Event #3

For my third event, I visited the UCLA biomedical library. I was very confused on why I would want to go here, but figured that Professor Vesna had something good planned for me. I actually got out of this something more than I believe most students would. When I arrived at the library, I noticed a picture on the wall. It was a picture of the first printed book on medicine ever. It struck me what this whole class was about, combining art and different studies on our life to really grasp what the world is all about. This picture really summed the class up. It is a piece of art, that captures history through art, as well as displaying the first written signs of medicine we have known. Not only that, but it is located in one of the top BioMedical libraries in the world. It really does encase everything this class is about.

I would also like to give an honorable mention to a beautiful picture of a fern I found. It was the first ever printed picture of a plant in a book.

Me visiting the BioMedical Library

The picture of the book

The picture of the ferns

Event Blog #2

For my second event, I attended Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) presentations. We opened up with a presentation from Ping Ho, the founding executive director of the Arts and Healing Initiative. She started by handing out pieces of blank paper and asking us to show stress through them, like many others, I crumpled mine up. However I was very interested in the way a select few viewed stress in their life. Professor Vesna for instance only crumpled a corner of her paper, one woman in the audience simply drew on her paper, and another man punched a small hole in his paper. 

However, the main thing I wanted to talk about in this blog, was the presentation by Hanna Chusid, a Psychologist and Art Therapist. One of my best friends in high schools mother was an art therapist, and the line of work has always intrigued me. In fact, it even gave me a bit of an idea for my final project! Personally, I have always been more of what society considers a "math person". Seeing things more in black and white rather than a spectrum of colors like some. So when I first heard about art therapy, it kind of seemed like a joke to me. I never learned much about it in high school, but Hanna's ideas intrigued me. How integrating work with meditation can increase productivity, and how she actually works with different states of consciousness is insane. She works with her clients in the forms of dreaming, active imagination, and visualization. She works with people until the day they die as well. For instance, she worked with a 106 year old women until she tied, who said through art and this sort of thinking, she developed a new sense of empathy at the age of 100.

What she ended with was one of the most powerful things I have heard in a while. That every human being should have two pieces of paper in their pocket, one that says "The universe exists for me" and one that says "I am but a speck of dust in the universe". Because in many situations we feel more partially to one of these, and we need to remember that both can and will be true. 

Me attending the LASER presentations

Event Post #1

Joyce Cutler-Shaw at the CNSI Art Sci gallery
What Comes to Mind: Memory, Traces, Engrams

The first event I attended was the Joyce Cutler-Shaw exhibit at the CNSI Art Sci Gallery. The exhibition was called "What Comes to Mind: Memory, Traces, Engrams". This exhibit really spoke to me deeply, as I grew up in a similar situation as the artist. She describes living with a single mother in New York, who owned her own market within walking distance to her house. I also grew up in a city, Downtown San Diego, with a single mother who owned her own small business just across the street from our small apartment. So when I was going through this exhibit, seeing everything Joyce was reminiscing on, it really made me think hard about what I was going to rejoice about when I return back to my city after I grow old. Her use of the "carrier pigeon" really gave an extra twist to this whole exhibit. I personally thought about it as almost a sign of age, showing how long ago all of this really happened. Also, carrier pigeons have specific places they are trained to go to, so if a carrier pigeon is in the picture, it must have been an extremely important place to that person. Overall, this show really taught me a lot and made me reconsider what I value, and I would love to see more of Joyce's work.

A picture showing Joyce's apartment she had lived in.

Another photo, this time showing Joyce's florist she went to.

Desma 9 Week 9 Space + Art

I thought that this lecture was the perfect way to touch a little bit on everything we have learned about thus far in class. Space contains a little bit of everything and there is a lot of art within it. First off, I first feel like the aesthetic value of what we send into space is very interesting. For instance, Sputnik was designed to be perfectly polished so that everybody could see it in space, art came into a huge play with the Soviets trying to get into space.

Sputnik

Another huge piece of art that we have because of space that I personally think is really cool are all of the old retro drawings of rocket ships. People had some crazy ideas of what space crafts were going to look like and we have made a lot of cool consumer items out of them since.

Retro idea of what a space craft would look like

The third, and most important artistic value we got from entering space is movies and tv shows. Just to name some, E.T., 2001: A space odyssey, Star Wars, and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Multiple generations have been raised off of TV shows, movies, and books like this. It has had a colossal effect to the people of the United States and I'm glad it got brought up in this class because it has allowed to to think a lot more in depth about the Art values involved with space travel.

Star Wars - taking place in space

And to sum up the last blog of this quarter, my favorite quote of the quarter so far: "Knowledge - technology and the recording of it, art and the expression of it - is the most important gift to our future and to our heritage. We have come far and have far to go." - B.E. Johnson

RESOURCES:

Gawker Assests. Digital image. Gawker Assests. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Dec. 2013. <http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18gs2gxwzx49zjpg/original.jpg>.

“Leonardo Space Art Project Visioneers.” Leonardo Space Art Project. MIT Press, 1996. Web. 1 Dec. 2013. 

Jones, Bucky. Rocket Reviews. Digital image. Rocket Reviews. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Dec. 2013. <http://www.rocketreviews.com/images3/buckyjones.jpg>.

Sputnik. Digital image. Wikimedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Dec. 2013. <http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/Sputnik_asm.jpg>.

Vesna , Victoria, dir. Space Parts 1-6. 2012. Film. 1 Dec 2012.

Nanotechnology and Art

Nanotechnology is a field in which I was completely unaware even existed before this lecture. Because of this, I was very impressed with everything that Dr. Gimzewski was talking about. He started off explaining how small things on the nano scale really are. The fact that bacterium, which is 1/3 as think as a piece of hair, but is still 1000 nanometers long is insane. I didn't realize we were able to work with things that small. Then he started showing us about ways it is possible to to move molecules into desired shapes, such as this race car below.

Another thing I found very interesting and very artful is the blue butterfly. When he told me that the coloring on the butterflies back wasn't actually pigment and it was instead nanophotonics I was stunned. It is insane that something so tiny can have such a huge influence on the things we see and perceive in todays worlds.

The third thing that really impressed me with this lecture is how we used nanophotonics to stain glass windows and create beautiful art with them. I didn't know much about nanotechnology before, however I really see a lot of promise between nanotechnology and art and think that this field will grow a lot as technology increases.


RESOURCES:

Blue Morpho. Digital image. Wall Paper Spot, n.d. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. <http://www.hdwallpaperspot.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/blueMorphoZ.jpg>.

Stained Glass Windows. Digital image. Logtas, n.d. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. <http://logtas.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Stained-Glass-Windows.jpg>.

"Nano’s Big Future." Nano's Big Future. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. <http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2006/06/nanotechnology/kahn-text>.

Racecar. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. <http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/03/13/article-0-12224B43000005DC-754_634x476.jpg>.

Vesna, Victoria. “Lecture: Design and Media Arts 9.” University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles. October 2013.

What really interested me most about this lecture was part 3 which involved all of the what used to be legal drugs, and are now currently illegal drugs. I think it is very interesting to look at drugs like Cocaine, LSD, and Acid from an artistic point of view instead of from the point of view of an over protective government trying to protect its citizens. There has been an incredible amount of art and music inspired by drugs such as Acid, LSD, and Cocaine, and a lot of the facts about it I learned today really surprised me. The fact that doctors had done research and proved that LSD did in fact help cure alcoholism, and also lowered the crime rate of current felons, is really quite amazing. That mixed with the fact that so much art and music has been inspired by it, its crazy how there hasn't been more testing involved to try and create a similar drug with no negative effects that can be used to music/art/medicinal purposes.

Art inspired by LSD

The Beatles album: SGT Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, which many people believe involved a lot of Acid and LSD in its creation.

I was also very intrigued by the work of Frans Joseph Gall and Ramon y Cajal. I thought that Gall's idea of taking the shape of the head and using that to determine personality was very creative and interesting, and a cool early try at solving the very complicated organ that is the Brain. Ramon y Cajal's work is much more interesting though, its crazy he actually found out that we can read out connections of neurons by looking at their shapes. This itself actually put a lot more interest into what neurons look like which personally is really cool art to me.

RESOURCES:

Beatles, The. The Beatles Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. Digital image. Olsenbloom Wordpress. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Nov. 2013. <http://olsenbloom.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-heart-club-band.jpg>.

Coulth, John. LSD Art. Digital image. John Coulth Art. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Nov. 2013. <http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/hofmann.jpg>.

Hellerman, Caleb. "Cocaine: The Evolution of the Once 'wonder' Drug." CNN. Cable News Network, 22 July 2011. Web. 17 Nov. 2013. <http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/07/22/social.history.cocaine/>.

Neuroplasticity. Digital image. Stroke Network. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Nov. 2013. <http://www.strokenetwork.org/newsletter/articles/neuroplasticity_files/image005.jpg>.

Vesna, Victoria. “Lecture: Design and Media Arts 9.” University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles. October 2013.

I personally believe that genetically modifying DNA is perfectly okay and a valid expressive medium. Not only can it be an aesthetically pleasing art form, however it can help out the world a lot. I believe that if DNA testing was only an art form, and was harming animals or human beings without helping anything, it should be illegal and wrong. However that is not the case, and lecture really showed that to me.

My favorite example from this class was the GFP bunny created by Eduardo Katz. He used zygote microinjection to take DNA from a fluorescent jellyfish and put it into a fertilized rabbit egg, so that when the rabbit grew up it could glow in the dark. A lot of people found this ethically wrong. But i have to ask, why? If the bunny is not being harmed in any way, and it not only makes for a cool piece of art, but also shows how far we can get with science, what is so wrong with it? The GFP bunny really shows us that with science we could possibly use DNA injection to cure diseases or help out a lot of other problems.

The other big DNA injection case that people that was ethically wrong is what Kathy High was doing to rats. She, along with many other scientists, are using rats as test subjects for a lot of genetic testing. People find this very ethically wrong because rats are still animals and they believe we are harming them. However, people also view rats as pests, and will hire people to kill them in non humane ways from their homes. I feel as though if it is a creature that is going to be killed anyway, we might as well be allowed to use it for scientific purposes that will help the world. Image if we could regenerate body parts that soldiers lost during war from rats! The world would be a 10 times better place.

Resources:

Alba Green. Digital image. Ekac. Ekac, n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2013. <http://www.ekac.org/albagreen.jpeg>.

How Much Is Your DNA Worth? Digital image. Forbes. Forbes, n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2013. <http://blogs-images.forbes.com/daviddisalvo/files/2011/11/DNA.jpg>.

Mouse Human Ear. Digital image. Dna Exchange. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2013. <http://dnaexchange.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/mouse-human-ear.jpg>.

"Why Are Rats Used in Animal Testing?" WiseGEEK. Wise Geek, n.d. Web. 10 Nov. 2013. <http://www.wisegeek.org/why-are-rats-used-in-animal-testing.htm>.

Vesna, Victoria. “Lecture: Design and Media Arts 9.” University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles. November 2013.