Event Blog #1

Event Blog #1

"Spun Chairs"

The Tyranny of Consciousness

For my first event, I visited the Hammer Museum. It was a unique and awesome experience because of the interesting mix of exhibitions and arrangement of artwork. What initially struck me was the opportunity to interact with the art. There was a permanent exhibition called the “Spun Chairs” which look like kind of like large yarn rollers, but you can sit in them and spin around. There were also ping pong tables that visitors were allowed to use, and an installation called The Tyranny of Consciousness by Charles Atlas. It combines forty four sunsets into one long video with a voiceover by a drag queen called Lady Bunny. It was actually very peaceful and reminded me of Santa Monica.

Salome Dancing before Herod

I also explored “The Armand Hammer Collection.” This exhibit was interesting to me because it contains many Renaissance-era works of art. A lot of the paintings in this room reminded me of our discussions on perspective, and how artists have developed techniques for demonstrating depth. A fantastic example of this was Gustave Moreau’s Salome Dancing before Herod, pictured here. You can really feel how large the cathedral is through the use of math-based perspective, which goes into the angles the artist used, and also how light is distributed throughout the painting.

Petrified wood

Another topic from our course that was on display at the Hammer Museum was the occurrence of fractals and spirals in nature. I liked a piece of petrified wood I saw because it represented so many things: time, waiting, age, and spirals. You could still see the spirals in the trunk of the tree and count how many years old it was when it died.

Ping pong tables & windows

The last takeaway I got from my visit was that architecture is a great collision of the two cultures: art and science. The way that the building was set up was very aesthetically pleasing and artistic, but also structurally sound and functional. The windows by the ping pong table were large and curving, and had a great view of other architecturally impressive buildings in Westwood —and a bridge over the main courtyard in the museum that was beautiful and useful. Overall, I would highly recommend visiting the Hammer Museum.

Me with employee

Works Cited

Kelly, Kevin. "The Third Culture" Science 13 February 1998: Vol. 279 no. 5353 pp. 992-993. Web.

Socioeconomics Institute. "Fibonacci, Fractals and Financial Markets" YouTube, 31 May 2007. Web. <www.youtube.com/watch?v+RE2Lu65XxTU>.

Vesna, Victoria. "Toward a Third Culture: Being In Between." Leonardo. 34 (2001): 121-125. Print.

Vesna, Victoria. "Mathematics." Lecture. DESMA 9. Web. <https://cole.uconline.edu/~UCLA-201209-12F-DESMA-9-1#I=Week-2-Assignment/id4287887>.