NatalieMyszkowskiDESMA9

  Blog this week about your own knowledge or personal experience with medical technologies in relation to the artist projects you have seen. Check the additional materials posted for more ideas. When I think of the overlap between science and art, what comes to mind first is biology. Art is very important in creating biological representations on paper which becomes extremely important in the medical field. We discussed Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, which is a very famous anatomical model of what a human should look like. This is just a stepping stone for many medical representations that have come later.  Professor Vesna also talks about the famous Gray’s Anatomy, an in-depth medical textbook that covers a very large range of medical information. The illustrations for this book are extremely important to display the information in a digestible way for the reader, making the content easier to understand. A use of art through science that has gained extreme traction in recent times...

The event I attended was Professor Vesna’s performance art piece titled Octopus Mandala: The Butterfly Effect. The entire event was a collection different of performance art at the beach in Santa Monica, all relating to the beach, the sand, or the sea. The Octopus Mandala event began with a procession toward the beach where myself and others joined to form a circle beginning with Professor Vesna in the middle. Audio then played which was a composition of meditation music, ocean sounds, and a voiceover of Professor Vesna’s thoughts and ideas relating to the octopus.  The audio described the disconnect between humans and our planet: the confusion of us destroying our lifeline. We continue to produce plastic and pollute our oceans even though we know the adverse effects it has on ourselves, the creatures around us, and the overall beauty of our planet, for our own capitalistic endeavors. This reminds me of the two distinct cultures of art and science we learned about in week one. This...

This week we discussed ideas revolving around mechanization, and robotics and how this is tied to industrialization. In Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, he discusses how there is a major loss in authenticity in art due to the technological advances as of late. With new tools for production and reproduction, there is a loss of humanity in our art and we become separated from it.  This reminds me of the ideas discussed by Marx and the mechanization of labor. Marx believed that with the replacement of machines for human labor, we become estranged from the work we are doing which is harmful to the laborer.  This idea is also explored in the film Modern Times starring Charlie Chaplin. This film follows a laborer working in a factory assembly line and we watch as he gets sucked in, becoming a cog in the system before eventually descending into madness. Just as Marx’s laborer is separated from their work, with technology, the artist is separa...

From the creation of computers to the design of our cities, mathematics is all around us. As much as we try to separate the disciplines, they are needed to create each other. This is shown by the math that is needed to create much of the art we see around us. The lecture videos explained how math is critical to art because it can be extremely helpful for creating realistic and scale designs. By using mathematical formulas, artists can easily scale up or down their designs with ease. Math is also critical when it comes to perspective in art, which is important to realism in art. We can calculate the length of objects and their relation to the vanishing point easily and accurately through mathematical principles (Frantz) Charles Csuri is an example of an artist who could not complete his work without the use of math and computers. He is a visionary for animation and computer graphics. By creating his work through the computer, he relies on coding, algorithms, and embedded math in order t...

The two cultures are very prevalent and separated in our society. At UCLA, there is a clear division between the arts and humanities and the sciences, especially through the division between North Campus and South Campus. Even as you take a walk from the north side towards the south, there are clear differences between the architecture and design of the sides of campus. North Campus is characterized by the art in the sculpture garden which is representative of the artistic culture of the humanities.  As you move towards South Campus, the buildings become much newer and nicer which aligns with many of the priorities of our university and society. As a science-heavy university and a secular culture that emphasized science, much of the school’s money goes towards South Campus buildings. This reflects the ideas shared by Snow in “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”, in that our society is also prioritizing the sciences over the arts. This perspective has given me the ideas ...