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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...

  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...

I always saw photography and painting as very similar in their forms. Certainly there are differences between the two, but I have never been able to articulate it. After this week’s reading, I see that the work of a painter stands at a natural distance from reality whereas the photographer is a more precise and specific view of reality (Benjamin 1935). Looking back at the evolution of art since the rise of industrialization, it’s most interesting to see how mechanization and robots were used in art and popular media. Image 1: Hermes & Modern Communication One of my favorite movies growing up was Baymax. With the setting being the metropolis of San Fransokyo (a hybrid of San Francisco and Tokyo), it is clear that the Japanese cultural fascination with automation and robotics is present. In this sense, I had a fun time understanding how cultural differences between the United States and Japan give rise to differing attitudes towards the place of robots in society. While the Japanese ...

  The first insight I gained was the importance of mathematical formulas in artistic measurements such as dimensions, areas, or volumes. Such a knowledge base is socially relevant, especially when artists are reinterpreting the natural world in their work. One example of this comes from the idea of the vanishing point (Crannell 2019). Growing up, the separation between art and math was so strong that it made it difficult for me to comprehend the “vanishing point theorem”. Today, I see that my mechanical engineering friends who are constantly visualizing 3D objects are using this principle. In lecture, the origins of the vanishing point are further explained through Brunelleschi’s work (Vesna 2012). With the majority of his work being accurate depictions of churches and architecture, it makes sense that he utilized these principles.   Image 1 (Rothner 2001) Another insight that I garnered is the role of art in teaching the scientific world. Alberti’s treatise “On Painting”...

  By highlighting the curriculum and layout of educational institutions as the source of the separation between science and art in “The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution”, CP Snow urges that education in the two fields and understanding their core connection is of immediate value to both the individual and society. He argues that mutual understanding between the two cultures would solve issues much larger to society. In contrast, John Brockman argues that contemporary scientists are the third culture or middleman, stating that such thinkers will replace traditional intellectuals.  Figure 1: Venn Diagram of Arts and Sciences It is my understanding that industrialization and the desire to have specialists in each field that perpetuates the “two culture” world as explained by John Heskett in the text “Industrialization and Design”. I agree with the emergence of a third culture that holistically integrates both artistic and scientific perspectives as the primary path towa...