Sunday 31 July 2016

Blog Summary

Desma 8: Art, Science & Technology has opened my eyes up to the Third Culture - a bridge between the conventional border between science and art. C.P. Snow's stance on Two Cultures showed me the traditional roles scientists and artists are confined to, and invited me to entertain the possibility that both can be made better through the integration of each other. The unit of Math + Art showed me the underlying logic in art through the artworks of Edwin Abbott's Flatland illustrations, Ron Eglash's African Fractals, and the mathematical manipulations behind music synthesis. Robotics + Art expanded my knowledge about the art world's concern with Artificial Intelligence, and walked me through a brief history of the evolution of robotics from Turing Machines to Neural Networks. MedTech + Art helped me realize the artistic opportunities that lie within medical imaging techniques, while BioTech + Art introduced me to the creativity that empowered genome research, as well as the issue of bioethics with regards to artistic productions. Neuroscience + Art opened my eyes to the philosophical and psychological interpretations of the brain, and allowed me to further investigate the technology of artificial neural networks - a statistical algorithmic model modeled after the neural networks of rats. NanoTech + Art taught me the history of nanotechnology and materials engineering, the technological possibilities that it enabled, as well as fascinating NanoArt creations that contributed to my knowledge of the Third Culture. Finally,  Space + Art ended the course on a galactic scale - the variations of artistic endeavors by artists and scientists on the topic of space demonstrated the limitlessness of human creation. 

For my final paper, I decided to write about artificial neural networks and the artistic genre of generative art, because it collided with my interest in artificial intelligence and offers great insight into the notion of the Third Culture. 

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