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.

Week 4 Part 1 - Biotech + Art

To me, BioArt has always been this weird, fictional thing that I’ve seen in comics, videogames and movies. Watching some of the lecture videos and seeing the more immediate applications kind of grounded the idea to Earth for me, and it’s been a bit crazy just seeing all the places that people are willing to take their bodies for the sake of art. To be honest, it isn’t something that I fully understand on an artistic level, but it is intriguing to study the artists’ motivations and thoughts behind their work.

One of the most infamous and earliest examples of BioArt- the earmouse.

Week 3 - Medicine + Technology + Art

The integration of medical technology and art is something that has never been immediately obvious to me. I’ve always viewed medicine as a very dry field, only serving to accomplish its mission of healing others without care for aesthetic beauty.

Week 2 - Math + Art/Robotics + Art

For me—a music lover and an audio engineer—the influence of math on art is immediately apparent as soon as sound hits my ears. Even when you split the creative and technical side of music, math continues to worm its way into the core of what we hear.