kennypDESMA9

The most obvious evidence of art in the medical world comes in the form of anatomy, where artists and medical professionals have worked rigorously on correctly identifying the internal structure and makeup within different species.  This overall structure includes muscles, bones, organs, and ligaments.  While doctors have performed the experiments required to correctly identify the overall structure of bodies, artists are required to actually realistically and accurately represent what doctors have proven from experiment.  One example of such artistic reconstruction can be seen at the Bodies Exhibit, which displays 13 whole body human specimens at the Luxor in Las Vegas (Luxor.com).   Bodies Exhibit The advent of computational technological advancement has allowed for further reconstruction and imaging of internal body structure.  Some examples of such imaging includes X-Rays, MRIs, and CAT scans.  I, personally, have undergone dozens of X-Rays and MRIs during my lifetime, a

This past week I was fortunate enough to attend one of Linda Weintraub’s (seen below) Art/Sci Eco-centric Art workshops.  This workshop focused on our more primitive past and the usage of our senses with respect to objects found in nature.  Specifically, the objects that Linda had on display were all found on her walks through the woods surrounding her home in New York.  Prior to entering the workshop exhibit, Linda expressed to us how she wanted us to focus more innately on our keen senses of touch and smell, without talking. Her “Welcome to My Woods” exhibit had several different themes, including volume, mass and weight, scent, form and beauty, and touch (with one’s feet).  Each of the specific objects, or collections of objects, had specific instructions as a guide to how one may go about inspecting them in order to really grasp the natural state that these items came from.  The instructional guide for the branches and rhizomes can be seen to the right. My

Since the dawn of industrialization, what we perceive as art has changed dramatically, thanks ultimately to mechanization.  The explosion of personal computers and Moore’s Law in the latter half of the 20 th century further drove mechanization and computation to set the stage for a new type of masterpiece: robotics (Intel.com). Vitruvian Man What was once reserved for sculptures and paintings, humanoids became a new focus of idealized beauty.  During the Renaissance, artists such as Leonardo da Vinci focused on this idealized, perfect human form, as seen in his Vitruvian Man; but recently, humanoid designers have taken up this focus on realistic human idealization (Stanford.edu).  Dr. Dennis Hong, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UCLA, has succeeded in this blending of art and science into CHARLI, “the United States’ first full-size autonomous human robot” (Hong).  CHARLI is able to walk in any direction, as well as kick, and perform several upper body t

In Edwin Abbott’s Flatland , Abbott describes that the shapes of an object that we optically perceive change with one’s perspective.  He specifically uses an example of a penny sitting upon a table to express how it could be seen as a line, circle, or oval, depending upon the viewer’s angle (Abbott 2).  While Abbott’s view is certainly correct, he is not the first to have conceived the idea of perspective, or linear perspective, in art.  Mathematics really began to influence the work of artists during the Renaissance, with artists intensely studying optics and light.  Brunelleschi, in particular, utilized basic geometry in the forms of triangles and rectangles, and embraced perspective (PBS.org).  Leonardo da Vinci further built upon Brunelleschi’s principles of perspective and geometry, as can be seen by the uses of vertices and a vanishing point in The Last Supper (LeonardoDaVinci.net, Frantz). The idea of math in art by utilizing linear perspective and simple geometr

This week’s reading focused on C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures and Scientific Revolution , in which Snow defines two different types of people based on his own real-world observations—scientists and literary intellectuals/artists (Snow, 1961).  His work goes into detail describing how these two groups have no interdependence and have trouble interacting with members of the opposing group, as he recalls specific interactions with individuals of the two groups, even citing some of these individuals’ specific names.  Victoria Vesna’s article comes from a perspective of research and review of Snow’s writing, providing background and summarizing some of Snow’s key points.  She states that “the curricula of schools and universities are the source of this problem” and that “the first reported use of the (term) scientist…was proposed as an analogy to the term artist” (Vesna, 2001).     I do see strong evidence of the two cultures here at UCLA, particularly with the split between Nort