Event 3: LACMA

In 1961, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was established as a separate, art-focused institution. With 100,000 objects dating from ancient times to the present, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is the largest art museum in the western United States. 

When I first got to the museum, the first thing that caught my eye was the urban lights sculpture built in 2008 outside, by Chris Burden. The sculpture has two-hundred and two restored cast iron antique street lamps. There are seven remarkable architectural building, which encompass the geographic world and virtually the entire history of art. The most impressing part I visited that day is Latin American art, ranging from pre-columbian masterpieces to works by leading modern and contemporary artists including Diego Rivera, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, and Gego, who launch the rise of geometric abstraction.

Geometric abstraction, which reminds me of the topic of art and math, emphasizes on clear and distilled forms, became the dominant visual language that reflected a move toward modernization and industrialization. The following painting is created by Joaquin Torres Garcia. This art work may be hard for us to understand, when I saw the painting for the first time, the only word came up to my mind is religion and my guess is close to the answer. The painting integrates symbols into his abstract compositions to create what he called a universal constructivist art.

This art work is created by Gego. Although these weblike constellations made with joined wire segments may let you feel dizzy, they allowed the artists to draw in space. 

This art work named “Space ”is created by Lee Mullican to express the opening of the a new world, opening of the mind into a kind of cosmic thought. Lee is a example of artists who have drawn their inspiration from the beauty of space.

The following art work is my favorite during the visit. I am not an art major student and have no knowledge of contemporary art. However, when I first saw the painting, I thought it was about music and my feeling is correct. If I could describe the painting in one world, it would have to be “active”. A harmonious arrangement of geometric shapes floats in space, suggesting the joy of musical tempo. Furthermore, the bright color makes it no longer a painting but a music.

Event 2: Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History

The natural history museum of Los Angeles is one of the few institutions in the country that has continuously staffed a taxidermy department, going back to the introduction of habitat halls in the 1920s. While most museums glassed and sealed their dioramas after completion, the natural history museum kept their open. 

When I entering the African Hall of Mammals, I feel all dioramas at the natural history museum depict a real place. Approaching a family of elephants on the savannah, the tour guide explained that this was not an idealized vista conceived by an artist, but a recreation of an actual waterhole near the Tana River in Kenya. This is the result of an expedition into the wild with a team of scientists, biologists, taxidermists.

Unlike zoos and aquarium, natural history museums are able to show the public unique behaviors or interactions between species that they would not see in captivity. Diorama environments often incorporate hundreds of small animals and insects in addition to the larger mammals who star in the scene. These frozen moments tells a complex story about life in the wild.

The Cougar diorama in the North American Hall of Mammals seems to depict a tranquil family scene. Another and her cubs play on the rocks while the father watches from above. Unfortunately, there is conflict between art and science. Cougars are extremely solitary and territorial creatures that meet only to mate. If a father came across a mother and her cubs, he would likely kill them all.

Combining art and science, the taxidermists at the natural history museum apply their skills and love of nature to create lasting masterworks. By providing the public with immersive experiences, natural environments, they hope to foster wander, curiosity and respect for the natural world.

Event 1: Getty Museum

Since opening in 1997, the Richard Meier designed Getty center has quickly assumed its place in the Los Angeles landscape as the city’s cultural acropolis and international mecca. The J.Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center in Los Angeles houses European paintings, drawings, sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, decorative arts, and European and American photographs. 

When I got to the Getty Museum, regardless of the gallery, I personally think there’s nothing more relaxing than spending part of a pretty day just strolling through the central Garden, which itself is actually a copyrighted work of art by Robert Irwin. 

Other than the central park, the gallery of “the poetry of paper” left a deep impression on me. This exhibition of drawings explores the concept of negative space—the unoccupied ground around drawn elements. I see many famous artists such as Rembrandt, Boucher, and Seurat deliberately left areas of the paper blank to create the illusion of light and form. If I could use one sentence to express my feeling after visiting this exhibition, it has to be “using absence to evoke a sense of presence. 

When drawing human figures, artists frequently used negative space to suggest form, trusting the viewers’ imagination to interpret the empty passages. The following painting is my favorite in the gallery. Although there is no chair under the character, the unoccupied ground below a reclining figure can be understood as a chair or couch. Therefore, I saw the character is perfectly stable. 

When creating architecture, artists also utilized negative space to help the view distinguish exteriors and interiors. The following painting is created by Giovanni Battista Piranesi who used red and black chalk to magnify the effect of light streaming into a building or shining on a column.
Personally, in designs for architectural decoration, empty space saved time: there was no need to fill the entire sheet when the intent was to repeat the concept on a ceiling or a wall. 

Week 9: Space + Art

Human beings are always longing to take a closer look to what is not so close to them, that is why people have put in huge amount of time and effort in developing advancements of outer space since the time of Nicolaus Copernicus.

Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance astronomer and the first person to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe. Copernicus’ epochal book, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, published just before his death in 1543, is often regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy and the defining epiphany that began the scientific revolution. His heliocentric model, with the Sun at the center of the universe, demonstrated that the observed motions of celestial objects can be explained without putting Earth at rest in the center of the universe. His work stimulated further scientific investigations, becoming a landmark in the history of science that is often referred to as the Copernican Revolution, which went hand in hand with the revolution in art and culture during Renaissance.

Although we have launched tons of spacecrafts into the space, there is still large area of unknown in the universe. The video clip, “Powers of Ten”, is interesting because it successfully integrates both science and arts. It demonstrates how the view changes as we zoom out each time at the step of power of ten in meters. The video is starting off with a couple lying on grass and ending with reaching into the outer space. I have a strong feeling that the space around us is full of beauty. We shall take advantage of today’s advanced technology to fully appreciate the artistic beauty in space, from the tiniest atomic particle to the enormous universe.

Citations:

1.”Nicolaus Copernicus.” . N.p.. Web. 30 Nov 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus>.

2.”Encyclopedia Astronautica.” . N.p.. Web. 30 Nov 2013. <http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&hl=en&sa=X&tbo=d&rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS472US472&authuser=0&biw=1476&bih=815&tbm=isch&tbnid=eFUr6XJYzFrsvM:&im>.

3.”Copernican System.” The Galileo Project. N.p.. Web. 30 Nov  2013. <http://galileo.rice.http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/theories/copernican_system.html>.

4.Powers of Ten™ (1977). Dir. Vesna Victoria. Film. 30 Nov 2013. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0fKBhvDjuy0>

5. Space pt4. Dir. Vesna Victoria. Film. 30 Nov 2013. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=J5ClKO6AJPo>.

Week 8 | Nanotechnology + Art

Nanotechnology was first used by Norie Taniguchi from Tokyo Univesity in a 1974 conference to describe semiconductor process such as thin film desposition and ion beam milling exhibiting characteristics control on the order of a nanometer. Nanotechnology gives people the ability to look closer to the nano world, where lie the answers to many problems hard to be solved. For example, nanotechnology improves chemical engineering by making chemical bonds tunable. By Scanning Tunneling Microscope, scientists are able to experiment chemical substance in a level of atom, which is exactly the same idea brought up by Richard Feynman that “the principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atoms”.

Another application of nanotechnology is in the field of nano-medicine, which includes nano-therapy and nano-treatment. One interesting example is that people can use nanodots to tag certain disease within animal body, thus trace and identify how the condition of disease evolve while during the treatment.

Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology is a landmark in the history of nanotechnology. Drexler imagines a world where the entire Library of Congress can fit on a chip the size of a sugar cube and where universal assemblers, tiny machines that can build objects atom by atom, will be used for everything from medicinal robots that help clear capillaries to environmental scrubbers to clear pollutants from the air. In the book, Drexler first proposes the gray goo scenario—his prediction of what might happen if molecular nanotechnology were used to build uncontrollable self-replicating machines.

Nanotechnology is the tool for scientist and artist to create a whole new world beyond people’s imagination. It vastly expands the potential of development of science and art, because now they could reach out the hands in a tiny yet fascinating and profound domain.

Citations:

1. CRN. N.p.. Web. 24 Nov 2013. <http://crnano.org/whatis.htm>.

2.  Jingna Zhao, ”Turning to Nanotechnology for Pollution Control.”  Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science., Feb 2009 Web. 24 Nov 2013. <http://dujs.dartmouth.edu/winter-2009/turning-to-nanotechnology-for-pollution-control-applications-of-nanoparticles#.UpHOREDa5a1>.

3. ”Engines of Creation.” . N.p.. Web. 24 Nov 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engines_of_Creation>.

4.  ”Nanotechnology.” . N.p.. Web. 24 Nov 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanotechnology>.

5.”Nanomedicine.” Wikipedia. N.p., 4 2012. Web. 24 Nov 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanomedicine>.

Week 7: Neuroscience+ Art

As one of the newest sciences, neuroscience stands at the front of scientific studies and researches. The most basic part of neuroscience comes from phrenology, which was first introduced by Franz Joseph Gall. He claims that human brain functions as different parts but integrated.

 While the study on human brain went deeper and further, it elevated to psychological level from structural level when Sigmund Freud wrote his master piece The Interpretation of Dreams. This book opened a window, through which people understand more about themselves and become more conscious about their inner life by studying their unconscious dreams, since dreams are forms of wish fulfillment-attempts by the unconscious to resolve a conflict of some sort, whether something recent or something from the recesses of the past. Also the images in the dreams are often not what they appear to be, rather the unconscious must distort and wrap the meaning of its information to make it through the censorship, and need deeper interpretation if they are to inform on the structures of the unconscious.

The topic of LSD also interests me, because it represents a typical issue raised when the development of neuroscience and medical technology imposes an unprecedented challenge on human being. LSD is a semisynthetic psychedelic drug , well known for its psychological effects which can include altered thinking processes, closed- and open-eye visuals, synesthesia, an altered sense of time and spiritual experiences. It is used mainly as an entheogen, recreational drug, and as an agent in psychedelic therapy. Some artists use LSD to inspire their creativities. LSD is non-addictive, not known to cause brain damage, and has extremely low toxicity relative to dose. However, adverse psychiatric reactions such as anxiety, paranoia, and delusions are possible. This controversial drug draws discussion through the society.

There is no doubt that neuroscience gives people an alternative to understand themselves and contributes to the development of humanities and arts as well as to science and technology. Yet, we have to apply them in a proper way with a correct attitude. It is supposed to remember that curiosity killed the cat, especially when we face something new or things we really want to expose.

Citations:

1.Victoria, Vesna, dir. Neuroscience-pt2.mov. Film. 15 Nov 2013. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xlg5wXHWZNI&feature=player_embedded>.

2.Victoria, Vesna, dir. Neuroscience-pt3.mov. Film. 15 Nov 2013. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xlg5wXHWZNI&feature=player_embedded>.

3.. “The Interpretation of Dreams.” . N.p.. Web.15 Nov 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Interpretation_of_Dreams>.

4.”Phrenology.” . N.p.. Web. 15 Nov 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology>.

5.”Lysergic acid diethylamide.” . N.p.. Web. 15 Nov 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysergic_acid_diethylamide>.

6.“The truth about LSD.” . N.p.. Web.15 Nov 2013. <http://www.drugfreeworld.org/drugfacts/lsd.html>

Week 6 | BioTech + Art

Bio-Technology is always being at the forefront of development of human kind, and it needs imagination and creativity of art to stimulate its further development. Bio Technology intends to solve various types of problems people meet, so it is dynamic and constantly evolving, and often it crosses the borderline and touches other fields of study. One good example would be the collaboration between Bio Technology and art, not simply mixed, but rather in a sense of chemical reaction.

In Professor Victoria’s lecture, I am greatly inspired by the example of Joe Davis. I cannot agree any more with his perspective, which goes as following, “The most absurd things are connected in very absurd ways. I like to take the least connected things and try to build connections between them.” Davis made many great works both contributed to bio-techs and arts, including Microvenus, a project in protest of the censorship of radio messages sent into deep space. Davis’ idea is to put the human genome into a hardy strain of bacteria and send it into deep space. Additionally, the sculpture Earth Sphere, a landmark fog fountain at Kendall Square near the MIT campus; Rubisco Stars, a transmission of a message to nearby stars from the Arecibo Observatory radiotelescope in Puerto Rico; New Age Ruby Falls, a project to create an artificial aurora using a 100,000 watt electron beam fired into the magnetosphere from a NASA space shuttle. His works are not just of value of scientific and artistic study, but more importantly, Davis eschews the art versus science argument, insisting that he speaks both languages and could not possibly tear the two disciplines apart in his own mind.

The impact of vinculum of Bio Techs and arts on the human society is immeasurably significant. It shows the public how to create enormous value through trans-boundary scientific studies. Meanwhile, it raises people’s concerns on ethical standards of scientists and artists.

Citations:

1. Gibbs, W. Wayt. “Art as a Form of Life.” Scientific America. N.p.. Web. 9 Nov 2013. <http://www.viewingspace.com/genetics_culture/pages_genetics_culture/gc_w03/davis_j_webarchive/davis_profile_sciam/jd.htm>

2. ”Arts news.” . N.p., 13 2001. Web. 9 Nov 2013. <http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/artsnews-0613.html>.

3. ”Microvenus.” . N.p.. Web. 9 Nov 2013. <http://www.viewingspace.com/genetics_culture/pages_genetics_culture/gc_w03/davis_microvenus.htm>.

4. Davis, Joe . “RuBisCo Stars” and the Riddle of Life.” . N.p.. Web. 9 Nov 2013. <http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=10283>.

5. ”Joe Davis.” Wikipedia. N.p.. Web. 9 Nov 2013. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Davis_(artist)>.