DESMA 9

I had a class a while back in the Geology building on oceanography. The section met just across the hall from this small gallery tucked away at the far end of the building. Back then I never thought to visit the gallery because, well, it wasn't very interesting to me. I'm already reading about rocks in the base of our own planet; rocks from outer space weren't very appealing because of that. Fast forward two and a half years and here I am in this gallery. To be honest I didn't expect the collection to be this large, both in number and size of the meteorites. Another shock was the absolute lack of security: that the meteorites are open to the public every weekday until 4 PM like this seems very, very risky. Maybe that's a testament to the mass of these meteorites. Meteorites often contain a large amount of iron and other metals. Those meteorites on the ground display? Over 300 pounds. Good luck stealing those. The smaller ones are also in...

Being a former physics major, space really has a special place in my heart. I grew up building models of Apollo 11, looking at Hubble images and watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos . Heck, I even wanted to be an astronaut when I was little.  And the appeal of the "last frontier" is understandable. For anyone who hasn't studied physics, the scale of outer space is just unfathomable. Americans often complain about the long flights between Los Angeles and New York. It takes almost nine months to fly to Mars. The speed at which the spacecraft flies is fast enough to noticeably experience time dilation. Crazy stuff, right? So I get it. It's a lot of hard-to-imagine stuff, and harder something it is to imagine the more imagination it sparks. That's why we have Star Wars , Star Trek  and all that Star-(insert word here)  sci-fi flicks in our cultural canon now. And I find them okay because they verge so far from what's scientifically possible that it's absolu...

I've been a tech junkie for my entire life. I've followed the development of nanotechnology very closely, especially the new carbon structures and their implications for consumer electronics of the future. I remember in elementary school my teacher demonstrating graphene by peeling off a layer of pencil lead with Scotch tape. Now we're at an age where entire car wheels can be made of carbon fibers. So it's a topic I'd like to think I'm quite familiar to. So I felt that "art in the age of nanotechnology," an exhibit for nano-art having a piece completely unrelated to anything nano illustrated how misunderstood the term is. Don't get me wrong. The exhibit has pieces that are clearly nanotechnology in some way. Boo Chapple's "Transjuicer" is a great example. At first glance it might sound like one of those bone conducting headphones like the one used in the first iterations of the Google Glass. This would use the bone itself as...

Having grown up watching those trippy videos by Cyriak Harris, I have at thing for the trippy, fractal-like, evolving movements. I'm inclined to believe that's why, when I entered the exhibit, I was drawn most to the piece by Hye Min Cho. Or perhaps her background as an electrical engineering major from Berkeley before pursuing an MFA here. I'm not sure. The display had looping videos of these strange shapes. It also seemed like people were more concerned with what the pieces looked  like, or the emotions they evoked. I on the other hand saw more value in how the piece was created. After all, each of these displays had something to do with one of the objects she listed in the description. MFA final project booklet. This was on the wall next to the displays. It's about the size of a business card. Somehow the displays relate to these things (wealth represented by cash, according to Cho), which in turn symbolize the artist's Asian roots. With ...

From my long bout with mental illness I've seen dozens of psychologists, psychiatrists and physicians. I've undergone many medication and procedures, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation(TMS), and come to a pretty rough understanding of the state of modern neuroscience. TMS uses electromagnetic induction to pulse electricity directly in the brain for the treatment of mental disorders. So it really puzzles me as to why phrenology is still talked about so significantly in a context outside the discussion of historical medicine. Phrenology differs from the current notion of brain regions (e.g. Broca's area, visual cortex) in that it assigns complex human concepts to regions of the head, not basic physiological or psychological functions. Then what of infants who do not yet understand spirituality? Dolphins have drastically different brain structures. What of them? Phrenological diagram of the head, 1894. The phrase on the neck says in German, "Know thyself....

What troubles me most about this segment of the course is the lack of discussion into the ethical concerns surrounding transgenic art. The lecture prominently features Joe Davis, who claims that he is the most published human in existence because his genetically engineered E. coli have replicated DNA sequences that Davis created. Never mind that that claim probably does not hold true because genetic mutations have likely altered his genes during transcription; these artificial sequences, without a clear understanding of the proteins they may come to express, possibly pose a health threat. Misfolded proteins, or prions, cause diseases such as mad cow disease, and without a clear understanding of what one is doing the artist may be at risk of causing diseases of the same vein. Brain tissue of a cow with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly known as mad cow disease. There are other, less scientific criticisms of genetic modification that is not addressed. The most prominent...