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The Glowing Effect This week’s lecture on the integration of biotechnology and art was the most interesting topic we have discussed so far. Before this lecture I was never aware of this field of science. I have heard of stem cell research and GMOs but seeing the reaction of combining science and art by making E.Coli listen to jazz or making essentially a lava lamp bunny is both kind of ridiculous but very cool in the sense that these unconventional experiments could change modern day science. To me, the weirdest but coolest topic was Eduardo Kac’s fluorescent bunny, Alba. This bunny is the culmination of artistic and scientific collaboration. By injecting jellyfish proteins into bunny eggs, a glow-in-the-dark bunny was made. At first, I was unsure of why such a thing would be created, but with further research I learned that this type of technology and research was for tagging embryos or furthering the fight towards finding a cure for cancer. Protein Structure I also think...

In tonight’s LASER event, I listened to five artists/scientists talk about the integration between art and technology in their lives, research, and in history. The presentations I found to be most interesting were by Robert Raffeatá, Maru García, and Ariel Levi Simmons. Raffeatá's culture community In Raffeatá’s work, she studies how culture interacts with how people think about their health. She discussed how our body is more microbe than human, in fact 90% of our body’s composition comes from microbes. I thought her presentation was interesting because she combined medicinal science to art and more abstract concepts of how humanity interprets and interacts with nature which creates the environment, a variable that she claims must be included i n the study of microbiology. Her ideas of how our health is a community was something I never heard before and to me further proved the point that medicine and art are very closely related like we learned in week 4. She also...

Just as Vesna said, the medical industry would not be as advanced as it is now if it were not for art. Even in the 15th century, artists like Leonardo Da Vinci was fascinated by human anatomy, as shown in his anatomical drawing of the male body. It was interesting to think about how before technology, medical illustrations were pieces of art and critical for medical care. Doctors relied heavily on art to represent the body correctly. Just as Vesna said, artists had a “critical role in documenting the progress and understanding the body.” In the article by Ingber, he describes how nature is art and how art creates the patterns and structures of living things. I think this is interesting because when you dissect a body or another living organism, the bone structure and placement of organs are often very symmetrical, artistic, and tends to consist of patterns. The creation of nature and life is genuinely a work of art.   What was interesting to me was that art was not only importa...

Tonight I went to an event called "Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick" at the LACMA. This event was a presentation about the 2001 science-fiction movie Space Odyssey and the origins of the idea, creation, and audience's reaction to the film when it premiered. Michael Benson, an author and artist who recently published a book about the creation of this film, discussed specific shots in the movie, such as a repetitive scene where the Jupiter-bound astronauts run on an artificial gravity centrifuge and how the perspective of the shot smoothly transitions from halfway up the wall to on the floor, which was a phenomenal and, according to the audience, boring segment of the film. This segment of the discussion reminded me of lecture 2 in week 2's topic of math in art. Because the perspective of the shot changed, it caused me to recall the golden ratio rule and made me wonder what t This event was pretty much exactly what this course's topic is about: technology and art. I...

Gutenberg's Printing Press In week 3’s lecture, Vesna discussed how the industrial revolution changed the process of production and the types of innovations created. Mass production became the main mode of production, shifting from hand crafted artwork that required much skill to an assembly line of simplified jobs that made a day’s work much more efficient. It seems as if the industrial revolution altered metal work and inventions from intricate works of art to mass productions of technology. I initially never considered the printing press as a work of art, but after this lesson, I now understand more clearly that technology and robotics is just a form of mechanical art. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mLmHUbC240 What really surprised me was that the invention of what we know in the modern culture as robots was actually created for theater. Just as Benjamin and Douglass considered that every type of art can be reproduced mechanically, robots are just that. They have b...

Compare golden ratio (above) to Selikoff's artwork (below) Both of my parents are graphic designers and growing up I was often told how inadequate they were in the fields science and mathematics, which I believed until this week’s lecture. After reading Abbott’s novel, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, I see that my parents are secret mathematicians. As graphic designers, my parents job is to take a concept and make it visual. Often minds my mom zones into a specific part of a company’s identity, say a neuron for a neuroscientist organization, and looks at it from all different perspectives. While she does this, she uses math to interpret an item from different dimensions and perspectives. I also learned that different looks surprisingly use different mathematical concepts, which I thought was really interesting and something I have never thought about before. In Vesna’s lecture, Math+Art, she talks about seemingly very mathematical concepts such as geometry, the g...

Differences in left and right brain https://ibrainandbody.com/left-brain-vs-right-brain/ There is no doubt that in the intellectual world around us, there are two types of people: logic and number oriented people, as well as creative and literary people. Even our brains separate the two types of thinking. C.P. Snow categorized these two types of people into the two cultures: literary intellectuals and natural science intellectuals. He also suggests the reason for the clear division of the arts/humanities and the sciences can be traced back to the universities. This division can be seen on UCLA campus, with the separation of the North and South. C.P. Snow then states that separation of the two fields cause capable minds to ignore science. I would have to agree with this. Growing up and being educated in some of the top private schools in the country, I have always been taught subjects through a keyhole. I learn scientific facts such as the laws of kinetic motion or numb...