Saturday, April 30, 2016

Event 1: Toni Dove


I really enjoyed this event with artist Toni Dove because I wasn't completely sure what to expect. What I found most interesting was her work with Interactivity, which is using part of human sensory as a way in which we connect to media. Before this show I did not even know that art like this existed or was even possible.

She showed us how she does her work with Artificial Changelings: scrolling and scrubbing the video with her hands. It was really cool to see because the relationship with media is different because her body was the interface that controlled everything. She described it as "It almost feels as if you're on anesthesia, you get to play with all of your senses."  In the clip below, she is controlling all of the video with her hand and arm movements. At first I didn't believe it, but as she slowed down and explained to us how it all works it became very engaging.
 
The video posted below is what Toni Dove labeled Spectropia, she used improvisation and collides it with narrative to create a new entity and is about the augmented real world. 
I thought it connected very well with our class these last few weeks with finding a "third culture". It's taking an art and combining it with cinema and science and Toni Dove's use of Interactivity. It opened my eyes to a very creative and artistic world that can help create other cultures beyond a third culture. It helped me realize that there are still a lot of ways in which we can combine the two cultures for more creativity that people haven't discovered yet.  

Sunday, April 24, 2016

Week 4: Medicine-technology-art

In this weeks lectures and readings what stood out to me the most was all of the information about MRI's. Being a student-athlete at UCLA, I've undergone a lot of injuries where I've had to get MRI's and X-rays. I didn't realize that MRI's were used as an art form, but it is very interesting to see such detail in ones own body based on the images from the MRI's. In Silva Casini's article she talks about how in the 90's an artist named Justine Cooper was the first to attract a wide range of attention from her art using the MRI. Art using an MRI has expanded and is growing popular, youtube has hundreds of videos of people using the MRI to try some strange things. One that I found interesting and sort of creepy to watch was a man chewing and swallowing through an MRI as seen below. 

The transformation of the views and art of the human body is fascinating. In 1858 when Henry Gray published "Grays Anatomy" as Professor Vesna says, it marks the growth and change of anatomical illustration of the human body, it also makes me wonder if Shonda Rhymes named her show after this book. 
I have been to the exhibits of Body World in Nevada and was amazed that the bodies could be preserved for that long and that they replaced the fat and water in the bodies with plastic materials for longer preservation. It amazed me when Professor Vesna said during lecture that the exhibits had been around since 1979 by Gunther Von Hagens using polymers and plastination.


It is interesting how plastic surgery became most prominent during WWII, driven by empathy for people who come back without limbs and parts of their bodies. It's also crazy how much plastic surgery has gone to define what beauty means, especially in modern society. As professor Vesna talks about Orlan and she stayed awake during her plastic surgeries I start to think her view of art and beauty is a little extreme, but thats what makes her such a prominent artist. 


Casini, Silvia. "Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) as Mirror and Portrait: MRI Configurations between Science and the Arts." Configurations 19.1 (2011): 73-99. Web. 24 Apr. 2016.
Vesna, Victoria. "Medicine Pt. 1." 24 Apr. 2016. Lecture.
Gray, Henry, and Henry Carter. Gray's Anatomy. N.p.: Arcturus, 2009. Print.
Vesna, Victoria. "Medicine Pt. 3." 24 Apr. 2016. Lecture.
Rose, Barbara. "Orlan: Is It Art?" Art in America. Stanford Education, 8 Feb. 1993. Web. 24 Apr. 2016.

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Week 3

It is pretty amazing how mostly everything we do nowadays has to do with robotics the idea of separating work into bits and pieces to make more production has been around since the printing press. It is also amazing that the printing press was created by the Chinese in 1040. To think that this is how so many different ways of life, religion,  and particularly knowledge is spread through books that came from the printing press being able t proceed mass copies. For example, Renati Des Cartes is to this day still called the father of philosophy based on the ability to copy his book.

Nikola Tesla is another inventor who created the wireless communication, that modern day society couldn't live with out. Henry Ford and his car assembly lines began the discussion of a human being treated like they were apart of the machine, which has had a massive influence on mass production, robots and machinery. Alan Turing is considered the father of computer science he formed the concepts of algorithms and computation, this book his huge in philosophical literature. This goes to show that although a mathematician, he still had a massive influence on other areas that we've talked about in this class, artificial intelligence starts with him.

Norbert Wiener laid the foundation of concepts like feedback principle and output. Through all of these amazing and brilliant inventors and scientists, all of them had one thing in common besides being geniuses, they all had imaginations. In Douglas Davis's "The Work of Art in the Age of Reproduction", he says that "These events empower imagination rather than reason, as ew tools placed in the hands of people with open minds always have." (p. 382) particularly in cinema today. I posted a video of Charlie Chaplin called "Modern Times" where he struggles to live and keep up with modern industrial society. A film that I recently saw called "Ex Machina" is about how in the future humans create a robot that has such human like qualities it is able to live among us unknown to the humans around it. It's pretty crazy to imagine that that is a possibility with all of our technological advancements compared to the Charlie Chaplin video below. Both films mark how advanced we have become and there's no stopping the progression.




Ex Machina. Dir. Alex Garland. Universal Studios, 2015. DVD.

Leonardo, Vol. 28, No. 5, Third Annual New York Digital Salon. (1995), pp. 381-386. 
Turing, A.M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59, 433-460.
Vesna, Victoria. "Lectures Part 1." Robotics + Art. 17 Apr. 2016. Lecture.
Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. New York: Wiley, 1948. Print.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Week 2: Math + Art


I agree with professor Vesna and Richard Fuller that the education system "de-genuiuses" does reduce or limit our ability to experiment and try new things. (Lecture video 2, 11:18) I found it very interesting when Professor Vesna talked about the vanishing point and how in order to find that in a piece of art, how many mathematical rules and geometry is needed in order to find it. Fuller claims that, "Perspective is necessary in order to understand painting. It is completely mathematical, concerning the roots in nature from which arise this graceful and noble art. . ."

When we use sound and we are able to transform it into numbers that we can alter and make music with. It is eye opening to read "Music and Computers" and being able to see what we can do with artists and their music, by transferring all of the sounds into numbers. In order to do this transformation scientists start  by using an analog to digital converter, which is fundamental for music on ones computer. I also found it very interesting how origami is essentially math and one is able to tell  how much geometry is involved based on the "blue print" of the creases once unfolding the piece of paper based on Thomas Hull's article on "Origami Mathematics". I found it pretty amazing that in origami there are thousands of theorems to fold paper that create beautiful and elegant pieces of art like the origami rose I posted below. 

Time and a "fourth-dimension" seems to be the largest phenomenon from this weeks lecture and readings. Based on time and our ability to perceive the various dimensions and the ability to record these sounds, angles, and art with mathematical principles to make various patterns. After reading "The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean geometry in Modern Art" by Linda Henderson was evident in the work of M.C. Escher and his mathematical art


 . 



Alberti, Leon Battista, Cosimo Bartoli, and Giacomo Leoni. The Architecture of Leon Battista Alberti in Ten Books Of Painting in Three Books ; And, Of Statuary in One Book. London: Printed by T. Edlin, 1726. Print.
Vesna, Victoria, Prof. "Mathematics." 10 Apr. 2016. Lecture.
Hull, Thomas. "Origami Mathematics." Page. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Mar. 2015.Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1983. Print. 
Smith, B. Sidney. "The Mathematical Art of M.C. Escher." Platonic Realms Minitexts. Platonic Realms, 13 Mar 2014. Web. 13 Mar 2014. <http://platonicrealms.com/>

Sunday, April 3, 2016

Assignment 1- Week 1: Two Cultures

  Hello all, I am an American Culture and Literature major and I found myself leaning more towards the literary intellectuals throughout lecture and this weeks readings. I found it very interesting how in C.P. Snow's "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution", he talked a lot about how the education system is too specialized. (Snow, 19) There is a large separation between literary intellectuals and the scientific intellectuals, even in the physical sense for example UCLA's campus is designed that way with the South and North side of campus, one being for the arts and the other for the sciences. I play on the women's soccer team at UCLA and even my teammates will get into arguments about the arts and science and which has more meaning or relevance between our individual majors.
  In the first video of this weeks lecture, professor Vesna brought up Aldous Huxley and his view that scientists want to purify common language to avoid any ambiguity, where as poets and literary intellectuals purify common language to express the inexpressible. I found this to be extremely true which I believe is partly due to the severity of miscomprehension between the two. Thomas Kuhn was also brought up in lecture about the paradigm shift in the revolution which tied into the fourth video about how the two reasons 1. the economy and 2. cultural. We need to shift from this model of the education system of being focused on the industrialization, and expand the arts and creative thinking. I do agree with Professor Vesna and her take on artists working with technology I believe that this is helping bridge the gap between the humanities and the sciences. In Kevin Kelley's article on "The Third Culture", he also talks about how computers and art have manifested the new culture, scientists created radios, computers, and various types of technology where pop culture is involved allowing people to share and express their creativity and art with the world. I'm a pop culture freak and didn't even realize the connection between the art and sciences until I read Kelley's article and how large of an influence science has on films, music, television, GCI, science fiction films etc.





C.P. Snow "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution"
Aldous Huxley (lecture)
Thomas Kuhn http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~rfrey/PDF/220/220%20Thomas%20Kuhn.pdf
Professor Vesna "Toward a Third Culture: Being In Between"
Kevin Kelley "The Third Culture" http://science.sciencemag.org/content/279/5353/992.full