Event 1: Art and Science

Proof of Attendance

I attended the Art and Science exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art, a collection of work that inspired by the inquisitiveness and ingenuity that scientists and artists share, even though at times their work seems worlds apart. There were several interesting pieces presented, but I’ll be discussing my favorites here.

           

A dragon flapping its way through swathes of color

Observe, Experiment, Question was designed to play with the properties of colored light. The rings of color on the wall demonstrated how primary colors combine to white. There were several light filters, as well as thin figurines, that could be held up against the projector lights to block certain colors from hitting the wall, creating shadows of varying hues. Sporadic giggles could be heard from that corner as kids discovered the figures shaped like knights and dragons, using them and the plastic colored paddles to change the light thrown against the wall. This exhibit was an ingenious way of encouraging viewers to explore the properties of light, replacing physics equations with something interactive and colorful.

Wight's slime mold LCD displays

In Creep, Gail Wight used time-lapse videos and LCD panels to “call attention to the similarities that connect the earth’s diverse life forms,” identifying “sea coral and flower buds and leaf patterns” in the structure of the dyed mold. In doing so, she directly attacks the idea that human being are the “most significant species” on the planet, suggesting instead that other organisms deserve the same scientific and artistic importance normally reserved for humans themselves. In an age where humans destroy coral reefs, rainforests, jungles, and other environments that are the natural habitats of so many animals, the reminder that we are not nearly as significant as we sometimes imagine ourselves to be is a necessary admonition.

The Pendulum Drawing Machine was my personal favorite, a neat setup that uses physics to produce beautiful drawings based on which direction the pendulum is swung in. It’s a bit of a simple project, but I think that it’s the perfect embodiment of why science and art are so important to each other. Because science is usually involved with microscopic entities, its connections to the bigger picture are often lined with technical terms and details. But art is adept at using creativity and visual or auditory effects to simply express what science may use complex equations to explain, and it’s this ability of art to translate science into layman’s terms that I think is incredibly valuable.

The pendulum

Medicine + Technology + Art

At least at a glance, there is nothing particularly artistic about surgery or white medical coats. Yet as reviewed in lectures, both in this course and in others, there is a substantial link between the two.

Da Vinci's rendering of cardiac anatomy

A pyramidal neuron, by Ramon y Cajal

Leonardo da Vinci is famous for his art, but he was also instrumental in the West’s understanding of the human body. Working around religious restrictions, he performed as many dissections and autopsies as he could, putting his artistic abilities into use to draw diagrams of what he uncovered, such as the meninges in the brain. Similarly, Santiago Ramon y Cajal worked in the 19^th century to identify and draw out various types of neurons. Although he had wanted to be an artist as a boy, he used his artistic talents to create detailed diagrams that still appear in textbooks today.

Vesna’s lectures mentioned the Bodyworks displays, which use a process called plastination to preserve bodies or body parts by removing the water and body fat, replacing them with enduring plastics instead. Although I had only thought of these as scientific displays, they also demonstrate the inherent art of the human body – quite literally.  Eduardo Kac’s Bio Art similarly plays upon principles of biology to create art, such as the “GFP Bunny,” which uses a combination of jellyfish and rabbit genes to create a bunny that glows under blue light (GFP refers to the green fluorescent protein often used in microbiology). While I am familiar with the mechanisms of transgenics as used in biology, implementing them in an artistic format is to me both new and fascinating. In another exploration of the possibilities opened up by science, Kevin Warwick implanted chips into his arm that could link his nervous system with a computer, a process that could prove an invaluable asset to the disabled community. The chips themselves are on display.

A BRAINBOW, a new and aptly named neuroimaging technique

As a neuroscience major, I have come into contact with the blurred lines between medicine, art, and technology far more often as of late. Da Vinci and Ramon y Cajal both relied upon artistic prowess to spread their discoveries throughout the scientific community. The hippocampus, a structure of the brain involved in memory and learning, is named rather whimsically for the seahorse its structure is reminiscent of. As does much of medicine, neuroscience relies upon imaging techniques to provide sharper, clearer diagrams of the function of the brain. And these images are invariably beautiful.

Sources:

1.     Jones, Roger. “Leonardo Da Vinci: Anatomist.” The British Journal of General Practice. Royal College of General Practitioners, June 2012. Web.

2.     Bentivoglio, Marina. “Life and Discoveries of Santiago Ramon y Cajal.” Nobelprize.org, 20 April 1998. Web.

3.     Lecture

4.     Kac, Eduardo. “BIO ART.” BIO ART: Transgenic Works and Other Living Pieces. Web.

5.     Warwick, Kevin. “Achievements.” Kevin Warwick, 2000. Web.

Images:

1.     Wells, Francis. “Leonardo Da Vinci and Cardiac Anatomy.” Warwick Neurosciences Society. Web.

2.     Garcia-Lopex, Pablo, Virginia Garcia-Marin, and Miguel Freire. “The Histological Slides and Drawings of Cajal.” Frontiers in Neuroanatomy. Frontiers Research Foundation, 2010. Web.

3.     “Brainbow.” Cell Press, Cell.com. Web.

Robotics + Art

Walter Benjamin

Science and art depend now upon technology for advancement, and as such society has accepted artificial intelligence into the fold, but bouts of apprehension rock the boat, as Vesna elaborated. In 1935, Walter Benjamin voiced his discomfort with rapidly evolving technology: “The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ.” In turn, the danger of technology stems from the failings of society – if these “elemental forces” were to be tamed, the dangers of technology would diminish substantially.

In his TED Talk, Rodney Brooks muses over the popularized Hollywood conception of a robot revolution, likening a robot’s bid for freedom to the delusions of grandeur of a moody teenager. But he warns that in order to produce such machines, humans must abandon the illusion of “special-ness,” accepting that they are not so different from the machines themselves. Similarly, Hod Lipson took the “primordial soup” from which life first evolved and created one for robots, demonstrating an environment in which these machines could evolve, replication being their reward, much as humans do.

The robot Sunny displaying a capacity for emotion in I, Robot

Raleigh Becket piloting a Jaeger (Kaiju-fighting robot) in Pacific Rim

Isaac Asimov borrowed these scientific aspirations – or their spirit, at least – in his I, Robot series, which explored what Asimov called “the Frankenstein complex,” or the fear of robots overthrowing humans, as well as the ethical implications of giving machines sentience and then placing them in a subservient position to humanity. Wall-E, the Pixar film that put young children to sleep in theaters everywhere while their parents and older siblings wept, features a garbage-crunching robot marooned on Earth, who befriends a cockroach to stave off loneliness and help fulfill his desire for love and connection. The film refuses to shy away from the dangers of allowing humans to delegate all their activity to robots – the humans themselves, out in a Star Trek-style spacecraft, live through their holographic screens and experience an alarming decrease in bone density. Yet Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim sang a very different tune. As monstrous Kaiju emerge from the depths of the Pacific Ocean to colonize the planet, humans around the world work together to build giant robots, ones that rely upon a neural interface with a two pilots in order to function.

Although individuals bear differing opinions, it is undeniable that science brings humans and machines closer with every year. It falls to art to both warn of dangers and enjoy the benefits.

Sources:

1.     Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Shocken Books. New York, 1969. Web.

2.     Vesna, Victoria. DESMA 9 Lecture.

3.     Brooks, Rodney. “Robots Will Invade Our Lives.” TED, February 2003. Web.

4.     Lipson, Hod. “Building ‘Self-Aware’ Robots.” TED, March 2007. Web.

5.     “I, Robot.” Encyclopedia.com. HighBeam Research, 2009. Web.

Images:

1.     Naranch, Laurie. “Walter Benjamin and Drilling for Pearls.” Hannah Arendt Center, September 2014. Web.

2.     Proyas, Alex. “I, Robot.” July 2004. Web.

3.     Del Toro, Guillermo. “Pacific Rim.” July 2013, Web.

Math + Art

Theo Jansen's "Strandbeest"

In the fifth grade, my teacher introduced class projects in which we played with perspectives, rulers, and protractors to draw out detailed cityscapes, and I discovered that being a terrible artist didn’t necessarily mean that I was a terrible artist. In the Math + Art section of this course, I could explore this idea in more depth. For one, I had been unaware of how closely tied art and biology were in centuries past. As Vesna related, Al Haytham around 1000 AD related perspective to the science of vision, and ended up defining the scientific method. Similarly, in his TED Talk, Theo Jansen combined physics and electricity with the artistic aspects of proportions and geometry to produce “mechanical beasts” that walk along the ocean, using electricity and wind power to move themselves.

            Perhaps most interesting, I thought, were Pollock’s fractals. These works of art are the shoreline where art and science meet, as mathematical formulas produce figures that repeat themselves in different sizes to create a geometrically and aesthetically beautiful image. Pollock took this mathematical concept and reproduced it in his paintings. His “canvases seemed to create repeating patterns at different size scales – just like fractals.”

Number 14, one of Pollock's famous paintings

            The unfavorable critical response to Pollock’s seems anachronous at first, especially considering the natural predisposition to the type of repetition found in these fractal forms. DNA strands contain repeating segments of purines and pyrimidines, muscles are composed of myofibrils that in turn consist of thick and thin filaments, and so on. Yet critics were repulsed by the concentrated fractals produced by Pollock. James Wise, an adjunct professor of environmental science, suggested that settings “with high fractal dimensions” were ones in which early humans were “most vulnerable, and thus most uneasy,” which could explain these reactions to Pollock’s work.

A visual mix of art and science - a musical rollercoaster
Overall, science and art can provide guidelines and insights to each other’s work. As technology entered the mix (e.g. computer-generated animation replacing hand-drawn images in movies), the mingling between these two disciplines increased. Many forms of art are now impossible without the science to produce them, and much of modern science would be incomprehensible without photographs, drawings, and diagrams to visualize microscopic entities. This relationship extends throughout other fields. Architecture requires aesthetics and mathematics, while musical scales have both a mathematical and artistic element to them.

Sources

Pollock, Jackson. Number 14. Digital Image. Number 14: Gray. Yale University Art Gallery, 2012. Web. 

Vesna, Victoria. "Math and Art." Lecture. 

Jansen, Theo. "Transcript of 'My Creations, a New Form of Life.'" TED, March 2007. Web. 

Jansen, Theo. "Mini Beasts." STRANDBEEST. Theo Jansen, n.d. Web. 

Virtualrepublic. "ZKO Rollercoaster // GREAT EMOTIONS." YouTube, 14 May 2009. Web.