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Showing posts from April, 2017

Week 4: MedTech and Art

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I never would have really made a connection between art and medicine before this week. They seem to be almost complete opposites in the way that medicine seems to be technical with specific guidelines of how to accomplish things, where art is more creative with endless boundaries surrounding to what you can do. Yet they are so connected in many different ways, you just have to take a step back and look for it. After seeing Zoran Todorovic's Operacija I thought of how surgery is like creating a artistic masterpiece. Although it still has a technical form to it, each surgery is different in the way each person is operated on and the surgeon has his own creativity to accomplish the job. Our own body is also a work of art. How each part inside and out works with with others to create a special self-aware being. Looking at the brain on an MRI we can see how our brain waves create different patterns and signals to how we think and feel. Below on the left is a map of someone's

Week 3: Robotics + Art

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Art is a process. It takes a creative mind and the ability to take this creativeness from an idea and put it in material form. There's also something about doing it by hand as well because a part of the art that makes it unique and special is the imperfections that come with it. Without the use of technology every detail can be nit-picked and made into perfection, which although can be aesthetically pleasing, it's like taking a short cut and to me isn't as special. In the past art was a more private pleasure, usually enjoyed by the owner but as it's popularity grew and demand for art grew, technology was there to reproduce them as needed As Walter Benjamin says in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"  “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Surplus stores like Walmart or Target that sell wall art

Event 1

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The first event I attended was the hands-on workshop by Linda Weintraub. The focus of the event was how disconnected from nature we are. Before entering the gallery we talked about how in today's world everything is mass produced from iPhones to food and we rarely have time spent with natural grown things. Going around the room we were asked what percent of our day we spend without produced goods and completely with nature, there was a lot of 0%, 1% and 2% answers which really showed how we're consumed by the materialistic world. Another idea she brought up was how our feet are a very good indicator of our environment so she invited us to take off our shoes as she had laid out different things for us to step on to get the full experience. Once we we got in there were boxes with different kinds of things from nature ranging from twigs and leaves to rocks and mushrooms. Each box had a certain question concerning the piece of nature inside it, for example one of the boxes had

Week Two: Math + Art

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I have always been drawn more to technical subjects like math or science, and have never really had an interest in abstract subjects like art. These subjects are very subjective and can be perceived differently from person to person, however there are still some mathematical principles involved that play a role in art. For example architecture involves lots of shapes and geometry principles which allow many different types of ideas for buildings. Maurits Cornelius Escher's  woodcuts, mezzotints and lithographs were admired by mathematicians because his work created a visualization of mathematic principles. He used geometry to create his different works and was inspired to go further to create "impossible" figures. By using black and white in some of his works he was able to create different dimensions and make images that should be impossible, possible. One of the mathematical ratios that is commonly found in nature is 1 : 1.618, known as the golden rule. Creat

Week 1: Two Cultures

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There is an existence of two cultures, a scientific one and a intellectual literary one that in its history has usually been separated from one another but with the uprise of technology the mixing of these cultures has become more prevalent. As Snow described it the two groups "psychological climate" were so different it was like he had crossed an ocean to a different culture. However this was back in the mid twentieth century where technology is no where near what it is today. Today we have MacBooks, iPhones and many other avenues that make it quite easy for us to acquire information. This allows for the different sides to have an easier access to information of the others ideas. Me, being a more math/science geared student with little knowledge or interest in subjects like art, through the use of technology is able to take a class like this; something I normally would not of taken. Not only has technology created an easier to way to access information it creat
Hi, I'm Jack Stronach. I'm a freshman from San Diego, California and I play baseball for UCLA. Right now I'm undeclared but plan on pursuing some sort of math major.