Week 7 | Neuroscience + Art

A bust of Apollo,
The Sun God

A bust of Dionysus,
The Party God

In professor Vesna’s lecture, she discusses consciousness and unconsciousness. The Freudian concept of unconscious primal desires (often surfacing in dreams) reminds me of Nietzsche’s Kunsttriebe, or

“artistic impulses”, the Apollonian and Dionysian. Based on their synonymous Greek gods, these are the two sides of out personality, as well as the basis of Greek drama. The Apollonian is the light, the controlled, and the moderated. The Dionysian is the destructive, the passionate, the free, and the excessive. There is debate among philosophers over which is the side that we should embrace, but to me it seems like Apollonian forces control our individual minds, while Dionysian forces control the group mind.

The cognitive areas that
Lumosity claims to train

I was further intrigued by Frazzeto and Anker’s discussion of how neuroscience has permeated various aspects of our society and created a “neuroculture”. The authors mention Nintendo’s Brain Age, but currently there is an even more widespread educational game that promises to “train” your brain. The phone application, Lumosity, was launched in 2007, surpassed 50 million users in 2013, and has continued to grow since. The app consists of 40 mini-games that focus on different mental skills and are tailored to the user’s strengths and weaknesses. Through the Human Cognition Project, Lumosity has been used to study education practices as well as various diseases. ¹

Brainbow

The last thing to truly interest me was the “brainbows.” I don’t really care about the science behind them. I just enjoy looking at them. I immediately paused the lecture and spent about 15 minutes just looking at various photos. They remind me of Jackson Pollock with Vassily Kandinsky’s colors.

Pollock

Kandinsky

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¹ "Completed Research behind Lumosity." The Human Cognition Project. Web. 15 May 2015. <http://www.lumosity.com/hcp/research/completed>.

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"Brainbow." Center for Brain Science. Harvard. Web. 15 May 2015.

Frazzetto, Giovanni, & Anker, Suzanne. "Neuroculture." Nature Reviews : Neuroscience 10 (2009): 815-21. Print.

"Lumosity." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Web. 15 May 2015.

"The Birth of Tragedy." SparkNotes. SparkNotes. Web. 15 May 2015.

Taylor, Nancy. "Apollonian vs. Dionysian Lecture." California State University, Northridge. Web. 15 May 2015.

Vesna,Victoria. “Lecture Part 2: Unconscious Mind and Dreams.” Neuroscience+Art. 15 May, 2015. Lecture.

Week 4 | Medicine+Technology+Art

Body Worlds Heart

I used to be pre-med. The subject matter fascinated me and I wanted to help people. However, the coursework was so rigid; even our “experiments” were simply following instructions to re-create someone else’s work. Even though I left the field, I am still fascinated by the human body. The Hippocratic Oath says “I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science.” Having visited Body Worlds twice, I can definitely agree with this statement. 

The Spiral Staircase at Chambord

Ingber’s discussion of the cell as architectural brought to mind one of my favorite places in the world, the Chateau de Chambord, and its connection with one of my favorite complex shapes, the double helix. Leonardo da Vinci designed the staircase at Chambord to be intertwined helix shapes, where two people can enter through opposite doors at the bottom and never meet up again until they reach the top. I was not aware, however, of the use of the double helix in modern art. During the debate over the Human Genome Project, the image of the double helix was presented in the media often and spoke to many artists. Mark Swartz says that, although DNA is completely organic, its image is not like that of a flower or spider web which “can inspire an artist without carrying much cultural baggage.” The double helix is a statement.

"Tickle" by Driessens & Verstappen, which feels
like a caterpillar crawling on your skin

I enjoyed looking at this art, but the use of art as a visual medium is restrictive because we have dozens of other senses. Smell can, as much as sight, trigger deep emotions and memories. The teamLab Floating Flower Garden discussed in lecture is one such use of smells in art. Eduardo Kac also uses scent with his Osmobox series, in which all of the pieces look identically indistinct and yet each release a different scent. Touch is another strong sense and I am equally intrigued by Driessens and Verstappen’s tickle robot series, in which tiny robots attempt to recreate the feel of organic movement, such as a blade of grass in the wind or a caterpillar. I would love to experience art that played with balance or time perception.

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"Chateau De Chambord - Leonardo Da Vinci." Travel France Online. 6 June 2013. Web. 26 Apr. 2015. <http://www.travelfranceonline.com/chateau-de-chambord-leonardo-da-vinci/>.

Ingber, Donald E. "The Architecture of Life." Scientific American (1998): 48-57. Print.

Kac, Eduardo. "Osmoboxes." Kac Web. Web. 26 Apr. 2015. <http://www.ekac.org/osmobox.html>.

Swartz, Mark. "Beauty of the Double Helix." The Chicago Reader 21 Sept. 1995, Art Review sec. Print.

"Tickle Robots, Spear, Tickle, Tickle Salon, Driessens & Verstappen." Tickle Robots, Spear, Tickle, Tickle Salon, Driessens & Verstappen. Web. 26 Apr. 2015. <http://notnot.home.xs4all.nl/ticklerobots/ticklerobots.html>.

Tyson, Peter. "The Hippocratic Oath Today." PBS. PBS, 27 Mar. 2001. Web. 26 Apr. 2015. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/hippocratic-oath-today.html>.

Week 3 | Robotics + Art | Blog Assignment

BeBionic markets itself as "the world's most advanced
prosthetic hand".

I've always been interested in the concept of cyborgs. It is easily arguable that we are currently living in the time of cyborgs. Pacemakers and mechanical limbs are just a couple ways that humans are being integrated with machinery. Not too long ago, the deaf community was afraid of cochlear implants for fear that it would turn their children into robots ("The Sound and the Fury" is a great film on this subject.) 

Tinder is a very popular mobile matchmaking app.

But it goes beyond the internal implants. Every single one of us has an external brain in our pocket. We use our phones to communicate, create, process information, and even form romantic relationships. This last concept is very interesting to current filmmakers, which is why we have films such as “Her.” But a film that I feel truly expresses the extent to which technology has taken romance out of the hands of people and into the control of a giant database is “TiMER,” in which a company implants people with a timer that counts down until the exact moment that they meet their soul mate (or at least the person that a complicated algorithm thinks is their soul mate).

Rob and Nick Carter's Replica of
Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers.

Another concept that really piqued my interest was how Benjamin differentiates the painter from the photographer in their distance from the object. In the modern era of the internet, physical distances are trivial for creation. A programmer can convert an entire physical object (be it an existing one that he/she would like to replicate or one from his/her imagination) into lines of code that can be emailed across the globe and 3D-printed. In this way, the art of sculpting has been morphed from one of the most hands-on forms of artistic expression into the most detached where you may never even see your creation in person. As the selection of materials available for 3d printing expands, so do the pathways for both innovation and expression. 

Sources

Benjamin, Walter, and J. A. Underwood. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Print.

Brooks, Katherine. "14 Ways 3D Printing Has Changed The Art World." Huffington Post. 30 June 2014. Web. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/30/3d-printing-art_n_5534459.html>.

Robotics + Art | Lecture. Perf. Victoria Vesna. UC Online, 2012. Film.

"TiMER." IMDb. IMDb.com. Web. 18 Apr. 2015. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1179794/>.

We Are All Cyborgs Now. Perf. Amber Case. TEDTalks, 2012. Film.

Week 2 | Math + Art | Blog Assignment

Vanishing point in Van Gogh's "The bedroom"

As Dr. Vesna points out in her lecture, artists need an understanding of geometry and mathematical formulas to represent human bodies and other objects. 3D geometry is necessary to create realistic forms and triangles are necessary to represent depth. However, I really enjoyed the thought experiment that the Henderson article sent me on. 

A square and a sphere from Flatland

Some modern art and nearly all contemporary art taps into this unconventional form of geometry beyond the three dimensions of our everyday world. As in Flatland, the discovery of a “higher” dimension inspires new ways of thinking. Whether it is time or “deep space”, the fourth dimension is an example of how mathematics directly influences art.

An Escher tessellation that makes the viewer
question whether the fish or the bird is the foreground.

As a psychologist, I love how explicitly mathematical art can give insight into how the human brain works. The ambiguity in works by artists such as M. C. Escher is a wonderful resource for studying cognitions. Whether it is processing “impossible” objects or discerning figure from ground, this type of art is extremely helpful to cognitive psychology.

One of my photographs with the golden spiral.

As a photographer, I never cease to be amazed at how perfectly some of my favorite shots involve mathematical formulas. I enjoy playing with perspective and depth, and I also employ the golden ratio when setting up many of my photos. However, I am even more intrigued when I find a shot that feels implicitly unique and discover that it completely disobeys the ratio.

Abbott, Edwin Abbott. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Seely & Co., 1884.

Frantz, Marc. "Vanishing Points and Looking at Art." VIEWPOINTS: Mathematical Perspective and Fractal Geometry in Art.

Henderson, Linda D. "The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art: Conclusion." Leonardo 17.3 (1984): 205-10.

Smith, B. Sidney. "The Mathematical Art of M.C. Escher." Platonic Realms Minitexts. Platonic Realms, 13 Mar 2014.

Vesna, Victoria. "Math + Art." Web.

Week 1 | Two Cultures | Blog Assignment

      CP Snow discusses the concept of “Two Cultures”: the literary and the scientific. He both defines the dichotomy and criticizes it. No individual is so well-defined as just a scientist or a literary intellectual. Many people are a blend and even more have been so marginalized by the education system that they feel they fit neither category (as explained in the RSA video). Wilson argues that art and science are indistinguishably linked and I agree. Artistic innovation follows scientific innovation (e.g. painting took on a new style once photography emerged as a way to capture life as it is commonly seen) and even in school, we use art projects to learn science (e.g. the famous styrofoam ball cell models).

"Bar at the Folies-Bergère" - Edouard Manet

Styrofoam Ball Cell Model

    

     I entered UCLA as a MIMG major, which is undeniably scientific. But in my third year I switched to psychology, which many consider a sort of “no man’s land.” I am constantly defending my major from students in the “harder” sciences because psychology is in the Life Sciences department, is located in South Campus, and requires extensive knowledge of biochemistry and neuroanatomy. While I do feel like a kid playing dress-up when I wear my white lab coat in the lab I work in, psychology is science. It simply deals with more abstract concepts and required intense creative thinking. Much like art, the wildest ideas in psychology are often the best.

Simplified Neuroanatomy

      In the Pinker interview, he pointed out a concept that has always bothered me: that it is fine to know nothing of science. I personally do commit the side-eye when someone makes an obviously incorrect comment about art or literature, because I was blessed growing up with ballet, opera, theater, and art. But I also abhor when other makes comments such as “I was never really good at that science stuff.” I feel that kids are too easily separated into “scientific-minded” and “not.” Everyone has the capacity to be a scientist. Science is art and no one walks around with only half a brain (ignoring the obvious incorrectness of the right-brain/left-brain fallacy.)

An Anatomically-Incorrect Brain

Sources:

Graham-Rowe, Duncan. "John Brockman: Matchmaking with Science and Art." Wired 3 Feb. 2011. Web.

"What Is Modern Art?" MoMA Learning. Museum of Modern Art, Web.

RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms. Youtube. The Royal Society of Arts, 14 Oct. 2010. Web.

Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Cambridge UP, 1959. Print.

Wilson, Stephen. Myths and Confusions in Thinking about Art/Science/Technology. 2000. College Art Association Meetings, NYC.