Ann B DESMA9

The term medical technology is deceptive in it's connection to art for two reasons, the first being that technology makes it seem as though this connection is recent, within the past 100 years or so.  The second is that, when looked at on the surface, the medical field and art come across as two disparate fields of study.  What most people don't realize is that medicine and art have a long, overlapping history, dating back to the Renaissance and even to ancient Greece and the Hippocratic Oath.  In fact, during the Renaissance, artists worked hand in hand with doctors who were dissecting the human body in order to accurately capture the body and what the doctors were finding.  Example of anatomical art drawing by Vesalius who worked during the 1500's. This long, intertwined history between medical technology and art continues to this today.  In fact, artists such as Diane Gromala, who used virtual reality and MRI's of her own body to create a 3D journey th...

The advent of mechanization technologies around 1900 greatly changed the landscape of society.  While the most obvious changes came in factories and the production of goods, mechanization also forever changed art.  Mechanization implies technological advances, and it is these so called advances in technology that most changed art.  For example, with digital technology photographs can now be taken and developed in a matter of seconds rather than minutes and hours.  Modern Day Printing Factory where hundreds of copies can be made on these giant machines.   Hundreds of copies of a print can be made with the touch of a button. Even painting, once considered unique and one of kind can be reproduced with relative easy.  These are the changes that Douglas Davis wrote about when stating that mechanization has diminished the concepts of master and copy, as the two have virtually become one.  The processes that made it easy to tel a copy from the original ...

One piece from the Deadwood show. Last week, I had the opportunity to attend a showing of Youjin Chung's Deadwood: Useless, For Use exhibition.  Upon entering the darkened room, the first thing that stood out to me were the stark white walls that drew your attention in the large space.  Further underscoring the main features of the show were bright spotlight type light features that illuminated the different pieces of the show.  Heading in, I did not know what to expect based on the name Deadwood and the flyer for it.  I never would have guess how relevant and timely the show was to the material we covered in the first weeks of class.     The first piece in the exhibit was what look like two black arms with sections attached to them that spin around or rotate.   On the parts that moved, there were various white plastic objects such as miniature heads.  Additionally, all of the wiring which made this work could easily been seen spilling aro...

If you were to ask the average person their thoughts on the connection between math and art, chances are their answer would say something like they aren’t.  People see math as a very left brained logical undertaking while art is seen as a right brain, creative activity.  I will admit that I was one of those people who did not really see much of an overlap between the two.  But, the more I have thought about and gone through the readings, I can see just how wrong I was.  The first thing that really sparked this connection for me was Professor Vesna’s lecture dealing with the golden mean.   Michelangelo's painting on the sistine chapel with lines superimposed  showing the presence of the golden mean I gravitated towards this as it is a concept I was already familiar with and is closer to the math/science world that I am more comfortable in.  Seeing how often the golden mean was used in art and why was the first time I truly saw the immense o...

Immediately upon reading C.P. Snow’s work The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution, I found that he was echoing a sentiment very familiar to me.  When describing the dichotomy between his literary and scientific friends, Snow could easily have been describing the current divide on the UCLA campus rather than what he was experiencing in London in the 1950’s.  The north versus south campus rivalry is perhaps the worst kept secret about life as a UCLA student. Cartoon featured in 2011 Daily Bruin article illustrating the north and south campus rivalry.   This campus divide is not without reason as the classes for north and south campus majors different not only in content but in length, number of meetings per week, number of midterms, and physical location with various buildings on campus used as unofficial markers of the campus divide.  At times, the divide between the two seems immense.  But, it is not unbridgeable and I am proof of that fac...