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Week 4 Nowadays, medical technologies enable us to analyze our body structures. For example, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) uses strong magnetic fields and radio waves to demonstrate "high-quality images of organs, structures, and tissues..., unsurpassed in showing anatomical detail" (Casini 2011). MRI produced those images from the Visible Human Project, letting both scientists and artists envision the unknown and further illustrate the complex brain. Its impacts on art are vast such as how it contributed to expanding the definition of self-portraits. However, while this technology offers more accurate representations of our bodies, artists could be more innovative. For instance, Virgil Wong's Symptom Data Portraits took these medical scans to perceive patients' pain.   Additionally, plastic surgery is common these days. There is more social acceptance because of the rise of social media. This procedure is more affordable than it used to be and it has been seen to ...

Event 1      On April 11, 2022, I attended a zoom event about interactive art—connecting to each other and to ourselves. Scott Snibbe is an interactive media artist, entrepreneur, and meditation instructor. Users can produce geometric figures on-screen in interactive arts as their hands move simple drawing tools. The motion phone records the user’s movements and converts them to the movement of abstract shapes on the screen. Whether using networked computers or the internet, whether here or distributed around the world, Assorted users can communicate and influence each other in a shared canvas of abstract movements. The pictures and animation thus create an almost hypnotic effect upon the viewer. Lastly, the program creates a form of bio-feedback.      As Edwin Abbott described in his teachings, students seemed unprepared to understand the dimensions theories and found more nonsense in them than he had expected. (Section 21) The particular idea which bega...

Week 3 Robots and Arts This week's theme of robotics and art discusses the effects of mass production and industrialization on art. The industrialization has created new art forms, from the invention of the car to digital art produced on computers (Professor Vesna, Robotics and Art Lecture 2). Mass production in the West is rooted in the development of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1436, which allowed for the mass production of books and enhanced the dissemination of knowledge. Later, this mass production evolved from the assembly line, famously known for its use in the Ford auto factories. Surprisingly, even though mass manufacturing has advanced modern society by extending access to resources (cars, computers, and textiles.), Walter Benjamin explicates that such activity eliminates art's unique existence and authenticity. While industrialization has benefited society in several ways, the habit of reproduction affects art and alters societal reaction. Furthermore...

 Week 2: Art and Math When it comes to art, people tend to overlook the aspect of mathematics. Week two’s lecture offered us insight into the dynamics between art and math. Perspective, brought by Al-Haytham, is the mathematical system to demonstrate three-dimensional space in a flat plane (Vesna). Artists could illustrate the depth and use linear perspective to exceed the one-dimensional aspect. Artist, Brunelleschi, was able to do so while adopting the concept of scale—an object’s length about the length of the whole picture (Vesna). Having learned about perspectives and scales, I started to understand those concepts from those drawings, including “Under the Wave off Kanagawa” by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai. Mathematics appears within this painting, embodying the mountain in the background and the multi-dimension curvature of the waves. (Harris) After reviewing Music and Computers, I learned how sound could be vital to the mathematical concept of functions. ...

     This week’s agenda focuses on the “two cultures.” In Toward a Third Culture: Being in between, the author Victoria Vesna defines the “two cultures” as a “divide between the sciences and the literary humanities and frequently excludes what was originally analogized to science—art.” (Vesna) The creative process of artists and scientists is associated with the discovery of strangeness. It means that to create is to reveal the unknown first. In “On Creativity,” Bohm claims “to discover oneness and totality in nature, the scientist has to create the new overall structures of ideas to express the harmony and beauty found in nature.” (Bohm) So, it means that learning something new depends on a person’s mentality. In “Matchmaking with science and art,” John Brockman coins the term “the third culture”—” scientists are communicating directly with the general public so they are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our live...