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I never thought that medical technology and art have such strong correlations before this week. They seemed to me two totally disjoint subjects. But after some thinking, there are indeed fundamental connections among them. Art is about representations of objects, either real or virtual. Medical technology is about improving the understanding of human bodies and medical treatments. One intersection between these two subjects is the representation of human body, which was already popular back in ancient times. Back then, people got to know about human body by dissecting cadavers. This was both difficult and not truly moral according to Hippocrates’ Oath. Dissection cannot provide an overall image of the inside of a body. But with the invention of X-rays, people were able to get images of human body from many different angles without dissecting them. The structure of the bones became surprisingly clear under the X-rays. Multiple images together can give a comprehensive descriptio...

Industrialization has had a tremendous impact on our life, and in particular, it has influenced art to a great extent. For one thing, as noted by Benjamin, “Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.” Originally, art was used in service for rituals. But with advent of industrialization when mechanical reproduction of arts were available, the real value of art shifted. Art became on longer intended for cult only, but also for reproducibility. Benjamin illustrated this point by saying “instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice----politics”. For another thing, new forms of art such as movies changed people’s reaction toward art. Compared with painting, which requires contemplation to appreciate the true essence, movies do not allow such contemplation by rapid shifts of scenes. Benjamin called such reaction as a progressive one, characterized by direct and intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoymen...

On April 18 th I attended Linda Weintraub’s lecture on eco materialism and the following symposium . Her lecture was about how she developed the ideology and the art that she is working on. “What is next?” “Is that all?” These two sentences ran through her lecture and impressed me a lot. Besides the word beauty, what else can we say about the nature? Such spirit of pursuing the fundamentals made Linda outstanding. Another impressive moment was when she talked about her “Woods”----her ecological home, where she could have intimate and direct connections with the nature. Linda's Woods I couldn’t help thinking about the idea of art and science in the first week. We learned that as a general trend, art and science are to some extent more integrated than before. But what Linda showed me seems to be a counterargument to this. Instead of employing more technologies, she goes back to the exact nature that is surrounding us. I suppose that a lot of her inspirations came from her...

Artists, making use of the concepts of mathematics, are able to represent the world better. The first idea I learned from this week’s lecture is the formulation of linear perspective, which allows   artists to represent three dimensional objects on a two dimensional canvas. The idea is based on the mathematical principles of optics and associated with a “vanishing point”. By proper scaling of objects at different distances, we are able to create a visually three dimensional image. The second concept is the golden ratio or the divine ratio, which is obtained by dividing a line so that the ration of the shorter part to the longer part is the same as that of the longer part to the whole line. This idea has been implemented widely throughout history, including the pyramids, ancient Greek sculptures and da Vinci’s paintings. The golden ration produces a harmonic effect that is also existent in nature. The third aspect is about dimensions. Artists became intrigued by...

The idea of “two cultures” has been increasingly involved in my life as I continue my academic career. As was identified by C. P. Snow in his lecture, two cultures refer to the literary and the scientific. At a certain point of history, these two areas became isolated and antithetical. Even though recently a “third culture”, one that is technology oriented, has emerged, we can still feel the estrangement of science and liberal arts. Science and art separated Take my experience at UCLA as an example. The campus is divided into two parts, the north and the south campus, where the north represents liberal arts and the south means science. This is a clear indication that these two areas are to some extent incompatible and students identify themselves based on which area they come from. Moreover, there is little chance that students from the north and south campus to communicate, at least in my perspective, since the geographical distributions make us harder to interact people fro...