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In this blogpost, I would like to focus on the topic of plastic surgery. In her lecture, Victoria Vesna talked about the history of plastic surgery. She mentioned how plastic surgery was used after World War I to repair faces. An example of that is seen today with the facial reconstruction (and one of the first face transplants) of Patrick Hardison, a fire fighter who was severely burned. His face has been completely reconstructed, showing the breadth of medical technology and innovation. Vesna also introduced us to ORLAN. ORLAN is an artist who considers her body to be a medium, like a readymade in some ways. She has undergone many plastic surgeries as performance art. In her documentary ‘Carnal Art’ she states: ‘My work is a critique on beauty and how cosmetic surgery is usually used’. She states that she also sees similarities between Catholic/ Church art and plastic surgery, the surgeon being a minister and the light shining on her face similar to the light shining on saints...

For this blogpost I decided to look into robotics and art. One example of robotics and art is the Otamatone by Maywa Denki. Maywa Denki considers themselves to be an art unit and yet the Otamatone, a musical instrument with a cute, humid face is mass produced.  This relates to Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction where he says: ‘To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.’ The Otamatone was not meant to be only one artwork, but was designed specifically so that everyone could have and afford one. Another example where we see reproduction of robotics is in the Disney movie Wall-E.  At the beginning of the movie, we see Wall-E moving around broken versions of himself. Wall-E is a compassionate, humanoid robot who immediately pulls on heartstrings, and in the opening few minutes of the movie we see that he was mass produced. What we also see in the m...

On Thursday April 13th I attended Dead Wood by Youjin Chung. The event featured two pieces. One was a mechanical contraption consisting of black robotic arms and white 3D printed pieces.   I’ve never seen an art piece in person that contained 3D printed elements, and that was very interesting to me. It showed to me an aspect of art and science intertwining, especially considering the entire piece of robotic. The piece didn’t really do anything productive, it just spun and moved, which showed to me how science can be used for play and does not always need to produce a tangible end product. The second piece was a video game with a controller on the higher level that controlled the screen projected onto the back of the EDA. I asked Youjin Chung what her inspiration was, and she said she was inspired by an article she read about a group of people who destroyed a hitchhiking robot. The video game was meant to explore our obsession with killing technology. This is also related...

In this week’s lesson, Victoria Vesna taught us about zero, perspective and the golden ratio/ golden section.  We learned that zero first appears in 650AD, and it was not until the 1600’s that it was used in the West. It was discovered by Brahmagupta. The ideas of perspective also existed in the East before it made its way to the West. It was discovered by al-Haytham. Giotto used an intuitive form of perspective, and the first painting showing true perspective was ‘Trinity’ by Massaccio. With the golden ratio, we learned it’s greek name phi, that the Egyptians used the the Golden ratio when building the Pyramids, the architects of the Parthenon used it, and Leonardo Da Vinci used it in his drawing of the Vitruvian Man. Mondrian and Le Corbusier also used the golden ratio. A piece that helped me understand more about Vanishing Points was Marc Frantz’ ‘Vanishing Points and Looking at Art’. I learned about how one-point perspective only has one vanishing point, and that where you vie...

Victoria Vesna’s perspective in the article we read is that there is already a third culture emerging of scientific artists. C. P. Snow’s perspective is that there are two cultures and they disagree with each other but should not as they are both ‘intellectuals’. He also believed we needed to change our education system, noting the British, Russian, and American education systems. I grew up in England, and during our GCSEs (higher exams that take place aged 15-17) the maths and sciences were mandatory, whilst english, history and art were supplementary. I consider what I do at UCLA to be part of the third culture as described by Vesna, but I also belong to the third culture described by Kelly, the ‘nerd culture’. I believe the design media arts major is part of the third culture, and I see examples of Kelly’s ‘nerd culture’ every time I’m online, that bring to life both art and science.  Bloom by John Edmark. Edmark 3D prints sculptures he designed using math and Fibonacci's...