how art can better our understandings of augmentation aesthetics, identity, & the relationship between bodies, embodied data and data bodies. His nomadic practice-based research interfaces art, bio-digital entanglements, embodied interactivity, food ecologies, culture and society. He was the founder of Dorkbot Perth and marart.org and has worked in academia since 2006 is Programme Leader of Creative Computing at Winchester School of Art. He also teaches on the Interface Cultures Programme at Kunstuniversität Linz. https://julianstadon.net/ (external link)

Jason Nelson

Jason Nelson is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen and the Principal Investigator of the Arts-integrated Research Node of the Center for Digital Narrative, a Norwegian centre of research excellence. He is also an award-winning and renowned creator of quirky digital poems and fictions, builder of art games and all kinds of digital art expressions, and an associate professor of digital art and writing. Apart from enticing students to break, play with and challenge all kinds of technologies, his artwork is seen around the world in places like FILE, ACM, LEA, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, and ELO. There are prizes to mention (Paris Biennale Media Poetry Prize), organizational board positions held (Australia Council Literature Board and Electronic Literature Organization), scholarships received (Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Bergen, Moore Fellowship at the National University of Ireland), and a number of other honours to his name (Webby Award, Digital Writing Prize). www.dpoetry.com (external link)

Date & time: Friday Mar 6, 2026, 2:00 pm (online)

Zoom meting here: https://uib.zoom.us/j/68283558527?pwd=mg7Dl1pzSigSytFTbvuzl5TiJlmbBJ.1 (external link)  

March 16: Therolinguistics: the digital and the feral

How do we engage posthuman and more-than-human 'voice' in critical creative practices? Computational artist and real-time animator Rewa Wright, and multispecies therolinguist and installation artist Audax M. Gawler discuss how nature-culture interactions, and non-Western and new-Western concepts of non-anthropocentric thinking, feeling, being, making, and writing, all come together in their distinct techno-practices as forms of languaging.

Audax M. Gawler

Audax M. Gawler is an award-winning, multigenre Symbiopunk whose practice sits at the intersection of speculative design, ecological humanities, and more-than-human world-building. Their research-driven work develops embodied and participatory prototypes that enact ecological futures attentive to multispecies justice, feral imaginaries, and collaborative survival. This inquiry spans exhibitions, publications, workshops, and public programs commissioned by leading institutions including the Powerhouse Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Australian Network for Art and Technology, Art + Australia, Sydney Institute for the Environment, Multicultural Arts Victoria, Next Wave, Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design, and the International Digital Media & Art Association. Gawler has received the Association of Professional Futurists’ Most Significant Futures Works Award and a Green Room Award, and has been a finalist in The TMRRW Awards, the Incinerator Art Award: Art for Social Change, and the Northern Beaches Environmental Art & Design Award. https://www.audaxaudax.com/ (external link)

Rewa Wright

As a computational arts, real time animation, and emerging technologies researcher, Rewa is driven by a commitment to exploring the intersection of bleeding edge technologies, creative practice, and critical thinking. A key aspect of Rewa's work is fostering interdisciplinary collaboration—bridging the fields of art, science, and technology to develop innovative frameworks that showcase the potential of computational creativity. Rewa is deeply invested in mentoring and supporting underrepresented voices in digital media, ensuring that diverse perspectives shape the future of emerging technologies. Rewa participates in International groups such as ACM SIGGRAPH (as a member of the Digital Arts Committee), IEEE Vis Arts Program (co-Chair two years running for the Annual Conference), and the ISEA International Advisory Panel, which affords the capacity to deliver a range of digital and interactive arts projects globally, for the benefit of diverse communities. Rewa is currently Senior Lecturer in Film, Screen, and Animation at QUT and the co-founder of UnCalculated Studio. https://rewawright.com/ (external link)

Date & time: Monday Mar 16 2026, 9:00 am (online)

Zoom meeting here: https://uib.zoom.us/j/62940170571?pwd=IJMDUayvX5Ah58mPaHafwzbcgo0946.1 (external link)   

March 26: Small Climates, Big Issues: Visualizing, sounding, touching, and reading microclimate data

Forest ecologist and ecoinformatics researcher Robert Lewis (Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, NINA) and multidisciplinary artist Alinta Krauth come together to explore how microclimates and the data that reveal them, shape forests and, more broadly, the Earth’s future. Moving between ecological science and artistic practice, they ask how microclimate data can be interpreted, translated, and contested through interactive digital art, literature, and sound, and what this implies for science communication, public engagement, and environmental stewardship. The discussion draws on recent Nordic Forest Research (SNS) microclimate research and the artworks that followed from the Intimate Atmospheres exhibition, using these as a springboard to consider how environmental sensing can be reimagined through multiple ways of knowing. Join us to encounter the same concepts through two parallel lenses: the scientist’s aims and the artist’s eye.

Robert Lewis

Robert John Lewis is an ecologist and ecoinformatics researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research (NINA). His work sits at the intersection of biodiversity science, distributed sensing, and socio-technical design, with a dual focus: advancing understanding of how and why biodiversity is distributed across landscapes, and designing novel monitoring infrastructures that translate environmental intelligence into sustained, participatory environmental stewardship. Lewis develops initiatives that connect field sensors and edge AI with participatory governance. His current work spans Norwegian forest sensor deployments and the Biodiversa+ ForestWeb3 initiative, exploring how emerging technologies might democratise monitoring and sustain stewardship at scale. Alongside technical innovation, he is increasingly attentive to epistemic plurality: the idea that biodiversity knowledge is produced through multiple, situated ways of knowing. He is interested in making environmental intelligence more legible, emotionally resonant, and actionable, while fostering reconnection with the natural world.

Alinta Krauth

Alinta Krauth (PhD) is a new media artist and artistic researcher interested in digitally innovative connections between machine learning, animal intelligences, and interfaces. Her work often looks at topics related to interspecies relations and collaborations, including the creation of interactive artistic devices as a response to more-than-human agency, and the building of interactive and wearable devices for use by other species. More recently, she works to implement machine learning in practices such as digital art, digital storytelling, and immersive digital experiences. Her outcomes include award-winning innovations in the fields of digital art, digital poetics, and creative Artificial Intelligence, including commissions for OpenAI, fellowships with Leonardo ISAST/The Institute for Science and the Imagination, and shortlistings with Ars Electronica/S+T+Arts Prize. Her artworks have been seen at spaces such as large screens in Times Square for ZAZ10st Gallery NY (USA), The MCA (Australia), Science Gallery Detroit (USA), The Glucksman Gallery (Ireland), HOTA (Australia), GentleMonster (South Korea), Art Laboratory Berlin (Germany), and many more. See more at www.alintakrauth.com (external link)

Zoom meeting here: https://uib.zoom.us/j/65909413240?pwd=rANvutafAw50BizqYrSU7wHxFi2ZUn.1 (external link)  

April 10: Art, Science, and the Threat of Extinction: Who lives and who dies on tropical mountains?

Digital artist Donna Davis and ecologist Darren Crayn come together to discuss how artists and scientists can work together in the field. Their research and practices raise important questions around species extinction, the role of artists in the future of endangered species, and who decides which species get scientific focus and which are forgotten to time. They will focus predominantly on their collaborative project the Tropical Mountain Plant Science Project, that saw Darren's team, with artist-in-resident Donna, working together in extreme tropical Australian mountain ranges to document, and potentially save, endangered plant species found nowhere else on earth. Join us to explore the same concepts through two parallel lenses: the scientist's aims and the artist's eye.

Donna Davis:

Donna Davis is a multi-disciplinary artist who examines human and non-human relationships with respect to ecological health. Exploring the intersections between art and science, she is often embedded within ecological research projects. Her work tells stories that examine the science through a creative lens; exploring imagined futures and constructing new ways of ‘seeing’ complex natural systems and the role of humans within them. To do so she has undertaken a number of residencies with scientific institutions such as the Brisbane Botanic Gardens, Queensland Herbarium, Department of Environment and Science and the Australian Tropical Herbarium to name a few.

Darren Crayn:

Darren Crayn is a failed engineering student, born again as a biodiversity scientist, and now Director of the Australian Tropical Herbarium. His professional life is equal parts management, leadership, teaching and research. His research aims to find out how many plant species exist, where they occur, how they are related, how they have evolved, and how people use them. This means fun outdoors in interesting places, but also helps humanity understand the natural world so that we can best conserve it both for its intrinsic value and for the benefit of our descendants. He has published over 140 scientific articles, undertaken research in 12 countries, and sits on many national and international advisory boards and panels.

Date & time: Friday Apr 10 2026, 11:00 CET (online)

Zoom meeting here: https://uib.zoom.us/j/69190772783?pwd=7skYjvAamwkiZkBcG2nbPKN9Qg4aGo.1 (external link)