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Leonardo Da Vinci's Anatomical Sketches https://drawingacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/Leonardo-da-Vinci-the-Anatomical-Artist2.jpg Almost since the dawn of time, art has been preoccupied with capturing the beauty of the human form. Just as scientists used human cadaver dissection in the Renaissance to further medicine, humanitarian artists like Leonardo Da Vinci produced anatomical sketches to further our understanding of how to draw the human body (Sooke). Now, advances in medical technology have allowed for us to go beyond our fixed anatomy, editing our form and shape and driving new frontiers in art. The French artist Orlan, quoted below, utilizes modern advanced in plastic surgery to turn her body into a canvas (Vesna). From modeling her chin, cheeks, and forehead after famous Renaissance paintings, to giving her devil horns with implants usually meant for cheekbone enhancement, Orlan surpasses human boundaries and challenges the concept of what it means to be human. Ad...

Me, in front of Boelter 3420 I recently realized that, though I have heard from endless tour guides that UCLA is the birthplace of the internet, I have never explored the actual exhibit in Boelter 3420. Though we now take the internet totally for granted, the room allows us to immerse ourselves in a time when we were in a cold war and developing the internet meant increasing our odds of survival. It's interesting to note that in science, much like in art, spectacular discoveries often occur in times of duress; Picasso's Guernica , a composition created in WWII that evokes the pain of Nazi bombings, is widely considered a priceless masterpiece ( Pablo Picasso and His Paintings ). Chalk Diagrams of ARPANET Viewing the room, one's attention is immediately grabbed by the chalkboard sitting on the left side. Covered in colorful chalk diagrams, it displays the importance of visual representation in the scientific world. The captivating nature of scientific figures indi...

In examining the profound influence that robotics and automation has had on art, it is useful to examine a statement made by Walter Benjamin after the industrial revolution: "[the] technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition" (1). Certainly, the initial responses of artists to industrialization was negative, which I believe is valid since a reproduction, though technically identical to the original, lacks the form and texture of the original. Therefore, reproductions lose out on an emotional response from the viewer to the effort placed into creating the original. However, not all responses to industrialization and modernization have been negative. My photographic self-portrait can be turned upside down, my ear can be chopped off, the background can be changed from black to gold Hugo Cabret Tinkering on a Mouse Automaton https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRL921NqU WGL41_VpTXq4E-s_AWAcQBiBFwwkQc3n2EVEY7iDMc D...

Poor Perspective in Art https://ayoqq.org/images/perspective-drawing-bad-14.jpg Art can be understood as the subjective expression of the natural world, and the world that art seeks to imitate and iterate upon as completely defined by mathematics. In this week's lectures, I gained a unique insight into the recency with which mathematics has been directly applied in art. One need only a glance at the image on the right to realize that it poorly reflects reality, yet a true understanding of perspective in art did not occur until as late as the 13th century BCE with Giotto (Vesna). One of the turning points in creating art, especially art that involved architectural objects and scenes as viewed from a close observer's perspective, was the vanishing point (Frantz, 37). The vanishing point is used to convert the visual field, which has disappearing lines due to the perception of vision through the eyes, into an image with lines converging towards certain focal points. Stud...

We need not look far to find evidence of a two-culture system at UCLA. As a computational biology major at UCLA, I often feel as though I take a diverse course load, yet this "diversity" is restricted to the south campus ecosystem that has become my identity. Snow mentions in his essay on the cultures of science and art that the separation between science and art becomes less bridgeable as time goes on (19). It's easy to see that at UCLA, where students are primed by tour guides, encouraged by peers, and pushed on by the university itself to promote this division of art and science. North and South Campus Division Encouraged by UCLA http://eamailer.support.ucla.edu/Images/Project/5160/email_header2.png Though STEM is successful at training technique and ability, creativity and originality cannot be learned from a textbook (Bohm, 148). Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of PCR, reported that creativity through use of LSD led him to his discovery...