Piero Scaruffi
Piero Scaruffi graduated with a degree in mathematics (summa cum laude) in 1982 from the University of Turin. He was the founding director of the Artificial Intelligence Center at Olivetti, based in Cupertino, California, and later joined IntelliCorp, which had been one of the earliest artificial intelligence startups. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University and Stanford University and has published a number of books ranging from cognitive science to rock music. As a software consultant, he pioneered Internet and artificial-intelligence applications in Silicon Valley. He also cowrote A History of Silicon Valley (2012), which was translated to Chinese in 2014. Synthesis: A Book of Nothingness (2009) collects his poems and meditations. Scaruffi pioneered Internet-based journalism. In 1985, he created his first e-zine, distributed by e-mail. Between 1986 and 1990, he created an online database, downloadable via ftp, that in 1995 became his website, the main avenue for his writings about popular and avantgarde music. His main books on music are A History of Rock and Dance Music (2008), A History of Jazz Music 1900–2000 (2007), A History of Popular Music before Rock Music (2007), and a guide to avant-garde music (out of print and being revised on his website). He founded the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous events (LASERs) in January 2008 under the aegis of Leonardo/The Insternational Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST). In 2014, he founded the Life, Art, Science, and Technology (LAST) Festival. Since its inception in 2015, he has been on the organizing committee of the “Scientific Delirium Madness” initiative of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. In 2012, he published two e-books on the visual arts, A Visual History of the Visual Arts—Part 1: From Impressionism to Surrealism and A Visual History of the Visual Arts—Part 2: From Abstract Art to Conceptual Art, which were followed in 2013 by A Visual History of the Visual Arts—Part 3: The Age of Globalization. Scaruffi is an avid traveler who spends months on the road; as of 2015, he has visited more than one hundred sixty countries.