katiemDESMA9

Event #3 Blog My third event was the Media Art Nexus lecture and screening on May 22nd. This lecture gave the innovative artists Mark Chavez and Ina Conradi the chance to speak about their work and collaborated projects. Their beautiful creations were so impressive, yet the lectures by the two were much more presentations than they were explanations of their inspirations and goals for the pieces, so it was up to viewers like me to decipher meaning in their art and make connections to our course. Professor Vesna at the lecture Conradi is an award winning new media artist and associate professor at the Nanyan Technological University in Singapore. Her current project focused on in the presentation is Media Art Nexus started in 2016 as, “a community public art project that aims at providing a platform for exhibiting interactive digital art created by the multidisciplinary community of NTU”(academic profile of Ina Conradi NTU website). The MAN (media art nexus) project integr

Week 8 Blog: Nanotech + Art According to Vesna and Gimzewski, nanotechnology is unlike many other disciplines focused on observing in a visual sense. Understanding this new science requires a paradigm shift in perception of reality, “from a purely visual culture to one based on sensing and connectivity”( Vesna, Gimzewski, 2012 ). https://investingnews.com/daily/tech-investing/nanotech-investing/nanotechnology-uses/ Nanotechnology is both exciting and mind boggling. Unfortunately, many of the complex background and theory of this field can go over the head of less scientifically inclined people such as myself, so what I focused on in this week’s material were the example if nanotechnology intersecting with art and the medical field. Because of my interest in a medical career, I am particularly excited to see how nanotechnology will revolutionize medicine. Currently in progress is the creation of nanorobots as small as a red blood cell, capable of, “ cleaning the coronar

Week 7 Blog At the same time as I am reviewing this weeks material about the mind and consciousness in this class, in anatomy I have been studying the inner workings of the brain and memorizing structures. What has really struck me about this is that the very structures I am ingraining in my mind and understanding are the ones I am using in order to study them. It is crazy how the brain and conscious mind give us perspective on the world and existence, but are also anatomical structures allowing survival. My diagram I used to memorize the major areas of brain Through the lectures and readings, I was stimulated by so many topics I could ramble on for hours. I particularly liked Giovanni Frazzetto and Suzanne Anker’s concept of “Neuroculture” as a framework by which, “neuroscience knowledge partakes in our daily lives, social practices and intellectual discourses” (Frazetto, Anker 815). I think this is a great concept and way to approach our own existence and participation in soci

Week 6 Blog This weeks material required an extensive thought process to see the connection between biotechnology and art, but after watching the lectures and reviewing the wealth of projects and examples, I think I could come to the agreement that biotechnology can qualify as a form of art expression, it is just so new and so different from traditional art forms that it becomes a new kind of category. This ushers in a time of change and makes many uncomfortable to see the stretching of biology by human manipulation into a public statement. Context for this paradigm shift was recognized by Chris Kelty, in his statement that these kinds of novel artists have left the “era of very small communities of biologists that regulated themselves” to having to navigating federal laws restricting experimentation. Ethical questions are very much in focus when it comes to these art forms. www.newscientist.com/article/dn16-mutant-bunny/. This is what intrigued me the most from the weeks mat

Event Blog #2  I attended the LASER presentation and discussion this week and was very pleased to see how much the artists and their work connected with all of the material we have been covering these past four weeks. I was very intrigued by the discussions of Roberta Raffaeta and Maru Garcia. Roberta’s work coincides perfectly with exactly the kind of concepts I’m interested in as a Human Biology and Society major. Her background as a medical Anthropologist is relevant to her analysis of culture interacting with human health. Her main topic is something that has interested me for a while and the basis for my midterm presentation, the microbiome. Her insight on this field mirrored my exact sentiments. I resonated with imagery of the human body as an ecosystem between our own genome and that of our microbes, which make up 90% of the cells in our body. Roberta discussed the complexity of this relationship, and brought in a new idea of how the computational approach of understanding

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