Sarah Cho DESMA9

  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...

Last week, I attended the Metropolis watch party for the Robotics + Art week.   Metropolis, a silent science-fiction film directed by Fritz Lang in 1927, is set in a sharply divided futuristic dystopian city that consists of wealthy city planners and an exploited working class that operates the machines that power the city. The film follows the journey of Freder, the son of the dictator who runs the city. Freder falls in love with Maria, an advocate of the working class, and attempts to help the workers. Meanwhile, the dictator orders Rotwang, a scientist, to construct a robot that looks like Maria to ruin her reputation and avoid any rebellion. The scientist, however, creates a geminoid of Maria to control the workers to promote a revolution.   The characters and landscapes in this film are filled with symbolic dichotomies. Take the setting for example. The overworld (inhabited by city planners) is portrayed as a beautiful elevated landscape, with skyscrapers, bright lights, ...

As noted by Professor Vesna, the idea of robotics was first introduced as a response to the mechanization of labor. It contributed to the growing renaissance, facilitated the scientific method, and gave rise to mass production with the invention of new machines, such as the metal movable type and the steam engine (Vesna). This blog post will analyze the benefits and drawbacks of the effects of industrialization on art. Factory workers during the Industrial Revolution Work was established as a form of labor and different modes of production in both industrial and cultural ways. One of the greatest examples of the integration between art and industrialization is the Crystal Palace in London. Built by Joseph Paxton in 1851, this exhibition structure was an ecosystem created to display technologies, art, and botanical samples from all over the world (“Crystal Palace”). This led to the public transfer of not only British culture accommodating itself as an empire, but also exhibiting other c...

Through Professor Vesna’s lectures, I learned that math and art had already been closely intertwined for centuries: the Greeks used the human figure as the source of proportion for classical proportions in architecture, and Mondrian believed in the use of geometrical shapes and primary colors to express reality and nature. Mathematically driven techniques such as the vanishing point were used to show the exact position and distance of objects from the viewer's eye (Frantz 5). Kate McKinnon’s guest lecture was especially informative, as she emphasized that beadwork follows mathematical ratios and fitting, like the Fibonacci sequence. What intrigued me most was the concept of geometric capture: DNA has resting, energetic, and charged forms, and beads can be used to represent those biological forms! This all demonstrates the juxtaposition between math, science, and art: math and science contribute to art by giving rise to patterns, architecture, and multidimensional ideas, while art c...

I’m a TCK, otherwise known as a “third-culture-kid.” I was born into a Korean family, grew up in China, and attended American international schools since the age of 8. I grew up building an ambiguously assembled identity of my own through multiple intersecting worlds. When I started my college career, I naturally gravitated to pursuing cognitive science, a field that could provide me with a similar interdisciplinary experience. https://www.madisonzeller.com/cultureclub Discussing philosophical and artistic implications of human thinking requires the application of computer science and statistics to model the way our minds work, evolutionary psychology to uncover human behavior, and behavioral neuroscience to understand what happens in our brains at a molecular level. The beauty of the field lies in the ability to examine phenomena from different perspectives without the dissociation of sciences and humanities.  https://www.carleton.edu/cognitive-science/ This isn’t to say that s...