Week 11 - Science Week:
1. Leftovers / The Orienting Stone, D. Graham Burnett, Cabinet Magazine, 2008
2. Art That Transfigures Science, Alan Lightman, The New York Times, 2003.
3. You Can Blame The Bugs, Sharon Begley, Newsweek, 2008
4. Real Rhapsody In Blue, Anne Underwood, Newsweek, 2006
5. The Human Brain: Marvel or Mess, Sharon Begley, Newsweek,2007.
6. Tom Shannon's anti-gravity sculpture (video above)
Optional additional readings on the topic:
1. A Creature of New Habits, New York Times, 2008.
2. A Conversation with TODT: Flexible Logistics, Dominick Lombardi, Sculpture Magazine, 2007.
3. Why Pop Culture Loves the 'Butterfly Effect,' and Gets it Totally Wrong, Peter Dizikes, Boston Globe, 2008. (followed by some comments from Gerard Brown)
4. The Science of Gaydar, David France, New York Magazine, 2007
5. Does Plastic Art Last Forever?, Slate, Kean, 2009
6. Click here to listen to an interesting hypothesis linking artists, cat poop and a rise in cases of Schizophrenia. (and everyone should love Radio Lab anyway!)
Check out one of my favorite spots!
EYE OF SCIENCE
Leftovers/ The Orienting Stone
ReplyDeleteWhile the images of the different kinds of fish where interesting I don’t see the connection it has to art. When I first looked through the article, just to see the images, I thought that they were the inner ear parts that that writer was talking about.
Art That Transfigures Science
By Alan Lightman
I don’t know if I would agree with this article. I would take this as some artists like to paint, draw, or sculpt scientific things. Just like some artists like to depict myths, biblical scenes, still lives, or whatever. I don’t see how these people are any different from other artists just picking subject to create into art.
Real Rhapsody In Blue
By Anne Underwood
This is interesting; being able to see colors with number or sounds. Thats really neat. I would think that someone would be making something that this up, but that study makes sense; that people that have Synesthesia would see the different numbers right away.
The Human Brain: Marvel or Mess
By Sharon Begley
I’m not a scientist but I do not agree with Liden. I don’t think that they Brain is a “cobbled-together mess.” The Brain is an intricate system and every part has a prepose. If it didn’t then all animals would be the same, we all would be able to talk about create; so I would not agree with comparing a mouse’s brain to a human brian.
Tom Shannon’s anti-gravity sculpture
Out of all the articles this has a good mess of science and art. He’s subject matter combined with he’s materials and he’s usage of those materials is great.
Kelly
ReplyDeletescience
I like Tom Shannons narrations. I find him curious.
MORE CURIOUS HOWEVER is synesthesia. I think its the coolest damn thing. My friend associates colors with numbers, like a green is a 2, red is a 5. So cool. Ive nevr heard of sound relating to color like that but i love it. I've always wanted to know about it.
sience is totally whack and blows my mind all the time. i cant understand it. i find it incredibly frustrating but i love it. i don't quite know what to say about the art transfiguring science but i liked it.
I like the thought of seeing relationships as opposed to classifications.
I don't know what to make of the article about otholiths, i mean, it seems pretty interesting i guess.
Human brain marvel or mess cracked me up. I liked it, but only because it took it lightly, had I not thought the use of language was hilarious I would be furious. The brain is amazing.
The otolith article reminds me how generative a little research can be—
ReplyDeleteThe forms would be beautiful motifs in artwork—they are already abstract and of visual interest.
The notion that something in science can explain a concept so massive and far-reaching as our self-centered relationship to time, space, and community is WAY cool. Is this not what causes us to feel justified in our acts of creativity? The importance of the self is ground for self-expression, no? So are otoliths one of the most basic reasons why I make art?
Thoughts on synesthesia article
Reminds me of a couple of things.
one- I have associated words and colors for as long as I can remember. But I’m not a synesthete, just an overly analytical creative person always looking for less than obvious associations. It started when I associated oranges with vitamin C, forever changing the hue of that letter when it came up in the alphabet, multiple choice tests, and my high school lunch schedule. B is green, but I’ve forgotten the origin of that idea. I think the same principle is why abstraction has always been easy for me. Just figure out how two unlike things are related, and BINGO, I’m totally comfortable making a piece about how Gertrude Stein broke into 107 rafts and began a relief effort in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina struck. And that is just the beginning of all the association can generate, so my attention span is pretty sizeable.
two-I think if people were more comfortable with exploring these kinds of associations (i.e. sounding a bit touched in the head) we wouldn’t approach life with such a limited cache of options. Free association can lead to a lot of discovery, including solutions that logic could never produce—happy accidents. Maybe that is why synesthetes tend to be successful in the arts—something that requires originality—the ability to manipulate pre-existing structures, rules, or realities or transcend them completely, if you believe that is possible.
Alan Lightman’s article makes sense to me. I have avoided asserting answers in my art for a long time and explained this tendency as my desire to not preach. I also think that causing a viewer to ask a question yields a ripple far more powerful than giving them a statement with which they only need to decide whether or not they agree. For these reasons I have not entered the field of science, though I loosely refer to science often in my artwork—to me it remains mysterious and beautiful.
The sculpture by Tom Shannon highlighted in the TED talk seems a good application of Lightman’s idea of science harmonizing with art. While the artist seems to want to explain every symbolic ratio and engineered aspect of his work, he does not manage to explain why he felt compelled to use science to build a functionless beautiful object in the first place. So the area where art will always remain mysterious is preserved. There can always be a how and a what but why is much more difficult. When the why IS addressed, it usually feels a little contrived, because, really, what human can be trusted to have the perspective to answer why accurately?
Sophie
ReplyDeleteI love science and I loved reading these articles. I feel like this just shows how everything is truly connected in some way or another. Science and art and life. I think one major relating factor between science and art is definitely imagination, creativity and new and different perspectives. Science provides possible answers and theories and art loves to talk about them. It’s a match made in heaven. If I didn’t have thousands of dollars of debt after this school I would definitely get a degree in astrophysics.
Brianna Barton
ReplyDeleteNovember 30, 2010
Critical Discourse
I see the scientist and the artist on a parallel mission or path. Both are unsatisfied with the answers that the present has provided them, and both search for something that can propel their society forward. Alan Lightman’s article, “Art that Transfigures Science,” hints at this. He discusses how art and science can feed off of each other. I think art can bring an emotion, and a life, to science—a world dictated by numbers and proof.
I found Tom Shannon’s work fascinating. Just the idea of using a material’s own properties to create an aesthetically interesting experience is rewarding enough, but then his later applications of potential ideas are really incredible.
Synesthesia—I’ve wanted it since the sixth grade. Ever since Barbara Walters interviewed a man who broke up with his girlfriend because her name tasted like sawdust, I’ve wanted to experience the crossing of senses (of course certain things have made that temporarily possible, but now is neither the time nor the place). I want it, I don’t have it, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore.
“You Can Blame the Bugs” reminded me a great deal of Dr. Jarrod Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, which looks at how the location of a civilization or culture lead to their ability to thrive and expand. Essentially, his argument is that certain parts of the world provided crops that could be harvested regularly, and also provided animals that were easily domesticated, allowing for the Agricultural Revolution which lead to complex civilizations, etc. This article offers another interesting possibility, which sheds light on the idea that much of our deep-seeded thinking boils down to where our society developed.
Sharon Begley’s article, “The Human Brain: Marvel or Mess?” is an insightful look at the haphazard brain—it really is a mess of instinct and intellect. Her article focuses on our visual and narrative perception of the world. Whether we are scanning a room, or dreaming in bed, much of our brains’ functions occur on a very reptilian level. It is just another refreshing reminder that we are not, as we like to believe, masters of the universe.
The idea of a stone representing the universe is quite a metaphor within itself. It is, essentially, a comparison of what the earth is: a giant rock within it containing many small parts which function in symbiosis. Maybe this would seem a naïve belief, but I think it is an acute human perception of something much bigger, rationalized in an object that is tangible. To make things tangible is how we can understand them.
ReplyDeleteTo illustrate the restriction of air from a breathing being is much the same as a portrayal of what we as humans are doing to ourselves. By putting ourselves in impossible social standards where we are sometimes unable to thrive and relate to each other, we are doing the same thing. I see this all the time in people struggling to just exist, but finding it difficult among all the expectations we put on ourselves and each other.
I was just having a conversation with friends about isolation and individualizing one’s self and how this is aliening, and often depressing. I admire the ancient Asian perspectives of seeing the whole rather than seeing the specific, and to me this is why their art, culture, and history seems much more practical and considerate to me.
I hate to read the phrase “overactive imaginations”: I believe, also, that there are many truths in experience, and we cannot always understand another’s perception of something. If there is anything I have learned in this life, it is that each comes to their own understanding of what is, and I cannot dispute that because I have not lived what they have, and therefore, all experiences to me are valid; much like seeing music and numbers as colors. It doesn’t take scientist to tell me that.
I think what our culture has largely done is ignore our primitive or primal brain functions. This is why we do things contrary to our nature: gorge when we are not hungry because of emotion, work to attain money instead of growing food or making shelter, etc. If we could become more attune to our “gut” feelings, I thing our actions would make more sense.
Tom Shannon’s work is very insightful in the same way that the first article makes tangible the universe into a rock, he makes tangible gravity and the relationship between earth and sun/moon. That our understanding of these ideas makes possible our ability to create objects like this is astounding, but not unlike that of many works of indigenous people. The Myans, for example, understood very much our relation on earth to that of other planets, and this is perhaps something innate in our understanding of our observations of our surroundings. This, I think more than anything else, is really what separates our brain capacity to that of other species.
Week 12-Science
ReplyDelete“In synesthesia, sights can have sounds, sounds can have tastes and, more commonly, black-and- white numbers and letters can appear colored”
This is very interesting to me for several reasons.
I was watching a show on "physic kids” who said they could see and feel people’s auras. The specific persons “color” would change depending on when they were going to die; for instance, Green means they were going to die soon.
Also, in high school I had a basic design class, one assignment was to listen to various types of music and draw what we heard, it was hard to figure out at first, not to “draw” something familiar but to just draw.
Science, technology and art are all very interesting subjects to combine. I think, especially for video installation or sculptural artist, it is very important to understand the fundamental structure and understanding how things work in order to communicate. Even painters and drawers who reference brain activity in their work is something that I want to research more.
As I was very interested in this article as well as this weeks reading…I wanted to research a bit further about he brains activity and how it works
“It's important to understand the complexity of the human brain. The human brain weighs only three pounds but is estimated to have about 100 billion cells. It is hard to get a handle on a number that large (or connections that small). Let's try to get an understanding of this complexity by comparing it with something humans have created--the entire phone system for the planet. If we took all the phones in the world and all the wires (there are over four billion people on the planet), the number of connections and the trillions of messages per day would NOT equal the complexity or activity of a single human brain. Now let's take a "small problem"--break every phone in Michigan and cut every wire in the state. How long would it take for the entire state (about 15 million people) to get phone service back? A week, a month, or several years? If you guessed several years, you are now beginning to see the complexity of recovering from a head injury. In the example I used, Michigan residents would be without phone service while the rest of the world had phone service that worked fine. This is also true with people who have a head injury. Some parts of the brain will work fine while others are in need of repair or are slowly being reconnected.”
(Traumatic brain injury survival guide. Dr. Glen Johnson, Clinical Neuropsychologist)
www.tbiguide.com/howbrainworks.html
Mallory Lawson
ReplyDelete"You Can Blame The Bugs"
It is really interesting that the main cultural difference between the Western society and Eastern society is based on the amount of threatening disease causing microbes. In the east people had to adopt collective behaviors while in the west people had the luxary of individualism. In Eastern cultures, the perseverance of the group identity was more important than an individual identity. This article was most interesting to me because I felt like it had a lot of ties to the article last week about "scenes" and the need to be individual. This article explained the "science" behind the western culture phenomena of being or being allowed to be a unique individual.
The relationship between science and art is quite interesting. I have always thought the two work well together and when art has scientific research involved it tends to grasp the attention of a much broader audience. Especially through the use of technology, art has come a long way and is much more available because of that. I believe it is with the help of science that art has evolved so much over the centuries. These articles were good reads, very informative
ReplyDeleteI really liked these articles. I love reading about the brain and how experience is processed through multiple parts – physically seeing and cognitively interpreting. I think it’s an interesting concept that “sensory feedback and experiences choreograph the dance of neurons during our long childhood”, but I wonder why it stops there. I also wonder if evolution could go backwards with all the increased technology today because we don’t have to think as much – curiosity and problem-solving are replaced by search engines and our attention spans are so short from constantly streaming images online that we don’t bother to process everything we see anymore. Today, I associate letters with fingers because I type so much, and I wonder how much our modern technological dependencies will affect the evolution of perception in the brain.
ReplyDeleteI really liked reading about how the brain’s narrative drive works during sleep while consolidating memories. I am so curious about dreams – why some are more vivid than others, why some people can remember them more easily than others, and why our brains choose one particular narrative or direction over another.
I wish I knew more about synesthesia. It reminds me of the theory of multiple intelligences in which some people learn better through doing while others learn better by watching (or listening or writing). This article claims that no one knows why people develop synesthesia, but that “synesthetes may have unusually dense connections between sensory regions of the brain.” Maybe there are particular experiences during childhood that motivate the neurons to supplement particular connections in the brain. Why would a brain decide that a three needs to equal pink?
I am so fascinated by the connections between art, intelligence, curiosity and creativity with science, sociology, psychology, and evolution. I went to Drexel’s open house for their Art Therapy program last week and we watched a video about a man’s pain management therapy that employed the use of music because the brain’s receptor for pain (the hypothalamus?) also responds to music, so when he played his instrument he felt less pain.