Nano+Bio+Art

All the groups worked their fingers to the bone today, trying to finish up their projects before dinner time so that they could go to the concert at the Hammer. As for my group, what we had estimated yesterday to be a substantial but not huge amount of work ended up taking the entire time [...]

Sara and Pinar gave us a lecture today about the limitations of human vision. As someone interested in art, and therefore how images are perceived, I of course found this very interesting. Human vision involves a lot of guesswork by the brain, which is often helpful, but when the brain tries too hard to make [...]

Our group was very productive today! In addition to finalizing our product name, logo, and slogan, we drew out some concept sketches for how the external portion of our device would look. Our hope is to make telepathy possible via an implant in the brain. This game claims to be able to read your mind… but our [...]

Today was my favorite day out of all of our previous ones. It was jam-packed with interesting stuff and I’m having a hard time deciding what to focus on in this entry. I thought that one of the most interesting things in Mattia and Rita’s lecture was the work of Eduardo Kac, in particular Alba, the [...]

Today we went to two museums, each focused on either science or art: The Santa Monica Museum of Art/Bergamot Station Gallery and the California ScienCenter. Of the two, I preferred the art gallery, which is consistent with my leanings in general. My absolute favorite part was the “functional art” section– essentially a massive collection of amazing [...]

Today we had a lot of artist presentations, which I loved! John Carpenter’s work really made me curious. I don’t know anything about programming, although computer science courses are offered at our school. I never thought I’d need or want to learn how to make my own website from scratch since snazzy platforms are always available. [...]

Today was the first installment in the science fiction movie marathon. We watched Woody Allen’s Sleeper, a comedy about a man who is cryogenically frozen and woken up in the future so that he could help bring down the government. We arrived at the auditorium/theatre rather late, so unfortunately we weren’t able to discuss the movie before [...]

Today, Pinar asked us to devote a portion of our blog to an interesting adaption in nature and how it helps the animal. I chose the throat puffing, or gular sac, of the male frigatebird. During courtship, the male inflates the pouch dramatically in order to increase his side and make himself appear stronger, more macho, [...]

I found today to be the most interesting day so far. Miu and Romie gave a lecture about the aesthetics and chemistry of patterns in nature. I was familiar with Turing’s work in robotics, but not with his work in nature. The presentation was visually stunning, but it also taught me a lot– I’d had no [...]

NOTE- I originally posted my blog to the Nano+Bio+Art page, which explains why I’m reposting here at 8am Today was our first day of serious content, which meant that today’s lectures gave us the broad strokes about what the program would be about. More specifically, we learned about C. P. Snow’s idea of the two cultures, [...]