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Event 3: LACMA, Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age (Travis Shibata-Bardaro)

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  Figure 1: Photo of me standing in front of Paul Rand’s Eye-Bee-M rebus (Shibata-Bardaro)      Last month, I attended the exhibition Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Upon entering the exhibition, visitors are greeted by a short wall of text that provides a brief overview of the early history of computers including their introduction into popular culture. According to the text, art and media played a pivotal role in advertising computers to the general public in the postwar years ("The Computer and Popular Consciousness"). For example, in a 1965 Time magazine issue that talked about computer technology, the cover page featured an illustration by Boris Artzybasheff that exemplified the idea of the computer as a computational, artificial brain. Then there was the CBS broadcast of UNIVAC’s prediction of the 1952 presidential elections. While pre-election polls favored Adlai Stevenson, the UNIVAC’s analysis of elect...
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Week 9: Space + Art (Travis Shibata-Bardaro)

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     Visual representation is a helpful tool that pioneers the advancement of sciences and technologies. The power of visual aesthetics is highlighted in Carl Sagan’s short film Pale Blue Dot , which utilizes the tiny size of the Earth in comparison to the vastness of space to evoke emotions and advocate for peace and collaboration. Another short film utilizing the power of the visual is Power of Ten . In the following film the viewer is taken on a journey of magnitudes starting from a one-by-one meter image of a sleeping man on a picnic blanket and then gradually expanding to cosmic proportions up to 10 24 meters before going all the way down to the quarks of a carbon proton (Eames and Eames). Utilizing both photography and artist interpretations, Power of Ten makes size intuitively comprehensible.  Video 1: Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem: “In Paradisum” (Fauré) Video 2: György Ligeti’s soundtrack used in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Ligeti) However, I want to focus on anothe...
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Week 8: NanoTech + Art (Travis Shibata-Bardaro)

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     With this week’s lecture being presented by Dr. Gimzewski, the separation between art and science became rather difficult to distinguish. At the beginning of this class, we saw that modern thinking imposed a clear separation between the arts and sciences. Creativity, imagination, and intellectual freedom governed the former, while rationality, rigor, and adherence to laws governed the latter (“Art for Science”). However, nanoscience challenges this rationale because the focus and scope of the field is ambiguous leading to an increase in creativity and productivity among scientists and artists alike (Spector 348). This ambiguity has also given rise to inflated perception of the potential of nanoscience allowing the imagination of researchers and science fiction writers to take over (Gimzewski and Vesna). Figure 1: A scale comparison of metric measurements including the nano (“The Scale of Things”).      In particular, the main issue with nanoscience is...
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