johncamposDESMA9

  Today I attended the Hox Zodiac event honoring the horse. The Hox Zodiac dinner parties are a conceptual framework intended to honor various animals and celebrate them based on their Zodiac positioning. Created by Victoria Vesna and Siddarth Ramakrishnan, the event intends to "allow an exploration and identification of the diverse world of the animals around us". (Hox Zodiac) Through a genetic perspective, in the article "METAMORPHOSIS OF THE HUMAN ANIMAL: HOX ZODIAC", Vesna and Ramakrishnan identify the hox gene as a gene capable of expressing and determining the limbs and other body parts of all living things. The authors conceptualize it into a sort of glue shared by all living things that result in their physical manifestation.  During the event, Professor Vesna’s daughter celebrated the Horse by recounting an experience she had where she rode on horseback in order to herd over three hundred cattle. She related how horses are extremely sensitive and collaborat...

  The event that I attended was Victoria Vesna's talk at the UCLA Undergraduate Research Week convention. Throughout the talk, Professor Vesna highlighted a number of exciting projects that she has passionately worked on throughout the span of her career.  The first project that she highlighted was her Octopus Brainstorming project. I conceptually thought that the idea of this project was really innovative because it was all about trying to place yourself in the shoes of another species' consciousness. I think this project is very significant because there is an array of evidence that Octopi are extremely intelligent and possess self consciousness (Laratt), The project featured an out of sync and in sync state, the former being characterized by disarray and jazz music (Vesna Brainstorming). Continuing this line of thought of attempting to understand and appreciate other species semantic understandings of the world was Vesna's project in collaboration with Dr. Charles Tayl...

  The Leonardo Space Art Project Working Group gives great insight into the philosophy behind the concept of space art. Many members of the group who deliver testimony on the website describe how they see mankind's voyage into space as our species' destiny. Space art functions as a cultural motivator and inspiration, generating the imagination and wonder necessary to continuously fuel our journey on this road.  One interesting aspect that Professor Vesna addresses within her lectures regarding space is the fact that the frontier of space requires understanding of all the other scientific fields we have previously addressed within this class, from biotechnology to nanotechnology to an understanding of consciousness and man's place in the universe.  Chelsey Bonestell's artistic legacy exists as a testimony to the fact that space art is a driving force that urges us to continue to explore out into the cosmos. Her work is replete with amazing, chilling images depicting land...

  Within The Nanomeme Syndrome: Blurring of fact & fiction in the construction of a new science, Vesna and Gimzewski address how the subatomic and nanotechnological realm is completely different in its actuality as opposed to how humans visually and abstractly represent it. (Vesna and Gimzewski).  This point is reinforced by Gimzewski, who explains that our understanding and conceptualization of atoms is mediated by art.  He emphasizes how "a picture is not a representation of a molecule", and how these entities are more like "clouds of probabilities".  In the show making stuff smaller, David Pogue relates the concept of efficiency to tinyness. What is interesting about the minitiarization of technology is that in creating smaller and smaller computer chips, "we're actually using the atomic properties of the silicon". This represents a concrete utilization of this abstract microworld.  The "art in the age of nanotechnology" exhibition at ...

Blog 7  Victoria Vesna's Octopus Brainstorming is a great piece at the intersection of art and neuroscience because it delves into a conceptual framework where the users are required to shift their understanding of consciousness and awareness, "their brainwave rhythms were made visible to the audience through colored lights and sounds" (Albu).  This use of art to comment on the connection between mind and body is also addressed in the book "Proust Was a Neuroscientist", where the author Jonah Lehrer conveys how the famous author Proust utilized language as a way to "anatomize memory", establishing a link from the physical world of smell and taste and the abstract world of our conscious thought and memory (Max).  The unembodied, mysterious phenomenon of consciousness explored by Vesna and Proust does not just exist as a disembodied entity that does not interface with the real world. The Global Consciousness Project explores this possibility through thei...

  Blog 6 John Campos DESMA 9      The McDonalds Food Experiment exemplifies how life itself can be an expressive medium. Within the experiment, there is no actual chemical analysis going on to show how the food is harmful. Instead, the aesthetic that is created from the natural process of decomposition is what is so visually striking (McDonalds Food Experiment).       This is also exemplified by the GFP Bunny. Again, what becomes visually striking is the fact that a natural process has been manipulated under human conditions in order to convey a sense of shock value (Kac).       Kathy High is an artist who also operates within this modality, but instead of alteration or modification, she is able to recontextualize science in an artistic lens, something she accomplishes simply by reframing lab rats as creatures worth caring for, a notion which is artistically resonant because these creatures are usually disregarded (High). ...