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Event#3- The Horse

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This past sunday I attended the event from HOX zodiac honoring the horse and it reminded me of the idea of how we can connect with both art and science through every aspect of our lives. The speakers talked about their functional relationshipes with horses, the stories they had around horses and the functional relationships between humans and horses though horse camp riding, cleaning horses, doing cinematography in movies on horseback, and even the origins of how horses were domesticated. Some of the speakers, including professor Vesna, talked about the idea if so many people belief in something that is unscientific then it becomes real within the context of horsecopes. However, even scientific quantities and hypothesis we make are made up and are only true if taken to heart and adopted by a large enough fraction of the scientific community. An example of this would be the definition of the kilogram.  The kilogram, as definied by the Encyclopedia Britannica, is the basic unit of ma...
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Week 9: Blue World and a Blue Dot

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 One of the most famous images in the world is the Pale Blue Dot taken by Voyager at the suggestion of Carl Sagan which makes us reflect on the history of humanity and the importance of all of our human fights and disagreements from the point of view of the universe                                               https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot But the Pale Blue Dot is not the only famous image that made us reflect on the state of humanity and the world and in fact lots of artistic and scientific imaging is taken from space in order to evaluate worldwide phemomena. A very famous artist and scientist that took incredibly beautiful renderings of sections of Earth was astronaut Chris Hadfield. Chris Hadfield was a decorated general and pilot before commanding two space missions, one of them as station chief to the International Space ...
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Week 8 : I'm short and that is cool and useful

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 I have always been teased about my size. I'm remarkably short, proudly standing at 5ft 1in and with the exact feisty demeanor that fits the stereotype. However it's no wonder I would pick a major like Materials Engineering that deals with manipulating things into the smaller scale, scales unfathomable to the human eye and visible only with specialized technology but that one can use to solve real-world problems to humans.  Dr. Gimzewski's lecture touched on the advent of the bucky ball and the carbon nanotube, but  nanotechnology can also be used to restore objects that come from much earlier by using imaging and characterization techniques from nanotechnology. For example  Nathalie Boucherie, Witold Nowik and Nathalie Pingaud used Raman Spectroscopy, Electron Microscopy and X-Ray Diffraction to chracterize the pigments in Pre-Colombian wall paintings in Peru.   Boucherie, Nathalie, et al. “Characterisation of Materials and Techniques in First Archaeologic...
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Event 2: Color, Art, Motion - Ann McCoy and someone's place in the world

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 I was lucky enough to attend the lecture by Ann McCoy on the works of Otto Piene and his works with light and sculpture  and the influence of the zero movement on more present works.       I was particularly interested on this lecture because upon googling a little bit about Otto Piene and what he did I saw the influence of industrialization and how a lot of the artist's works seemed to come alive in three dimensions. And as Ms. McCoy's lecture went on, the concepts further enraptured my enthusiasm.  At first, when the lecture focused a little bit on the historical influences beside Mr.Piene's work, I got a little confused, especially with the first clip of the "Ballet Mechanique" because there seemed to not be a very conducting line between begginning middle and end of that clipt , and the sculptures I had seen while preparing to watch the event. But it was when the themes of stars, lights and the cosmos came up that my fascination started to increas...
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Week 7: Consciousness, Thoughts, Jung and Piaget

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 "The modern man....alone has a present day consciousness, and he alone finds that the ways of life on those eariler levels have begun to pall upon him"[1] The concept of a present day consciousness and living in the present versus living in your head and on past events is something that has interested me since I was a teenager because of the bouts of rebeliousness I had in attempts to differentiate myself from my parents while simultaneously finding myself acting in new and surprising ways in incredibly similar ways to them. This got me interested through reading an essay on Art,Mind and Brain by H.Gardner on the works of Jean Piaget and his views on adolescense and young adulthood. [2] Piaget talked about stages of development and how children grasp certain concepts at certain ages including the abstract concepts and similarities and differences. And this comes through art. For a lot of history, the parent people in the Catholic World talked about the most was God and this ...
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Week 6: Some very complicated questions about biology and art

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 So this week we approached the topic of life and life as an art medium with all of the ethics and dillemas behind it. And it all started with a cute little bunny who got a protein added from a fluorescent jellyfish that made it glow.                                      Alba the GFP Bunny:  https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16-mutant-bunny/ Alba's story and Eduardo Kac's arguments for how people's preconceptions about life, biology and art made me feel both horrified and inspired before I looked more deeply into them and I would like to analyze the first two because on the surface level I agreed with them but as I researched further I started having some concerns and attempting to gain a more meaningful response to them. But I also don't completely disagree with them, and think that the answer might lie somewhere in the middle. [1] His first argument, to enh...
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Week 4: Structures, The Body, X-Ray and Materials Engineering

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 Throughout my undergraduate degree, I devoted my studies to structural materials and structures in general. The degree's focus on characterization naturally led to X-Ray Diffraction but not as a medical technique or artistic one although the background on x-rays in general as the medical imaging part of it was promptly explained to us by Professor Goorsky in the very first lecture in his class. X-Ray Diffraction, and Diffraction Enhanced Imagery as I would later learn work by bombarding a sample with electrons that are energetic enough to knock out an electron from the inner shells of the atom, as shown in the Bohr model picture below. Electrons would then fall from the valence shell to fill the holes in the inner shells and emit photons of light which we can capture as images or spectra. As a materials engineer, the spectra or intensity graphs offer clues to the composition and structure of crytstalline materials.                 ...
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