Event 4: CNSI: Waste Matters: You are my Future

I had recently visited an art exhibit at CNSI featuring Kathy High and Waste Matters: You are my future. High is an American artist working with technology, science and art. She greatly focuses on the biological sciences and the politics and ethics regarding this broad field.

This exhibit focuses on the human body and a biological system. Despite the fact that we, the human is in control of the body, there still exists an uncountable amount of other living organisms that are involved. They are a variety of life such as bacteria and yeast that live within our system in different parts of our body including the respiratory system, digestive system and the integumentary system. Within all of these systems, the other organisms find a way to live and to balance with our life. In fact many of these biological organisms are required for our life and therefore live cooperatively with their human hosts.

At an even closer look, High explores the process of fecal transplantation. This process is the movement of healthy colon bacteria from a donor to a person suffering from a compromised gastrointestinal tract. As an individual suffering from Crohn’s disease, High is extremely driven to explore this type of process that involves a human system. Through her art, she hopes to explore, explain and extrapolate this idea of an internal system coming out of balance and how certain processes such as fecal transplantation can be a first step in re-mediating the imbalance.

For High, the art in this exhibit stems directly from her experience with this disease. She hopes this type of expression will encourage cooperation between different parts of society to potentially work towards a solution for Crohn’s disease.

Event 3: Fowler Museum

I had attended the Spanish art exhibit at the Fowler Museum. It had a variety of different concepts with some sort of relation to the Hispanic community: culture, artists or location.

Within one of the exhibits all of the art was based on the idea of recycling. Many of the art pieces were created from other everyday objects. The following piece appeared to be a vest made from old handbags, backpacks and leather clothing. Art like this reminds me of the possibilities that result from just the idea of recycling. A person can take broken and separated objects from a variety of different sources and recombine them together to form something new. This concept has been used throughout time with both science and art where a combination of something old creates something new.

In another exhibit, a war ship is depicted and casted out of silver. Although it appears to be simply an extremely well detailed and casted silver ship, it is much more. The ship actually acted as a bottle caddy with a number of places to hold bottles of wine. It is rumored that this toy was used to roll bottles of wine from one end of a table to another for the enjoyment of drunk adults. The silver used in pieces like this most likely originated from slave labor in Spanish mines.

The following is a paper mache creation reflecting a scene drawn by artist Jose Posada of the Cemetery of the Red Little Devil. The artist Felipe Linares recreated the scene utilizing paper mache into a three dimensional object adding his own flair. This particular creation was created during the Mexican Revolution when anger was high towards politicians and landowners. It bares many resemblances to art used for the Day of the Dead celebrations, which directly comes from Linares’ specialty of Day of the Dead projects. 

The vest holds a modern approach of recycling old material to create something new. The ship contains material derived from slave labor originated from Spain. While the last object has great cultural significance by signifying the anger during the Revolution. Despite all having some sort of Spanish origin, each of the projects is unique and tells of a different story.

 

Week 9: Art and Space

The common idea of space is that it is the vast emptiness that surrounds the earth. As first coined by the series Star Trek, space is the “final frontier” left for exploration (Wikipedia). Humans have grown, adapted and explored the greater portion of their home, Earth. What is left is to leave the terrestrial land and explore the greater expanse we call space. Although it was scientists that have revolutionized space exploration, it could be said artists first envisioned space exploration.

 

Destination Moon Movie Poster

With the first terrestrial object put into space by the Soviet Union, Sputnik 1 orbited the earth in space in 1957 (National Geographic). Even with this amazing feat by humanity, it took humans nearly 54 years to achieve that dream of putting a man made object in space that was first theorized by the Russian scientist Konstantin in 1903 (Britannica). Since then humanity has made many achievements such as: putting the first animal in space, putting the first human in space, putting the first human on the moon and having humans reside in space in modules such as the International Space Station.

 

Edwin Aldrin on the Moon

In the topic of space, art has driven scientists to make science fiction to science fact. For example, in a film Destination Moon which was released in 1950, four astronauts had been depicted as having landed on the moon. This depiction occurred even before man put an object into space, let alone put a man on the moon which occurred with American Edwin Aldrin in 1969 (National Geographic). The film Destination Moon is prime example of where artists create science fiction based on certain current facts and scientist push human intellect and innovation to make such fiction into reality.

 

Mars One Colony Modules

Another piece of art in the form of literature from the background of science fiction forms the backbone to inspire science fact. In Ender’s Game, a united human front is in space conflict with warring species from distance plants (Wikipedia). Technology that allows for human survival during long term space flights currently does not exist but is in development. Such development is reflected in the ambitious endeavor of sending a colonizing team to Mars by 2025 by the organization Mars One (Cooper). Similarly to our earlier dreams of exploring the moon and space, art pieces like Ender’s Game now inspire future development to make long distance space travel feasible.

 

 
Cooper-White, Macrina. "Mars One Applications: Astronaut Recruiting For 2023 Red Planet Colony Now Open To Public." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, n.d. Web. 27 May 2015.

Destination Moon. Dir. Irving Pichel. Perf. John Archer, Warner Anderson. Geore Pal Productions, 1950. Film.

"Ender's Game." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 27 May 2015.

"Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky." Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d. Web. 27 May 2015.

"Space Exploration." National Geographic, 2009. Web. 27 May 2015.

"Where No Man Has Gone before." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 27 May 2015.