The idea of two cultures is something that I personally have dealt with my whole entire life. I attended High Tech High Media Arts, a school that used multimedia and media arts to display the knowledge we learned about math/science concepts learned in normal high schools. I personally feel like using art to explain what you know about math/science is a better way that current school curriculums because you actually have to conceptually understand whatever you are explaining.
Coming to UCLA is a huge change for somebody like me, because now art and science are completely separated. In high school, I would go to science class, and then immediately after go to art and do some sort of art project about the science I learned. I think that this really helped created the "3rd culture" or more of the grey culture, that helped combine these two instead of creating the negative stereotypes associated with them. A good example of this is the "mac vs. pc" debate. South campus has always been more of a pc campus, and north campus being macs. With macs generally looking cleaner, much like north campuses architecture, and north campus computers being more boring, much like their architecture.
I think getting to this 3rd culture would save many types of art. For instance, a beautiful art form I personally enjoy is graffiti, which is generally associated with criminals, but one project I did in high school is follow around a graffiti artist day to day, and he was just a normal person with nowhere legal to express his medium of art.
Another art form, tattoos, have a very negative stereotype related to them, but can also be very artistic.
I'm excited to take this class and try to help the world reach a level of combining the two cultures, because I believe if we can combine the two we could really improve a lot of aspects of the world.
SOURCES:
Art&ScienceTattoo. 2010. Photograph. unknown. Web. <http://hobbesdutt.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ArtvSci.jpg>
Mac vs. PC. 2011. Photograph. HobbesDutt. Web. <http://hobbesdutt.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ArtvSci.jpg>
Graffiti. 2011. Photograph. Neil Baffert.Web. <https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr1v55HIE3IYNwwpkeI78ia5NnOPhrXsDuC1Qg6K5hVpyIA0WsMdH5YKFBVEBPRRpMychAZxyow05LCE7yFGysjYBsYNHV4Cy9XEP4B1NBqMM8U5pBnsvalVV2kDyI1pyaGXU0z3oGuhbx/s1600/sickness.JPG>
Snow, C. P. “Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” Reading. 1959. New York: Cambridge UP, 1961. Print.
Vesna, Victoria. “Lecture: Design and Media Arts 9.” University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles. October 2013.
Neil,
ReplyDeleteI was excited to read that I had a very similar high school experience to you. Art and science were one. In fact, I read a book over the summer called Imagine: How Creativity Works (by Jonah Lehrer) that talks about High Tech High and how educational systems can create better environments for creativity. Really good book.
Your post brought up the idea of stereotype a lot which is an inevitable part of "culture". When a culture generates, a fixed idea of that culture develops as well. (Literary intellectualism is more poetic and beautiful like Macs, scientific is nerdier and clunky like PCs, graffiti, etc.) This goes along with the readings as well; cultures form and solidify not just by their subject matter, but also by the thoughts regarding the actual subject matter. Good stuff.
Bowan