Week 9 Post

 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 landscapes out in the universe. It is interesting to think how most of our conception of space comes from images generated by human's on Earth who have never left here. 




Richard Clar's project Space Flight Dolphin also testifies to the need for extremely creative thinking that is required in order to comprehend our place in outer space. The project is intended as a sculpture of a dolphin that will be deployed into low orbit deep space, emitting dolphin noises in the hopes of contacting outer intelligence. The metaphor of the dolphin is important as their acoustic communication represents other ways of communication we may not possess. 

In conclusion, man's place in space has constantly been reinforced and reimagined in the public consciousness through art. Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot" speech serves as an additional powerful reminder of how important art is as a tool for understanding reality. "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives". By placing us in a larger context, Sagan is able to convey the wonder of the cosmos and our place in it. 





Works Cited: 


Art Technologies. “Space Flight Dolphin” http://www.arttechnologies.com/site-2005/projects/space-dolphin2.html


Bonestell, Chesley. “About Chesley Bonestell”. https://www.bonestell.org/


Leonardo Space Art Project. “The Leonardo Space Art Project Working Group”. https://spaceart.org/leonardo/vision.html


Sagan, Carl. “Pale Blue Dot”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO5FwsblpT8. 


Vesna, Victoria. “8 Space PT3 1280X720.” YouTube, YouTube, 29 July 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WOqt_C55Mk.


Images Cited: 


NASA. “Pale Blue Dot Revisited”. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/pale-blue-dot-revisited/


Brittanica. “Chelsey Bonestell”. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Chesley-Bonestell. 


Greg.org. “Space Flight Dolphin”. https://greg.org/archive/2009/09/06/space-flight-dolphin-by-richard-clar.html. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 4 Post

Image
               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...
Read more

Event 2

Image
  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...
Read more

Week 8 Post

Image
  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 ...
Read more