Truth

Truth is a tricky subject to discuss. I think the real breakdown we need to see is the difference between personal truth and absolute truth. Personal truth is what you as an individual believe to be true. Absolute truth is what is really real. Let’s say a man yells at his wife for leaving the garage door open. The man believes that his wife purposefully left the door open because she has a total disregard for his things that are in the garage. This is his personal truth. The wife believes that she closed the garage door and that the man opened again just to have something to yell at her about. This is her personal truth. The absolute truth is that their son left the garage door open when he took his bike out. So there are three different truths here, all of which conflict, but also all of which are true. Let’s get everyone riled up and bring religion into it. For example, Christians believe there is one true God who is the creator and ruler of all things. For a Christian who believes in the Christian philosophy this is true. This is their personal truth. Atheists believe there is no God, evolution is rational, and every man is only accountable to himself for his own actions. This is his personal truth. Both of these views are the truth, but that does not make either one True. No one can prove the absolute truth in this situation. If atheists are right then a lot of people wasted a lot of time. If Christians are right, then a lot of people are really fucked.

Space art

I would like to take this opportunity to say WTF? Dolphins swimming through space is art? Of course that takes us back to the whole conversation of what is art where we eventually realize that everything is art depending on how you look at it. But really, space dolphins? come on. No wonder we haven’t found any extraterrestrial life, they probably were gonna drop by but then found one of our space dolphins and were like, woah, fuck that. It’s especially great that the guy who did it was talking about how there’s so much trash in space already. Oh no, there’s too much debris and other unnecessary crap floating around our galaxy, here’s a solution, fire off some more trash! If they were debris eating space dolphins then sure, I can see that working out. They could be art and serve a purpose. In fact why don’t we decorate our trash trucks on earth to look like dolphins. I think that would be much more enjoyable. I often think of what other civilizations will think of us when they find our ruins. God forbid the first thing they find will be Disneyland. “These people worshiped the great mouse god!” And you know what, with dolphins in space, maybe we do.

Body Worlds

I think body worlds is fascinating. Creepy, but fascinating. It’s extremely valuable to know what goes on inside your own body. I’ve had knee problems for years and all I ever got from doctors was medical jargon and put some ice on it. When I started playing rugby for college it became a real problem for me, I had to figure out what was up and find a way to work around it or I wouldn’t be able to play my favorite sport anymore. So I studied the anatomy of the knee, and from there finally figured out what exactly was going on in my joint that made what I love doing hurt so much. I discovered where I needed to put tension to counteract what was happening and presto I can run again. Body worlds can help other people make these same realizations about their own bodies. If I was a smoker and saw the body worlds smokers lung I sure would quit. It’s also especially cool to have animals in the exhibit as well. That makes it so you are able to relate things that are on our bodies to how they work in other species and shows that all life is unique and the same all at once.

Biotech

I understand that often harmful testing can lead to results that help many. For the greater good, even if it means harming some. Some valuable medical information even came for the torture tests performed during the holocaust, and animal testing can often lead to helpful discoveries. I also believe that art simply for the sake of art is a necessary entity in our world, that the strictly logical people of our society need to just accept it and leave it alone. And maybe I have stronger violent tendancies than others and feel more of a connection to animals than others. But hearing a man talk about his neon green bunny that may have lived from two to ten years made me want to jump out of my seat and bash his face into the floor while screaming “it’s for the sake of art!”

That’s all I have to say on the subject.

Robots

It is amazing how our opinions on robots have changed so drastically since their introduction to the world. I’ve read many old sci fi novels (I’m a nerd like that) and today it’s comical how terrified the world was of robots. Looking at todays world and how dependent we are on electronics it’s hard to imagine where we would be if our fear of robotics had held. I believe that part of what really changed our view of robots are books such as I, Robot. In this collection of short stories the reader goes on a journey, starting at the beginning with a fear and dread of a robotic companion, through robots taking over, robots having feelings, robots running away, and ending with preferring robots over the despicable humans that created them. I believe that robotics is what is helping us towards our next big step, whatever it may be. We don’t quite have flying cars yet, and we might end up in “The Matrix.” But I say forge onward and lets hope we end up in “Futurama” instead.

The North South Divide

I think that the divide between north and south on our campus is very prevalent. In the architechture alone the divide is visble. When walking through north campus there a lots of trees and open space, the buildings are mostly a quant brick or have a modern art type feel. South campus is a world of grey cement, tangled buildings and a general feeling of impending doom. Can you tell that I’m a north campus major? But I believe many south campus majors have the same feelings about their territory that I do, even if they don’t know it. South campus majors enjoy the perks of classes where there is no room for creativity, you either understand or you don’t. My south campus friends are generally constantly stressed and all seem to believe that they are inevitably going to fail. But that doesn’t stop us from being friends, I’ve just learned to keep my distance around midterms and finals week. I once brought one of my south campus friends with me to pick up something from the theater department and upon seeing the rolling hills of the sculpture garden she had to stand for a minute rather dumbstruck and asked “Is this still on campus?”
So essentially, The north south divide does not stop us from socializing, networking, or any other such ing. The difference is in the attitude.

final post, finally – xuan wei

today i got slaughtered on my physics final examination. it was quite frustrating but i think i will get over it eventually. regarding to this class, i thought it was awesome and much better than my physics class. um, i really liked everyone’s final presentation, they were very creative and fun to watch. frankly i am very depressed today and that is why my blog is looking so bad right now. i just feel quite lost as an engineering major freshman in ucla, and i am seriously considering changing major into art related fields. well i hope everyone best of luck on their finals, and for those who already had them, i wish you good results, for those who had bad finals, i feel you~ hopefully you get over it soon and move on!

i want to thank prf vesna and the TAs, you guys did a really good job inspiring me. good luck to you guys too~

Last Post – Simone Chen

First of all I have to apologize. For not posting until now, I mean.

I think the stress of finals made me forget about this blog (temporarily) completely! Although I never forgot to think about the class of course (especially after Professor Vesna handed out such a wonderful Christmas gift). I have to admit that when I enrolled in the class, I didn’t expect anything. It was just a GE, that’s all. But after all we’ve been through, I’m really glad I picked DESMA 9, instead of say some other random visual arts course. I like drawing and appreciating paintings and what not so don’t get me wrong, but, in terms of applicability, I think what I learned in this class can definitely be seen later on in my college career, given that I’m a science major and we really touched on bits and pieces of “south campus” material at times.

There were times when I was less engaged than I should have been (like when we kept talking about the GFP bunny and basically nothing else during that whole…was it 3 hour lecture?), moments when my mind wandered , floating off into the distance, (such as when the professor mentioned Nikola Tesla and his various accomplishments, and even times when I sort of dozed off, despite the fact that the chairs weren’t designed to be used for sleeping, (I think that was when we discussed about fractals and mathematical algorithms – math is not my thing you see). But for the most part, it was really a class that I actually enjoyed going to. We’d watch interesting clips pertaining to the material (or sometimes it seemed like they were a bit off tangent, but nevertheless they were fun to view!), see odd pictures (when I first saw body worlds, the “bluntness” of it all definitely shocked me, but now it’s just amazing…I think), and be introduced to unique websites (the blue morph site for one).

Nowadays whenever I see science, I can’t help but notice the “art” behind it at times. It’s not just, say, atoms/molecules, but their structure and the kinds of shapes that can be formed (like the bucky ball abacus).

Recently I’ve found a DNA music website and I’ve got to say that it has some great music files and I can’t wait to hear more. They’ve got bits of the swan gene and are working on the whale gene I believe. Look at the following links:

http://www.tjmitchell.com/stuart/dna.html

http://www.stuart-mitchell.com/

If it weren’t for this class, there would have been so many things left uncovered. All the “treasure” would have been buried, never to be found (so to speak, sorry if my metaphor doesn’t make sense). So once again I have to say that I definitely found this class worthwhile.

On a side note, I also have to say that every person in the class is a “good” person. We were all able to appreciate each others’ works of “art”, respect other’s opinions, and, while doing so, express our own ideas. And these qualities are actually really important in life and not all that easy to find in people. So I thank everyone, professors, TAs, and fellow classmates (although I don’t know many of you personally), for making this a great first quarter!

 

Final Blog- Marco Anzures

The final week of presentations was a refreshing experience in creativity and ingenuity. I was continually impressed by the classes enthusiasm towards their projects and the amount of careful detail and deliberation that was put forth into their projects. This class has really provided a different academic experience for me thus far in my career at UCLA. Normally classes require you to recall dates, facts, or formulas and very rarely allow the amount of freedom to explore topics and personal interests in an academic setting. The myriad of different ideas for fire, water, air, and earth were incredible. This was truly the first time I have been able to exprience the thoughts and ideas of my peers in such a fashion, it was quite inspiring. Perhaps now that the course has ended I am a little disappointed that we didn’t have the opportunity to do more of this type of learning research and presentation throughout the quarter. I understand that the quarter flies by and lectures must be presented but if there was a way to increase the amount of student collaboration and presentation of ideas that would be awesome. I believe someone else commented that this class was different than others he had taken because he felt he was learning rather than being asked to memorize certain things. I would have to echo those words as well. This class presented me with an opportunity to absorb information at my own leisure and it offer avenues for personal research and inquiry. I believe the blogs have been an important facilitator of ideas and discussion (I’m one to talk though, having only contributed sparingly to them, although I enjoy reading them). I feel like the blogs would become an even more important part of the class if they were discussed more thoroughly in section, maybe as a way to start a class discussion and survey the general feelings about that previous week’s topics. My thoughts are wandering but I would also like to comment on the guest lecturers who came and spoke. While many of them are distinguished individuals in their field it would be helpful if their lectures were designed to speak towards a more or less ingnorant group of intellectuals, and I mean this in the best possible way. I was left a little dazed, even overwhelmed at times from their lectures because I couldn’t possibly hope to understand the language and context they speaking of. Perhaps I was the only one with this isssue but in any case it was inspiring to have them speak to us and I’m grateful for their time and energy spent. In closing I would like to say that this class has been a very unique experience for me and I encourage others to explore other opportunities like this at UCLA.

Final Post!

I wrote on my hand yesterday, “AST BLOG,” because I knew that with the huge amounts of text book reading I had to do, my brain would not be functioning normally (you know how studying makes you really tired and kidna feel brain dead?). Anyway, clearly, I fell asleep and woke up in the morning with my note not only on my hand, but on my cheek as well. Evidently that’s what I get.

Anyway, the final group of projects was awesome. I loved the project that wanted to used different chemicals to change the color of fire and thus make art with it. I thought it was such a cool idea, and had no idea you could make purple fire! I told my boyfriend about it and he said “oh, yeah isn’t it K+ and something that makes purple fire.” I guess he got to learn about it in AP chem, but nonetheless, I thought that project was awesome and would LOVE to be able to see different colored fire.

I also really liked the idea behind the global song project. I think that if we could come up with something that simple, it would at least be one step towards some kind of global uity– it would be something everyone knew, and at least something we all had in common. Which, with such a divided world, couldn’t really hurt.

The air pollution project was also really awesome, those are the three that really stuck in my mind. But, obviously, as a whole, I was once again impressed with my classmates creativity.

I had a great time in this class this quarter. It was such a refressing 2 hours, when we’re all so used to sitting in boring lecture classes where the profs read off of powerpoints. I loved being exposed to so many new ideas and theories and all have them have a common thread. I wish everyone in Art Science and Technnology good luck, and want to thank you again for the great fall quarter.