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Week 9 - Space + Art

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In this week ’ s material the idea that I think the most interesting is the Cosmic Dancer . Created by Arthur Woods, the Cosmic Dancer  is a 3-D sculpture with painting on its surface, and was launched into the space on the Russian Mir space station in 1993. Astronauts Alexander Polischuk and Gennadi Manakov spent some time with the sculpture, and become the only two human beings who had a chance to view it in space. Under zero gravity in the outer space the sculpture was allowed to float and spin freely, which makes it observable from every angle. The idea of a sculpture without a resting point or given angle for observation is quite stunning, in that it challenges the ordinary procedure of creating a sculpture while determining how the sculpture is to be perceived at the same time.   The surface of the sculpture is painted in a way that the color and lines mimics the motion of subatomic particles, thus making the sculpture a metaphor of recent discoveries in physics. Bef
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Event 3 - Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous

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Last week I attended the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous . Several speakers presented their own work on the combination of art and science. Among them, the one that interests me the most is artist Behnaz Farahi. Farahi ’ s artworks can be categorized into two major categories. Some of her works, including The Living, Breathing Wall  (2013), The Breathing Wall II  (2014) and Aurora  (2016), explore the interactive relationships between human and the surrounding environment; other works, such as Synapse  (2015), Ruff  (2015)and Caress of the Gaze (2015), have focuses on the wearable devices as extensions of the human body. The Living, Breathing Wall  (2013) is an installation of a wall that could move with respond to human action and human language. It is clear, both from the title of the artwork and from the installation itself, that the artist aims to create a parallelism between the organic human body and the surrounding environment. The surface of the wall is
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Week 8 - NanoTech + Art

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    In this week's material the artwork that interests me the most is the Nano Mandala created by Professor Victoria Vesna. The artwork consists of a video projected to a disk of sand. The video depicts a recursive scale of view ranging from the nano-structure of a grain of sand to the entire graph of a mandala pattern. The video can be watched below:     The Nano Mandala (from YouTube)     What I would like to investigate further into the artwork is the resonance between eastern and western culture about one common philosophical idea it conveys. The images of nano-structure of a grain of sand clearly makes use of modern science, which originates from the western culture. On the other hand, the symbol of Mandala in Buddhism is a famous representation of a universe in the eastern culture. Thangka painting of Mandala     Also, it is apparent that the artwork aims to establish a link between things of the extremely small scale and the extremely large scale, whi
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Week 7 - Neurosci + Art

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In this week's material the idea that interests me the most is Roger Penrose's claim that the human consciousness must contain some non-computable ingredients. The idea of the world not being real can be traced back in the ancient times, from Zhuangzi's Dream of Butterflies in the eastern culture to Descartes' external world skepticism. Due to the advancement in modern technology, especially in the invention and rapid progression of computers, a lot of people have hypothesized further that our own consciousness may well not be true but is oply part of a computer simulation. Roger Penrose refutes the idea by pointing out that due to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem our consciousness cannot be part of a computer simulation. Roger Penrose Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem merely states that in any logic system of the first or higher order that permits the representation of Peano Axioms (which defines natural numbers), there must be some statement compati
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Week 6 - BioTech + Art

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In this week ’ s material the topic that interests me the most is the Workhouse Zoo project initiated by Adam Zaretsky and Julia Reodica. The project explored issues associated with biotechnology in various aspects. Adam Zaretsky The Workhouse Zoo project is an 8 foot by 8 foot biosecure container which contains ten different types of living organisms that forms a small biosphere. The living organisms include bacteria, yeast, worms, fruit flies, frogs, mice, fish, and human beings (which is Adam Zaretsky himself). The project was open to public and displayed on a 24 hours webcam, thus becoming part of the mass media comsumption. Information about the origins and behaviors of the displayed species were given to educate the public, and Adam Zaretsky himself worked throughout the time to feed the animals and keep the entire biosphere running.   The project have various other goals besides public education. On the artistic level Adam Zaretsky ’ s presence can be regarded as
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Event 2 - Mnemoawari

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This Tuesday I attended Eli Joteva's show Mnemoawari . The title of the show is composed of two words: mnemo, which means memory, and awari, which means awareness. Since the show overall is pretty abstractive, my feelings and understandings of the show are only personal, and may not accurately reflect the author's intentions of creating it. The Event Outline The show is consisted of four parts. The first part of the show is a futuristic style painting of a ball full of light , titled "The Dream Auger".  Dreams have surreal powers over the reality, and the light ball appears to me to have spiritual essence. It is also worth noting that the subtitle of this part of the show is “ Can you remember a future? ” . W hile a "memory about the future" seems contradictory in itself, the idea behind such concep t can be justified by a view of reversing the time axis which all of us experiences. Such a view could also guide us to understand other parts of the sh
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Midterm Project

Link to Midterm Project
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