alexistongueDESMA9

I attended the Lifes Exhibition at the Hammer Museum on Thursday, April 22 nd . The exhibition combines visual artists, choreographers, composers, musicians, vocalists, and other writers each  creating their own works for the exhibition.   Lifes  acknowledges the inherent incompatibilities at play between traditional artistic disciplines and within the spaces of art’s display. Overlapping themes emerged, including the translation and mediation of language and the idea of the audience as a material substance inseparable from public exhibitions. The exhibition at Lifes ties directly into the lecture given in week 2 about mathematics, perspective, time, and space as well as the lecture in week 1 about the two cultures evolving into a third.  Each performance interrupts the implied stability of the schedule set forth on the brochure handed to guests as you walk inside the gallery. The Lifes exhibition relies on time and numbers.     Starting at the hour (00:00)...

 Artists have always been fascinated by the human body. In works like the  Vitruvian Man  and  Écorché (A Dead or Moribund Man in Bust Length ,  Da Vinci “believed the workings of the human body to be an analogy for the workings of the universe.”  While most artists limited their investigations to the surface of the body and observed live, nude subjects, some went so far as to produce  écorchés,  corpses in which the artist would peel back successive layers of muscle, tendons, and bones, all in order to gain a better idea of how to portray the human body in their art.  Technology has evolved from slicing the body and looking with the human eye but evolving into using instruments like x-rays that give us a closer look at the human body that Renaissance artists could not dream of.  There is now a variety of tests doctors can employ to find out what is going on within the human body. In today’s society, artists like Virgil Wong ex...

  Henry Ford introduces the Model T automobile revolutionized transportation and American industry.  “Fordism” sparked mass production and consumerism on a global scale. Workers became cogs in the wheel of industrialization and many feared societies were losing their humanity.  The term robot comes from the word robata which means “work” in many Slavic languages. The robatas were the time a serf had to give for his lord. Robots are understood as a subordinate with no free will. Many movies of the 1980s sought to expose industrialization and show the horrors of effects caused by industry and capitalism. Blade Runner is an example of this film.  The film explores the story of future Los Angeles where humans are synthesized to work on space colonies.     These synthetic humans were called replicants. A group of the replicants escape and return to earth, thus bringing to motion the. Events of the story. “The replicants stand for capitalism’s oppressive features...

I’ve always assumed there was a connection between math and art. I took art history classes in high school and went over various works of art that had geometric configurations or origins, especially when it comes to architecture. Artists use math in their works to help with things like perspective, ratio, etc. Perspective is necessary to understand painting. A painting is the intersection of a visual pyramid at a given distance, with a fixed center and a defined position of the light, represented by art with lines and colors on a given surface. Leon Battista Alberti was an Italian Renaissance humanist author, artist, architect, etc, who wrote three treatises about art and its use. For Alberti, the ultimate artistic goal of painting was to rival Nature in the depiction of visual reality. Forms within a painting should be modeled with light and shade to appear sculptural, as though they stand out from the two-dimensional surface like the forms in ancient relief sculpture. Other artists l...

  C.P Snow in his book  Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution  expresses the idea that  “…the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups. Literary intellectuals at one pole-at the other scientists and as the most representative, the physical scientists” (Snow, 4). This is very true and apparent in the structure of UCLA’s very own campus. The campus is split into North Campus (humanities and the arts) and South Campus (science and technology).  North Campus is known to hold the classrooms of Theater, Art, Sociology, English, etc., majors. In the past, most students in these majors rarely made the journey over to the opposite end of campus only to take one or two GE  classes. The same went for South Campus students, very rarely did they cross over to take many classes or spend much time in North Campus areas. However, as time has progressed a third culture has emerged to bridge the gap between the ...