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.