johncamposDESMA9

               This weeks content has a direct connection and relevance to my life as I suffered a knee injury while skateboarding in high school and was forced to undergo a series of MRIs before my surgery. Within Casini's Magnetic Resonance Imaging as Mirror and Portrait, the author discusses how there are aspects of the MRI experience which make it a performative, artistic one. Through the "the mirror placed inside the scanner, the condition of stillness" ( Casini 99), one is placed into a contemplative state. To me, this experience was akin to a body scan meditation, and I see MRI's as much a performance as I do a science.                      Adding on to this performative nature of medicine is the Hippocratic Oath, which is a document that doctors continue to enact and bind themselves to this day. I think it is extremely interesting how this document from antiquity continu...

 An idea which intrigued me since I was a teenager is the concept of the technological singularity which was explored by Ray Kurzweil. He acted almost as a modern day scientific prophet in his insistence that one day AI and robotics would improve to the point that it would be able to refine itself. At this point, an exponential increase in progress and technology would occur, enabling improvements that would be totally beyond our comprehension and understanding. In writing on the destructive nature of war, Benjamin explains "that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ" (Benjamin 6). If the singularity were to occur, technology would be totally, beautifully incorporated in a way which would make improvement possible and perfect. This sentiment is reflected also in Davis' insistence to "leave us alone" (Davis 385) and not let beauracratic mechanisms interfere with this process of gradual perfection as technology reaches its point...

 A great place to start when examining the way mathematics have interfaced with and influenced art is the idea of a perspective system. Perspective is a specific mathematical formula that can be applied to art in order to make it appear realistic, and it is stunning to think that it is a concise system of thought that can be followed in order to achieve a result that approximates reality. A key character who played a role in this transfer of information is Al-Haytham, who in around 1000AD made significant advances in understanding the system of vision and the way it operates in the brain (Lecture).  This investigation of angles and distance eventually paved the way for artists like Brunelleschi to develop a complex perspective system. It is stunning to think that many of the great aesthetic achievements of the Renaissance would have never occurred if not for significant mathematical advances conducted much earlier in history. In "The Fourt Dimension and Non Euclidian Geometry ...

 In my life I would say that the separation between art and science occurred during my high school/college years. Specifically, being forced to choose a major initially led me to choose Cognitive Science as my route, with me assuming that I would be able to make more money with a science degree in the future.  This contention echoes the writings of CP Snow, who blamed the formatting of universities for this division (Lecture 1).  What is also striking about how Snow' writing relates to my story is that I primarily chose science for economical purposes, and Snow addresses these same problems in his essay, writing how "Most of our fellow human beings, for instance, are underfed and die before their time" (Snow 1).  Circumstances led to me leaving my first university and pursuing my passion for filmmaking full time. What really turned me off in the first place from science was the stress and rigidity when it came to having to choose the perfect, correct one answer on a ...