Final Project - SingRiff

My final project is linked for download below, it is a proposal for an application that I call SingRiff. I hope you enjoy it!

Download PDF

The link will last through the evening of August 14th, please download the PDF before then.

Event 3 - LACMA

For my final event, I paid a visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. To be honest, I didn’t find too many exhibits that were explicit combinations of art and technology. That being said, the ones I did find were pretty wild.

Within first walking into the museum, I encountered the massive structure that is Tony Smith’s Smoke. The piece is effectively a set of aluminum hexagons twisted about and supported by tetrahedral columns. Smith used geometric logic to construct and fabricate the structure, but named it “Smoke” to reflect the way that logic seemed to disappear into thin air when one was placed right inside it. I thought this was an incredibly interesting way of using math to visually defy logic and kind of throw the viewer for a loop.

The next extremely cool thing I found was the Light Art exhibit from Thomas Wilfred. The art (referred to as “lumia” by Wilfred) would effectively move and shape in different colors via a television screen. The movement itself was defined and composed by Wilfred himself. I almost saw this as a way of writing songs or music, but using a visual medium instead of sound. One thing I did note was that this form of art was perhaps more open to interpretation than traditional music with lyrics though. For example, during one of the light compositions I was absolutely certain that I saw a depiction of Kermit the Frog.   

Kermit came later.

Lastly, I saw a giant hair comb. This may not appear to have an immediate correlation with the third culture, but then I thought about just how precise the comb was when it came to the dimensions. I’m strongly convinced that the artists had to have taken precise measurements, and then scaled them up by several times in order to achieve the accurate image of the hair comb. That’s about as strong a combination of math and art as it can get. This was also a classic example of pop art, which I’ve always found fascinating due to its irreverence and lack of apparent rhyme or reason behind some of the works.

Works Cited

"Lumia - Thomas Wilfred - Introduction." Lumia - Thomas Wilfred - Introduction. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Aug. 2014.

"Magritte Index." Los Angeles County Museum of Art. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Aug. 2014.

"Original Creators: Thomas Wilfred, The Father Of Multimedia | The Creators Project." The Creators Project. VICE, 18 June 2012. Web. 03 Aug. 2014.

"Smoke." LACMA Collections. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Aug. 2014.

Vogel, Carol. "INSIDE ART." The New York Times. The New York Times, 31 Jan. 2008. Web. 03 Aug. 2014.

Event 2 - Natural History Museum

Last weekend I visited the Natural History Museum. It was my first time at the museum, so I went in not knowing quite what to expect. I was initially greeted by well, natural history. Dinosaur skeletons and animal exhibits made up the first part of the day. Nothing too technology-related there!

No tech here, unless you count the smartphone used to take this photo of me and a triceratops skeleton.

It wasn’t until I hit the Dino Lab that I got to really see technology and history come together. I got to see scientists working to preserve and restore fossils. Temperature control, vacuum sealing techniques and a whole amalgam of preservations techniques that I couldn’t understand were on display here. Getting to see modern technology used to keep the past intact and potentially increase our understanding of the creatures that lived on Earth millions of years ago was something I found incredibly neat. I even see 3-D printing being a potential way of restoring skeleton models when the original article becomes too fragile to handle. Apparently as of only four days ago, a skeleton of King Richard III was 3D printed- surely dinosaurs can’t be too far off, right?

Bone science!

The exhibit that fascinated me the most easily had to have been the Becoming LA feature, a full-blown chunk of the museum dedicated to the history of Los Angeles. I got to take a look at how technology evolved over the course of hundreds of years, and the various landmarks that came to Los Angeles as a result. I thought that one of the most thought-provoking attributes of the exhibit was the lighting of the room. The hall grew gradually brighter and more illuminated as “time” passed in the exhibit, which according to The Los Angeles Daily News, represented time sweeping into bright new technology away from metaphorically darker ages. Seeing wooden buggies be replaced by sleek sedans and even looking at the initial build plan for UCLA was a trip to say the least, and really offered a new perspective on how far we’ve come in such a short amount of time. Dinosaurs may have been stomping about over a hundred million years ago, but we only installed running water in the US two hundred years ago, and now we have electric cars and phones that tell us where to drive them. That’s kind of bananas if you ask me.

A new degree of "vintage cars"
Works Cited

Barrera, Sandra. "Natural History Museum's New Exhibit Tells Story of a City Still 'Becoming Los Angeles'" Los Angeles Daily News. Los Angeles Daily News, 11 July 2013. Web. 30 July 2014.

Ferguson, Dana. "'Becoming Los Angeles' Explains L.A.'s 240-year Journey." Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 16 July 2013. Web. 29 July 2014.

Krassenstein, Brian. "King Richard III’s Entire 3D Printed Skeleton Unveiled For Museum Opening." 3DPrint.com. 3DPrint.com, 25 July 2014. Web. 29 July 2014.

Landi, Ann. "'Becoming Los Angeles' at the Natural History Museum." The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, 20 Aug. 2013. Web. 29 July 2014.

Lee, Elizabeth. "Los Angeles Natural History Museum Redefined." VOA Online. VOA News, 09 Aug. 2013. Web. 29 July 2014.

Week 5 - Nanotechnology + Art

To me, one of the coolest applications of nanotechnology is the idea of making the invisible visible. The fact that we can blow up something that was previously inconspicuous to the human eye, and even apply our own abstractions to it, is something that I think is pretty rad.

One of Chris Orfescu's pieces.

Cris Orfescu’s work was among the first to pioneer the idea of abstract nanoart. He considered the nano-images as jumping off points for his work rather than having the images be the art itself. What I enjoy about Orfescu’s point of view is that he readily admits that his art loses its grasp on fundamental scientific laws, and that he is okay with that as long as his work spurs further discussion and interest in nanotechnology. To me, that’s a wonderful compromise towards advancing the field forward, much like how “sandbox” videogames may not necessarily depict proper physics or engineering, but they allow the audience to dive further into the field and explore. That’s the value that I see in abstract nanoart, and I think that’s the direction that the medium should take moving forward. Otherwise, we’ll probably get bored with standard microscope images.

Origami nanobatteries!

I then stumbled upon research being conducted by Arizona State University. In short, they’re combining nanotech with origami in order to produce better batteries. By folding twenty-five layers of microscopic paper into a dense and tiny package via origami techniques, the researchers were able to store a high amount of energy in an extremely tiny space. This was actually the total reverse of what I was expecting to see happen, which was have nanotechnology and old art forms combine to advance other kinds of tech, in this case electrical. I then also found that researchers in Germany were using carpet-weaving techniques in order to bond boron molecules together in an especially stable fashion. Some chemical engineering applications require immensely strong bonds, and so the combination of art and nanotechnology here has allowed that field to be further advanced. I think it’s sometimes rare to see art used in such direct and practical applications, so it was especially interesting for me to read up on this.

Daniela Caceta's depiction of growth and morphology on the nano-level.

Works Cited

Feder, Barnaby J. "The Art of Nanotech." Bits The Art of Nanotech Comments. The New York Times Company, 25 Jan. 2008. Web. 27 July 2014.

Kullman, Joe. "Art Form, Nanotechnology Combine to Advance Batteries." ASU News. Arizona State University, 18 July 2014. Web. 25 July 2014.

Lovgren, Stefan. "Can Art Make Nanotechnology Easier to Understand?" National Geographic. National Geographic Society, 23 Dec. 2003. Web. 27 July 2014.

"Nanotechnology: The Art of Molecular Carpet-weaving." ScienceDaily. Technische Universitaet Muenchen, 4 Jan. 2012. Web. 28 July 2014.

Tranquilin, Ricardo. "Extraordinary Beauty of the NanoArt World: Photos : DNews." DNews. Discovery Communications LLC, 12 Dec. 2012. Web. 25 July 2014.

Week 5 - Space + Art

The first thing I think of when I put outer space and art together is the television show Cosmos (Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse-Tyson, both are rad in their own right).  What I’ve always found especially beautiful about Cosmos is the way that both Sagan and deGrasse-Tyson found ways to present outer space in a way that made vast emptiness seem grand and majestic to even non-scientists. To me, that’s art in its purest form: taking something apparently simple and unassuming, and presenting in a way that reveals its glory and beauty.

Event 1 - The Hammer Museum

For my first event, I visited the Made in LA exhibition at the Hammer Museum. The exhibits that I found most applicable were the pieces by Devin Kenny and Channing Hansen. Kenny's exhibit featured direct interpretation's of technology's impact on society and the world, while Hansen's was more of a study on how technology can actually direct the shape and form that art approaches.

Week 4 Part 2 - Neuroscience + Art

My knowledge of neuroscience and art working with each other was a foreign concept to me entirely. It’s a field that I am just plain uneducated in, and so I approach this blog post almost entirely blind.