Joana_Lacerda_desma9

 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 ...

 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...

 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...

 "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 ...

 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...