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For my fourth event, I attended a street performance offered by The Laboratory for Embodied Intelligences on June 3, 2017. The theme of the performance is "Trying out Bacterial Behaviors". The performance was to explain the idea that human thought and signals are based on chemical and physical abilities latent in bacteria. Each performer acted as a single bacteria cell and demonstrated that mindness is the internalization of movement. LEI Performance  The performance took place in a tunnel and outside the tunnel. The tunnel represents an environment we are familiar with. The performance in the tunnel simulated single cell behavior and multi-cell clusters behavior. For single cells, each "bacteria" could move toward any direction it wanted. They have figured out a way to sense large environment without sending signals to communicate with each other. For the multi-cell clusters, "bacteria" turn on group behaviors. A signal by one cell itself may not

For my third event, I attended the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous which took place at CNSI presentation room on May 25, 2017. It is Leonardo/ISAST's international program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversations. The LASER speakers are Claudia Schnugg, Tamira Elul, Stefanie Volland, Behnaz Farahi, Hans Barnard, Symrin Chawla, and David Ertel. Their recent work focuses on intertwining artists and art projects with new technologies and scientific research. I was impressed by the work done by Dr. Claudia Schnugg. She was affiliated with the Sparks project, an H2020 project focusing on making Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) accessible and comprehensible for general public. A device named "Agent Unicorn" was created in this project. It is a unicorn horn shaped headpiece which includes a camera and it is based on electroencephalography (EEG). There are electrons within the headpiece. When

As Professor Vesna said, the week’s discussion on space and art is a combination of nanotechnology, biotechnology, mathematics, robots, etc. Some of these aspects were illustrated in the video Powers of Ten. It is a film dealing with relative size of things in the universe. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this film transports us to a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward into the hand of human beings with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. The journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a cell. The online lecture videos and readings provide me with the information about the history of developments in space, Copernicus’ idea of the solar system, as well as the development of the atomic bomb, the arms race, and the space wars. This week’s topic also involves different aspects such as politics, science, and popular cultures. Powers of ten When I was taking Chinese h

This week’s course material really refreshes my understanding of nanotechnology. I agree with Jim Gimzewski and Victoria Vesna’s idea that ‘seeing is believing’ does not apply to nanotechnology. Nanotechnology introduces a whole new area into our lives as well as touching beyond everything we have known so far. Art and nanotechnology intersect in a unique way. This new science is ultimately about a shift in our perception of reality from a purely visual culture to one based on sensing and connectivity.  Nano-Art experimental combination surprises with Anti-HIV effectiveness The unique works on a previous art exhibition at John Curtin Gallery demonstrates innovative examples of contemporary art and scientific collaboration. One artist featured in this exhibition is Boo Chapple with his Transjuicer. She has been working on a project to make audio speakers out of bone. Through the piezoelectric nature of the bone, she is able to cause the bone to vibrate and generate sound. Boo

The intersection of Neuroscience and Art helps me understand how Neuroscience developed through Art. Before taking this class, I thought Neuroscience is a branch of modern science since it requires to look inside human brain, where modern medical technologies are usually required. However, in the lecture Professor Vesna introduced that some artists and scientists and their works paved the way in exploring Neuroscience as it developed throughout the historic period.  Neurons in human brain To begin with, we can look at the beginning of primitive Neuroanatomy created by Franz Joseph Gall who is a German physician known for his phrenology chart. It was an attempt to look at the individual intellect and personality from an examination of the skull’s shape. He was convinced that the mental functions are localized in specific regions of the brain and that the human behavior is dependent upon these functions. This reminds me of my Linguistic 1 class. Language is processed in three

For my second event, I went to Eli Joteva’s graduate solo show at UCLA Broad Art Center, which was called mnemoawari. Mnemoawari performed a cycle over the course of three days, during which three cryo sculptures released their entropic potential into virtual and material memory: past, present, and future. Each cryo sculpture was made by different materials. The materials used to make these sculptures are flowers, sand, fungi, rocks, and water. Each of them was made layer by layer using a mode. The “past” was projected onto three separate adjoining walls in the room. Each projected image is different from each other since they were made of different materials. On the screen, three spheres rotated at a constant speed. They represented the initial states of these ice spheres. Wildflower ice sphere: the "past" The “present” was depicted at the corner of the room. The ice spheres were melting down at an extremely slow rate due to the room temperature. Some material