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After watching the videos for this week I found it really interesting how prevalent space was in movies, but especially children's movies. Some videos mentioned a few movies that are centered around space exploration and after doing more research about the impacts of this I found that it has had a pretty widespread impact. People for hundreds of years have been fascinated with outer space and planets, but ever since we have seen footage of people on the moon, this fascination has grown exponentially. Why do we as human like the idea of weightlessness, what does it give to us? Gravity is just a subjective experience of lightness and weightlessness (Jackson). However, children and adults alike all enjoy movies like ET and Wall-E that try to describe the magic of space.  Outer space is a difficult concept for children to learn because it is so abstract, and it is hard for them to learn about things they can't see ("Teaching Kids About Space"). This is why diffe...

This week in particular, I had a hard time picking a topic that I wanted to focus on. Even after watching all of the video lectures I still had a hard time connecting the idea of nanotechnology to art, as I felt many of the topics covered didn’t completely relate to the art sector. Then after I read more about art and nanotechnology I found Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau’s work of creating an invisible sculpture. The way they were able to achieve this was with a wireless magnetic force-feedback, which let viewers interact with invisible nanoparticles in order to create a malleable sculpture that changes as people interact with it. They must wear a magnetic ring that allows them to physically feel the repulsions, attractions, and sometimes even shock to help them discover the foundation of the sculpture. The shape of this invisible sculpture changes based how people interact with the magnetic rings and how many people are viewing it (John Curtain Gallery). ...

I really enjoyed this week’s video lectures focusing on Neuroscience and art. Although there were so many directions I wanted to take this post I chose to focus on LSD and the hallucinations it causes.   Dr. Albert Hofmann talked about an experience he had on LSD, “I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense kaleidoscopic play of colors” (Vesna 2012). While he was biking home he felt as though he wasn’t moving, but seeing everything and sound become optical perceptions. After reading some more about what LSD does, I found how it connects different parts of the brain that are usually segregated and has them “speak” to each other (Sample 2016).   This is connecting different parts of our brain and according to Newsweek we are always hallucinating, but usually these hallucinations are based on sensory information, not random connections of the brain (Osborne 2017). From here I started looking at peop...

The topic this week was Art and Biology. I don’t think I have ever learned much about this cross-section of fields, so I was really intrigued in a lot of different topics presented. However, I really wanted to focus on and learn more about Marta De Menezes work, specifically her project “Nature?” Marta is originally from Portugal and her work Nature? Was done in 1999 (Nature? 2012). I found this work to be extremely interesting, because I have never heard of artwork that literally lives and dies. Although this was her most well received project, it did have some controversy, which Marta is quick to dismiss. She explains that just because the butterfly is manipulated there is no reason to call it man-made or artificial (Silva, 2008). The way in which Marta does the modification is with an extremely thin needle paired with heat to redesign the wing when they are still in their cocoons (Reinert, 2004). Since the genes remain unchanged the new design of the wings is no...