Emily Leung DESMA 9

A fluorescent bunny sounds awesome doesn't it?  Eduardo Kac created a bunny that glowed fluorescent due to injection of jellyfish genes into its system. However interesting this project may have  been , it incited lots of controversy. Animal activists deemed it unethical and scientists did agree that the project was "silly." I agree with animal activists; for the sake of art, mutilating another species is unethical. I feel the same way about Marta de Menezes' work; she manipulated a butterfly's wings to the point where it had holes in them. Animals develop certain traits that make their survival more  likely , but through manipulations such as the ones done from de Menezes and Kac, could harm their well-being even if they were never meant to live in the wild.  Kathy  High's Transgenic Rats is where  the  line gets blurry for me; her work  isn't  just for art but serves as research for  decoding "physiological processes and cure diseased ...

I attended the first show of the concert series called Fowler Out Loud, where a jazz collective named Jungle Rhythm performed. They started the show off with an upbeat, playful song that was about a girl who cheated on the lead singer with multiple people related to him. As the show progressed the band explored deeper themes such as depression, the struggles of being first-generation, growing up poor, and love. Music has proven to be an " effective way to express ourselves and cope with challenging life circumstances," and f rom all the hardships the lead singer has faced in his lifetime, I see how Jungle Rhythm's music came to be so powerful and moving (Warren). Jungle Rhythm performing at Fowler Museum I began to think of how this performance related to the themes of this class and an obvious connection I made was how science and mathematics created the instruments and electronics used in the performance. The artists wouldn't have the means to convey their art...

This week's material most interested me because it showed how the human body in its plainest form, inspired many works of art. For example, Drew Berry's Body Code  highlighted the simplistic beauty of the human body at the molecular level. His work reminded me of when I was in high school and we dissected a strawberry to separate out the DNA to view under a microscope. We didn't get to view the strawberry DNA in the vivid coloring Berry's work displays it in, but I now understand just how beautiful DNA can be! Virgil Wong's work also caught my eye due to his representations of pain. What made him chose the colors he chose? The shapes? What was striking in his work were his color tones; often times I think of pain as a blaring red color, but he incorporated cooler toned blues and greens into his work. In his piece  Trigeminal Neuralgia , I was curious to see if the area with the most overlap with shapes meant anything.  After  a quick  search  on google of...

An interesting theme I found among throughout the readings from Walter Benjamin and Douglas Davis was the idea of how advancing technology was changing our relationship to art. According to Benjamin, technology shifted our dependance on original work to reproducible work, which changed the function of art to " begins to be based on another practice—politics." Davis found that technology influenced art in a different manner, stating  " By finding the means to transfer my  early video works from analog to digital  media, I can contemplate revisions on my  computer that will allow me to change  my mind, two decades later, about points  where I erred long ago. This allows me to  produce a 'post-original original.'" In the context of knowledge production, Davis saw this transition to digital media as a chance to continue producing knowledge (in the form of artwork) through expanding on work he did long in the past. ...

From this week's lectures and readings, I have learned how mathematics influenced art and science through the Egyptians application of the golden ratio in building pyramids,  the idea of vanishing points in paintings, and  Da Vinci's unmatched ability to fuse "mathematics and art in a single concept" in works such as Vitruvian Man.  Diving more specifically into one piece of work that exhibits mathematics influencing art, I chose to analyze M.C. Esther's Regular Division of the Plane with Birds . As shown on platonicrealms.com, Escher's piece utilizes a tessellation of triangles. The style of tessellation requires that artists employ geometry concepts such as  reflections, glide reflections, translations,  and  rotations in their pieces. Furthermore, " These distortions had to obey the three, four, or six-fold symmetry of the underlying pattern in order to preserve the tessellation." Escher had a lot of mathematical considerations when constructing ...

I gave the California Science Center a visit this past weekend to find some fascinating installations on exhibit. There were installations on aircraft design, fear and how that affects the human body, and an exhibition called "Creative World," where I spent most of my time at the science center. I quickly walked over to the area where nanotechnologies were on display, as I remembered one of the class's weeks focused on art and nanotechnology. I often think of nanotechnology only being used in technical items, such as computers and other digital devices. But this installation opened my eyes to the common ways nanotechnology is used, such as designing shoes, which also is a great example of how nanotechnology is the intersection of art and technology. Another installation I walked by was about structures and shapes that made buildings sturdy. Engineers must decide what shapes work best to support buildings and how to make them sturdy, while architects design buildings to ...

In the second part of lecture, I found it astounding that there were students who hadn't visited other parts of campus because of their major being so heavily one-sided in either math/science or social sciences. As an economics major, I find that I get a good mixture of both sides. From the reading "Toward a Third Culture: Being in Between," " The bridge, in fact, is being triangulated   and made more stable with the work of artists utilizing new technologies, who are in active dialogue with both sides." was a line that resonated with me as in my previous internship, I had to learn new technological platforms to process data, but also had to combine my own analysis and social science background to derive meaningful insights from the data. Standalone numbers would not have been useful nor would insights without analyzing data. Combining both fields made for more efficient, smarter work. Spotify leveraged user data to produce end of year stat...