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Week 4: Medicine + Technology + Art

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  Humans have been cutting open bodies since almost the beginning of history (Vesna Week 4 Lecture, Part 1 ). Scientists used to cut sections of cadavers and photograph them (see below) until the 20 th century brought new technologies to help us look inside bodies without cutting them open. Scientist preparing to photograph transverse section of human head (Vesna Week 4, Part 1 ) Two familiar methods of looking inside the body without cutting it open are the x-ray and the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) which was invented by Raymond Vahan Damadian. Dr. Damadian became his own first MRI patient because nobody else was willing to get inside the MRI. However, when he got into the machine it didn’t work and the reason turned out to be that he was too big, so a student had to get in instead. As stated by Silvia Casini in her article, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) as Mirror and Portrait: MRI Configurations between Science and the Arts , “magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and its f...
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Week 8: Nanotechnology + Art

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  The materials that most interested me this week were Dr. James K. Gimzewski’s YouTube videos entitled Nanotechnology for artists (1). My favorite part was the images shown below of shapes made by Don Eigler using Scanning Tunneling Microscopy which uses a needle whose tip measures about one hundredth of an atomic diameter. The needle rasters across surfaces to make images, in a similar process to the one used in a cathode ray tube, the original type of television (2). Patterns created using the Scanning Tunnel Microscope Even more powerful is the Atomic Force Microscope which is able to image molecules in a way that hadn’t been achieved before with the Scanning Tunnel Microscope (2). Today there are thousands of nanotechnology products on the market and many of them are invisible.  Atomic Force Microscopy Nanoparticles are sized between 100 and 1 nanometers, and they have existed for a long time. In Roman times they were used to make pottery out of gold that looks one c...
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DESMA-9 Week 1

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Hi, everyone! My name is Laura and I have experience of both cultures. I grew up in an artistic household. My dad was a music teacher, and my mum is a fine artist. I began playing music when I was 3. The first thing I remember liking at school was painting. I loved writing stories when I was a child. However, I, like many of us, was told at a young age that pursuing a career in the Arts was less sensible due to the financial aspect. It was interesting to learn that, as Kevin Kelly writes, “Science has traditionally accepted…money with fewest political strings attached” (1). I went to university for Law but quickly realized it wasn’t for me. Next, I went to university for Applied Physics. The same thing happened again so I left Scotland and moved to Ireland. There I began a career in acting, which brought me to Los Angeles. During the pandemic, I decided to go back to college. First, I did Psychology, but it turned out that Philosophy was my favorite subject. I am now a Philosophy major...
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