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Event 3 Blog

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Image 1: Spanish Art Village Scenery This past weekend I visited the Spanish Art Village Center in San Diego, located between the SD Zoo and the SD Natural History Museum. I went with my girlfriend for her birthday and it was a super fun experience. Their studios are open 7 days a week and we got to go to every single shop where there was an artist working on a piece while visitors enjoyed their work and bought stuff as well! It’s one thing to be able to see these incredible pieces and another thing to be able to interact with the actual artists as well. One particular piece that stood out to me here that I thought would be great to highlight for our class was the crystalline glazes that one artist was selling. Her name is Sarah Parent and she works out of her home in Encinitas where she throws and makes all the original art ceramics, then I bisques them and brings them to her studio in San Marcos where she does all of the glazing and firings. Image 2: My Favorite Pieces Her crystallin...
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Week 9: Space + Art

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This week I really enjoyed learning about the interactions between humanity’s interest in space and culture/popular media. I genuinely enjoyed how our introduction video really framed the history of how mankind has always had a fascination with outer space and the world beyond us. To me, the first thing I think about is how much this has changed throughout history with technology and government support enabling humans to travel to space and capture striking images to share with the world (Vesna 2024 Lecture 5). It’s great to see government support for the arts and sciences (Pell 2014) and it is something that we should never take for granted. Something else I wonder however, is how popular art about space and the stars, planets, and comets have changed given that light pollution from cities has covered our skies up. Today, it is so much more difficult to see the stars than it would have been hundreds of years ago. In that way, I wonder if the arts about space were more accurate than th...
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Week 8: Nanotech + Art

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  This week I really enjoyed learning about nanoparticles. My own research in CNSI is based on a core-shell microparticle platform that enables single-cell encapsulation and studies. I thought it was really cool that Dr. Gimzewski dove into the history of nanoparticles and how they have existed in technology and nature for a long time. It’s so interesting to see the science of how making materials into a nanosized portion can yield interesting properties. The one that I found to be most interesting was how inert materials can become catalysts for chemical reactions (Gimzewski 2024 Lecture 3). It was cool to learn about all the different industrial applications of nanoparticles from windows to fabrics. I never knew that nanoparticles were so prevalent in everyday life outside of technology. Image 1: Nanoparticles to Cross Blood-Brain Barrier These properties make it obvious why nanotechnology would be appealing to artists. This week, I also learned that manipulating and rearranging ...
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Event 2 Blog

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Image 1: Grace and I dancing separately together The event that I attended for this assignment was the Love Machines exhibit at the New Wight Gallery in the Broad Arts Center. I had a lot of fun standing around trying not to look silly as I attempted to understand the art pieces that were around me. Everything was super cool and appealing to the senses. The first piece that caught my attention was Grace and I dancing separately together . I’ve always been super interested in machine learning, particularly its applications in medicine (Deo 2015). The idea of teaching a program and then having it “learn” and improve based on your feedback is so human-like that it's really intriguing. I volunteer at the VA and the veterans tell me about pilot machine learning tools that did a non-invasive skin biopsy to help determine whether their growth was malignant or benign. At Cedars-Sinai, I recently connected with a PI that uses machine learning to look for biomarkers of multiple sclerosis. Fo...
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Week 7: Neurosci + Art

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  In our daily lives, we are already associating different neurotransmitters and chemicals with certain behaviors and actions in our body. I enjoyed learning about cocaine and LSD in lecture 3 (Vesna 2024). In CHEM 101: Catalysis in Modern Drug Discovery, I learned about how many drugs originate from plants and other natural products. It’s interesting to think about how drug use has affected artists and their work. Many drugs, if not all drugs, impact the way we see the world by impacting our cognitive function. Thus, they will of course have a role in our production and consumption of artwork.  Image 1: Impulse I became interested in how human cognition has changed over time and found a comprehensive theory known as “Environmental Complexity Thesis” (Godfrey-Smith 2002). ECT describes the environment as posing both challenges and opportunities for cognition to overcome and utilize respectively. It is interesting to view cognition as a “tool-kit” for survival and this aligns w...
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Event 1 Blog

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  Screenshot of online event and registration email for “Yolande Harris Public Lecture” Webinar link: https://ucla.zoom.us/w/96453242859?tk=nxw74XwF0gM5-_NsegLSuEbE4rWNfuxNVnCWw278y3U.DQYAAAAWdQ-v6xZZQU9SRjlIWVJsZU5OaXFDck5KSXlRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA On April 11th, 2024 I attended a public lecture with artist and researcher Yolande Harris. Here, Harris discusses her specific works including satellite sounders, navigating by circles, and displaced sound walks. What I enjoyed about this lecture is that Harris contextualizes her work by first giving an overview of her field: the transformative potential of sound and listening in times of environmental change. Image 1: Navigating By Circles / Sextant In the first outside work that Harris references, Harris highlights the distinctions between the concepts of hearing and listening (Oliveros 2002). The ear hears, the brain listens, and the body senses vibrations. These three basic understandings lay the groundwork for Harr...
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Week 4: MedTech + Art

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  In general, this week has been my favorite so far. To begin, I liked learning about the cell’s cytoskeleton and network of microfilaments again (Ingber 1998). I’m interning at Forcyte Bio, which leverages a high-throughput cell-contractility screening platform for drug discovery in mechanobiology-related diseases. I was interested in this subject because of how artistic it is at a subcellular level. Seeing how interconnected each organelle is and how erroneous movement can cause diseases is so interesting.  Image 1: Cell Contractility Screening It’s incredible how aesthetically pleasing and unique this interconnected network is. It was this same type of work in Dark Skies , which also captivated me. This work delves into the complexity of the shadows and how they are always in motion (Olynyk 2016). The most interesting thing to me is how they respond to human shadows in such an unpredictable way. In this same work, the germ paintings of Fleming were also introduced. Although...
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