Midterm Project Link

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0rLribFznyQOUxiMmVIRlVrWGM/view?usp=sharing

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Week 6: BioTech + Art

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This week’s topic, biotechnology and art, involves more recent and controversial art, as living organisms are used as an artistic medium.  I found one of the more fascinating works of art discussed this week to be that of Stelarc, the man with a “third ear” implanted into his arm.  While the implanted ear was made of material commonly used in plastic surgery, his own tissue has morphed with the ear so that it is now a fully living part of his body (McCafferty).  In the future, Stelarc wishes to have a small microphone inserted into his “third ear” so that the entire world can listen in, with this worldwide connection being the artistic value that Stelarc sees in his implanted “masterpiece” (DailyMail.co.uk). Stelarc's Third Ear The more controversial side of BioArt comes in the genetic modification of living species, such as Kathy High’s work with transgenic mice.  High was able to genetically modify certain mice by including foreign genetic material and watch the geneti
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Week 8: Nanotechnology + Art

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Newman's Microscopic Text This week’s lectures and readings focused on the history of nanotechnology and its recently increasing applications.  One of the more fascinating things that I thought we covered in the lectures was the two competitions offered by Richard Feynman for the advancement of nanotechnology in 1959.  The first was to build a miniature motor that could fit inside of a 1/64 inch cube and the second was to reduce the size of a page of a book to a 1/25,000 linear scale (CalTech.edu).  The first cash prize of $1,000 was awarded relatively quickly to William McLellan in 1960, while the second prize took 25 years until Tom Newman completed the task using an electron beam in 1985 (Kornei).  Such advancements in nanotechnology have obvious application in the artistic and literary world, with new art being created out of nanostructures. I also found the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope in the 1980s to be particularly interesting within the field of n
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Week 3: Robotics + Art

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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
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