RyanWuDESMA9

I attended the event on MycoMythologies, partly because I needed to attend an event that I was actually interested enough in to talk about, and partly because fungi is biologically fascinating to me. I have always had a morbid fascination with death, less so spiritually and more so with the physical processes involved with it. In my "extensive" personal research, I have obviously looked into the role of fungi as a part of the global food web, and the importance of decay in restoring nutrients to ecosystems. This is likened to the concept of conservation of mass, except with inflows of natural energy and outflows of work exerted. Decay exists as an extant form of life, and death it inescapable. So I have always seen fungi as the end-all-be-all of organic life outside of the eventual heat death of the universe.  The lovely Ms. Vesna, and me in the top left. The more I understood about fungi, the more I realized I didn't understand. This experience with MycoMythologies was n...

Medicine and technology, or "Medtech" and art, have not been very related to each other throughout history, at least not in the conventional sense. Before the modern day, very few medical procedures were performed for purely aesthetic purposes, and medicine was a pragmatic practice, meant to either cure someone or alleviate pain before death. However, this is not to say that there were no historical practices that involved both the medical sciences and the arts. One culturally significant early example of when medicine was used to create art was in the Egyptian practice of embalming. I would consider the techniques employed to preserve the body, which would then be placed into a sarcophagus, to be a form of funerary art. However, I think that it's rather pointless to focus on the premodern fusion of Medtech and art, since artistic intent was not a goal for most significant inventions.  A Sarcophagus https://gnosticwarrior.com/wp-content/ uploads/2014/08/Sarcophagus-egypt....

I think that to begin a discussion about robotics and art, the term "robot" first needs to be defined. According to Merriam-Webster, "robot" has two definitions. The first is "a machine that resembles a living creature in being capable of moving independently and performing complex actions". The second is "a device that automatically performs complicated, often repetitive tasks". Both definitions will be valuable to the discussion of the connection between robots and art.  I will begin the discussion of art and robots at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, as before this point in western history, robotics and art had little bearing on each other. Though disappointment could be levied against me for intentionally omitting other historical examples of robots that could be considered art, such as the mechanisms in an orrery, or the ability of a printing press to mass produce culturally influential materials, I think that its most conducive to tre...

I've always considered mathematics and art to be, to some extent, two sides of the same coin. Mathematics is not absolutely art, nor is art absolutely mathematics, as the more abstract and theoretical one wishes to delve into either subject, the more insular they will find it to be. Despite how much I value widespread appreciation of math through meaningful application, I must confess that I despise "pop math". What I consider to be pop math I will not strictly define at the risk of sounding elitist, but I believe that the image it evokes within the reader will suffice to convey my distaste. The idea of a relationship between maths and art is hardly new. As Vesna expressed in her video, an example of mathematic concepts employed in art is through the use of perspective. She discusses the history of the the development of optical references to create a sense of perspective and depth in paintings by using an imaginary vanishing point in the distance (Vesna). A piece that ex...

I don't believe in ascribing myself to the category of "artist" or "scientist". In fact, I find that I am neither artist nor scientist, as unnecessary labels and the stereotypes associated with them are more limiting than they have any right to be.  Charles Percy Snow's concept of the existence of "Two Cultures", especially in the context of education, is certainly true; the schism between what we define culturally as "art" and what we define as "science" has only become more profound, to the extent that some may consider them antonymous (Snow 18). The coining of the term "science" in the mid-19th century by William Whewell and its later recognition by the compilers of the Oxford dictionary to specify "physical and experimental science" demarcates a point in time when the split between the two cultures was recognized (Vesna 121). It seems apparent that this cultural division is a product of post-Industrial so...