Event Blog #2

        I attended the Fowler Museum on UCLA’s campus for my second event. This is a place I’ve been meaning to visit my entire college career, so this was a great opportunity to finally go. A lot of what I saw at Fowler made me think about the interaction between art and technology, and what we really mean when we label something as a technology.
The silver ship


       The first exhibit I went to that made me ponder this was “Reflecting    Culture: The Francis E. Fowler, Jr. Collection of Silver.” Right near the  entrance is a plaque discussing the process of turning silver ore into  silverware. It says “art, craft, and business all commingle in the fashioning  of silver, which involves long hours and arduous techniques, acts of  repetition and acts of imagination.” What a wonderful way to describe the  marriage of art and technology and science! The process of turning raw ore  into wonderful pieces of art isn’t something that humans have known how  to do for a particularly long period of time, and I think that absolutely  qualifies it as a cutting-edge technology. Another representation of this  crossover was a replica ship made out of silver. It was a very detailed  artistic work.
The hollowed gourds used as bowls

The Igbo mask
The next exhibit I went into was “Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives.” Most of the pieces in this exhibit were at one point used for functional purposes, but made in an artistic manner. I think this is really important, and demonstrates the intersection of two worlds; not art and science, but art and utility. The art related to our course in that it actually used a lot of math in its creation. There were hollowed out gourds with perfectly-symmetrical patterns on them. Many of them featured spiral patterns, and considering that natural growth is governed by Fibonacci Numbers, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were present in these pieces. Another piece that demonstrated the use of perspective was a mask made by the Igbo people of Nigeria. Its horns flare outwards at the top, which make it appear larger than it really is.


Overall, this museum didn’t relate super closely to the material we’ve covered in our class. The best representation was between art and technology and math, as demonstrated above. I would recommend this museum to other students for a quick visit.

Me in front of the museum


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. "Lecture. Medicine pt1." Youtube, 21 Apr. 2012. Web. 25 Oct. 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep0M2bOM9Tk>.

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

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