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Blog #4: Art and Medicine and Technology This week’s topic was art and medicine and technology. When I began thinking about the intersection of medicine and art I really couldn’t see how they related. The medical profession seemed very removed from art because I was thinking of it too narrowly. I was imagining helping the sick and healing the wounded, but when I listened to Professor Vesna’s lectures one of the first things she mentioned was Body World. That surprised me, but I realized that it was a perfect example of this intersection — the use of medical plasticity procedures to preserve bodies, and then arranging them artfully in a traveling display. I personally visited this show when I was young at OMSI in Portland, Oregon. It really grossed me out at first, but it also intrigued me very much. As I began thinking more about art and medicine and technology, I realized that this intersection is actually an everyday part of our lives. Any time we manipulate our bodies...

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...

Blog #3: Art and Robots Much of this week’s material discusses the dehumanization of workers caused by industrialization. The idea is that as the workers become integrated in with the machinery, each performing one small task to contribute to the greater production goal, they are themselves forming one large machine. There is a negative implication here that they are giving up their humanity to earn a paycheck.  Factory workers in a production line. I agree to some extent, but there’s another perspective worth mentioning. Industrialization and machines have greatly decreased the amount of time it takes to accomplish tasks. The National Bureau of Economic Statistics estimates that “women between the ages of 18 and 64 spent 18 fewer hours on housework each week in 2005 than they did in 1900.” Those eighteen hours a week freed up actually means less time spent in the drudgery of work, and more time to create art and pursue passions. Damage and aging on Mona Lisa. ...

Blog Post #2: Art and Math Similar to my elementary art project. This weeks topic covers the relationship between art and mathematics. The first interaction I personally experienced between the two was when, in elementary school, we learned a drawing and painting technique for creating realistic perspective. We had to choose a point on the horizon and then draw a series of diagonal lines expanding outwards from that point. Then, we drew street scenes in which the tops and bottoms of the buildings aligned with the line segments emanating from the centroid. We weren’t taught the mathematical basis and, to be honest, I didn’t even realize we were using math to make art at the time. My favorite classical use of perspective: Pietro Perugino's Sistine Chapel The goal of my art project was to create a 2D image that looked 3D. Before this week’s lesson I had always taken our collective ability to do so for granted. However, it wasn’t until Giotto in the thirteenth cent...

 Blog Post #1: Two Cultures The education system which leads to lost genius.         In Toward a Third Culture: Being in between , author Victoria Vesna makes mention of John Horgan — a journalist who spent years working for the magazine Scientific American . In 1996 Horgan wrote a piece questioning whether science had met its end; whether or not any further advancements could be made. The scientists of his day were quick to denounce his speculation, and Vesna proposes that Horgan “does not take into account the possible emergence of group genius or endless mutations of disciplines that truly do result in something new,” and further posits that every end constitutes a new beginning. The decision I had to make in high school. What’s interesting to me is how quickly Horgan’s thesis is discredited, but that the analogous debate in regards to whether art has met its end is still raging. Perhaps this is a  consequence of the “Two Worlds...