Sarah Cho DESMA9

For event 3, I attended the Contagion watch party. The plot concerns the spread of an infectious virus that affects the respiratory system and central nervous system and follows medical researchers and public health officials that try to identify and contain the disease. Citizens around the world live in fear, families attempt to cross borders to enter another city, and social order is lost as people fight (and even kill) for resources and food. A vaccine is introduced at the end of the movie to stop the spread of the disease.   The movie had striking similarities to the current coronavirus pandemic, and it was extremely unsettling to follow the story of a plausible outbreak, as it describes the reality of the world that we currently live in. To illustrate how realistically the movie reflects the pandemic panic we experienced in 2020, I’ve included some pictures below of movie scenes (left) and compared them to pictures I took myself (right).   The movie highlighted many chall...

Nanotechnology is thought to be the future of all technologies– a platform that includes countless disciplines, from biology to engineering to medicine to chemistry. Nano drugs like Abraxane are used to treat breast cancer, nano foods allow for the creation of long-life packaging and health supplements ( Gimzewski) , and nanoparticles give rise to intelligent technology that we use in our daily lives. Nanotechnology also plays a significant role in art conservation and protecting historical art from future damage, allowing us to continue uniting the fields of arts and sciences and connect people in today’s diverse and complicated world. For instance, nanodroplets are used to remove oils, nanocontainers are used to fix old paint, and nanoparticles are used to restore artifacts and bones (Manik ) . Nanotech encompasses many– if not all– of the topics we’ve discussed in the course, such as medicine, robotics, math, and art.  Nanotech in Art Nanotech in food Although nanotechnology is ...

Mental imagery serves as the mind’s eye– subjective and abstract mental representations that share properties with pictures. Stephen Kosslyn, an advocate of the analog viewpoint of mental imagery, claimed that visual mental images are of functional equivalence to pictures in the head (“Mental Imagery”). Now, image scanning experiments and fMRI studies serve as evidence for analog visual images and show that visual perception and imagery activate the same cortical areas associated with visual processing. Because mental imagery involves many sensory modalities, viewpoints, and spatial information, the mind can be a source of creativity (Vesna). The things we see, both visually and mentally, are reflective of what our brains are doing (Cohen). Mental imagery is of great interest to both scientists and artists– it provides us with valuable insight into the complexity of cognition and neuroplasticity, and also serves as a representational medium providing us with access to thoughts and...

Marta Demenezes perfectly tied together this week’s topics– the idea of the self and the non-self in the perspective of art and biology. As she notes, art is never meant to be purely didactic in any way, but rather about being interpretative (Demenezes). She emphasized the importance of repositioning and questioning things that have been taken for granted, and issues that we find important (Demenezes). Although art is not necessarily good at explaining why and how things happen, art helps us generate questions and serves as the tool to put those questions forward, which can sometimes be even more effective at helping us see new perspectives and points of view.   Different viewpoints of the same shape Eduardo Kac’s Alba Bunny, a bunny created with a synthetic mutation of a green fluorescent gene found in jellyfish (Rojahn), serves to highlight the genetically unique bunny as a social entity rather than a biological one (Vesna). He emphasizes the importance of open discussion on the ...

Ticket from Event The event featured Texas artists and their performance works, created to celebrate simple, human-made objects. The idea behind this theme, “Odes for a World in Search of Joy,” is inspired by “Odes to Common Things,” a book by Pablo Neruda that allows one to appreciate the simple things in life, such as an ode to the present, an ode to age, and an ode to broken things (David). The artists all expressed their own perspectives on the topic through multimedia art. There were poems, visual art, animations, short films, and music. Artist Jay Duffer created a choreography on the concept of salt.   Salt by Jay Duffer (Taken from the Event) Artist Jonathan Fielding and Brenda Withers’ “Spec-Ulation” took an interactive approach to the concept of glasses. They interviewed several people about their experience with wearing glasses and shared the stories behind their glasses and their memories associated with them.   Spec-Ulation by Fielding and Withers (Taken from the E...

  Image of app prototype A few months ago, I was part of a startup team building a smart clinical nutrition app. The goal of the product was to allow healthcare professionals to calculate energy and macronutrient requirements, as well as feeding (oral, enteral, and parenteral) for his/her patients. This app would allow dietitians to securely store calculations and notes for each patient without needing to do the calculations by hand each day. This product truly demonstrates the interconnections between technology, medicine, and art in the modern age: user experience design elements were implemented to create a simple interface for medical professionals to use, with smart recommendations based on clinical guidelines and collected data. As explained by Professor Vesna, this shows that the med-tech space has grown immensely over the last few decades (perhaps as a response to our increasing desire for a healthy body and mind), promoting the collaboration between designers, engineers, a...