Event 3 This week, I had the pleasure of finally attending UCSB‘s free admission art museum for the first time. These last couple of weeks, they featured art pieces pertaining to the idea of science and art which I thought was perfect for this class. I was able to look over different pieces created by past and present students that are involved in the Media, Arts and Technology department here on campus ! The first piece of art that caught my attention was some sort of drawing of a frog-like creature. It instantly reminded me of the previous robot I saw at my last event ! When you stand in front of it, it is able to detect your presence based on its built in camera, and as soon as it knows you are there, it begins to read you a poem. This ties in, once again, with the robotics + art lecture from a couple of weeks because this piece of art is in some way like a robot. It has human-like abilities but only because of the machinery installed within it. In another room, I c
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SPACE + ART At this point, it is very clear that science and art in fact do mend and each of them helps with the other. I knew that this week’s lesson of “ Space + Art” would make a lot of sense. As Professor Vesna says, space and art really do involve a lot of what we learned in this class, such as robotics, nanotech, math, and many more subjects ! I truly enjoyed the small segment on the powers of 10 and sagan’s blue dot. Both of these videos are a reminder to me that space, itself, is a reminder of how small we are individually compared to the universe. Going from having the ability to see multiple galaxies at once that look like dust to seeing teeny tiny electrons is quite fascinating but also scary to think about ! This week’s lesson also included the talk of robotics. Early in the year, we discussed this and it has come back for the talk of space. Robotics + Space exists because that is our way to explore space. Without the creation of robotic machinery, we wouldn&
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Nanotechnology is a field that we, as a society, are pretty uneducated on because it is not mentioned to us nor is it well known. However, in this week’s lesson, Professor Vesna introduced us to nanotechnology. Before this lesson, I had no idea what nanotechnology is. To my surprise, nanotechnology is all around us. It is in our food packaging, the clothes we wear, and even in our electronic devices and its accessories ! The meshing of nanotechnology and art is something I didn’t think was possible. However Rothemund, the speaker at the TED talk for DNA folding showed us how they do in fact go hand in hand at time. Rothemund showed us DNA folding into what resembled a smiley face ! Who knew that scientist could manipulate DNA and change the way that it folds ? Companies like Apple are well known for using nanotechnology. Nanotechnology has made life more efficient for us in certain ways. Dr. Gimzewski was very helpful in making us understand the concept of nanotech
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NEUROSCIENCE + ART The relationship between neuroscience and art is quite intriguing. They go hand in hand. I believe that without neuroscience, or more specifically the brain, would be no art. There would be no creativity. In this week’s lesson we brought light to the significant role in which neuroscience plays in relation to art. In my opinion the most interesting section of this week’s lesson was the effects of certains drugs on the brain and the way in which they create art. The term that is now being used to describe the meshing of neuroscience and art is “neuroaesthetics”. As obvious as it is, we all know that art creation and perception comes from the brain and certain things can trigger that such as drugs. I found that Professor Vesna’s talk about different the drugs including, LSD & cocaine, and their effects in lecture was very interesting because it is fascinating how these drugs can make us create art out of our everyday surroundings. For example, the effect
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Event 2 This week, I was lucky enough to attend the End-of-the-Year show for the Media, Arts, and Technology department here at UCSB. The show consisted of graduate students showcasing their creations that included all three aspects. The showcase was fairly entertaining however all of my attention was put towards an interactive robot that one graduate student created. This robot, ( pictured on the left), is one that detects human-like sounds,& responds to them. It also has the ability to do a few human-like things. It can sing, play music, and record videos. In order for it to do these things, you must interact with it simply by standing in front of it and holding your arms out. This specific art piece ties into the section of Robotics + Art. During week 3, we focused on robots and their relation to art. The robot created for the end of the year show is a good example because not only was it an interacting robot, but it also produced art in the form of music and images. I
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BioTech + Art I believe that human creativity is one of the most beautiful things in world. Without it, we wouldn't have a lot of the things we obtain today that make our lives easier. However, as we all know, nothing i perfect and every good thing does have its bad side. Human creativity can sometimes be our worst enemy. Why ? Because when creating things, we often don't take into account that what we produce can negatively affect our well being. We fail to be careful enough to minimize the chances of creating and distributing things that can harm us and therefore, human creativity should be limited when it affects a large amount of a population. In this week’s lesson, we discussed the mixture of the biotechnology and art worlds. Specifically, we went over the topic about GMOs also known as genetically modified organisms. I found this topic to be quite interesting because it is a prime example of human creativity that is both beneficial and non-beneficial. GMOs are e