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In both medicine and art, observation and intimate understanding of the human body are key components. In order for an artist to reflect and capture the real world, he or she needs to see all the details of a scene to reproduce it. For example, to accurately represent the human body in its many postures, artists need to observe the body more deeply than the surface. According to Vesna, “we are seeing technology moving us more and more into the direction of noninvasive ways of looking into the anatomy of the human body.” Medical technologies such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Cat Scans (CT) have allowed artists to understand the intricate inner workings of the human body. The saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” is important for artists because learning how to see what you are looking at is more important than knowing everything. Leonardo Da Vinci's anatomical sketches Oliver's family portrait created using MRI slices One artist’s project th...

On Friday, April 21 st , I attended the “Eco-Centric Art + Science: Prophesies and Predictions” symposium. Out of the multitude of speakers at the symposium, the one I found most intriguing was Charles Taylor. His presentation was about the interactive installation, Bird Song Diamond. The purpose of this presentation was to help us experience the world from a bird’s perspective, which in turn, allows us to fit in better and understand the larger part of our environment. When you look into a diamond, you see many different reflections. Charles Taylor’s intentions with using the diamond was that each reflection reflects different disciplines interacting together through shared interests. These disciplines include artificial intelligence, technology, art, and engineering. The part of the presentation that interested me the most was how computer scientists and electrical engineers work with artists to create figures that combine data collected in the environment. More specifically,...

The idea of the robot, according to Vesna, came out of theater as a response to mechanization of labor. In the past, assembly lines were solely manual labor done by humans. Before machines were created, humans were treated as if they were part of the machine. The idea of separating actions into pieces by having each worker do a single part of the production came from Gutenberg’s printing press. This was also reflected in Ford’s assembly line. The advancement of technology and computers was the starting point for replacing humans with machines in assembly lines. Chaplin and Lang’s criticism of the mechanization of workers relayed the fact that workers were being superimposed and replaced by machines. The mechanization of workers reminded me of the movie RoboCop. This movie takes place in the future in old Detroit where crime-rates are at an all time high. The senior president of Omni Consumer Products (OCP), Dick Jones, signs a contract with the mayor of Detroit pr...

Before UCLA, I was torn between majoring in architecture or civil engineering. The artistic complexity of architecture is very impressive, but I am a science guy and I gravitate more towards the numbers. As nerdy as this sounds, the first time I realized how mathematically complex architecture truly is was when I watched a Harry Potter movie. Specifically the scene that showed the transformation of a werewolf during a full moon. In order to show the proportions of the werewolf, they used Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. As Vesna states, math has not only influenced art itself, but it also has influenced popular culture.  In "The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art", Henderson states that "we [artists] are motivated by a desire to complete our subjective experience by inventing new aesthetic and conceptual capabilities." Leonardo Da Vinci has done just that with his idea of human proportionality that has revolutionized the techniq...