DESMA 9

As I was growing up in the early 2000's, Korea underwent a reversal in its censorship of Japanese culture and started opening up to things such as Japanese cinema, games, manga and anime. Among them was the second anime reboot of Astro Boy in 2003, which became one of the shows I grew up watching along with  Megaman . So looking back at all these characters, I don't think as a child I even considered them as "robots" any more than they were humans with robot-like superpowers. Rather, I think that was the point, to see how close these robots and programs could come to the human condition. Both Astro Boy  and Megaman  are part of the Japanese obsession with artificial humanoids and humanoid robots that Prof. Kusahara mentions. This fascination continues well into today, where humanoid home assistants are actually a thing. Take, for example, Pepper from SoftBank: One of Japan's most popular YouTubers, Hikakin, bought his second Pepper last month to keep his ...

Although I'm a working photojournalist, I never formally received an art education past middle school, a part of the "de-geniusing" as mentioned by Buckminster Fuller. So to learn photography I took the analytic approach, seeing how exactly cameras and lenses work, what the numbers mean. I probably have an unnecessary amount of information on this, such as the meaning of aperture numbers (The f in f/4 refers to the focal length). But note that this is all the technical bits of photography, analogous to Prof. Vesna's example of artists using computers. The more qualitative aspects, such as the difference in bokeh, why stand developing gives the look it does, and most importantly, composition, sees little connection to math. In effect, I've studied what makes art possible more than art itself. How a rotating 4-dimensional tesseract would look in 3D, projected to a 2D computer screen. Bridging the two and understanding the connection between math and art ha...

Perhaps no one's more familiar with this dichotomy of art and science than I am. A linguistics major who's recently switched from physics, and a working photojournalist, I see both ends of this argument that scientists have divulged from what science used to be: an art. I'm compelled to say, however, that this view is fundamentally flawed. Categorizing art and science in this way separates the two into mutually exclusive worlds, with no gray area in between. Nay, there is art, there is science, and there is a spectrum of somewhat-art-and-somewhat-science. There are things like the Zeiss lens Stanley Kubrick used for Barry Lyndon (one of the largest aperture lenses ever made). Of the ten made, Kubrick bought three to film scenes in candlelight, NASA bought six and Zeiss kept one for posterity. Queen guitarist and physicist Brian May at the Paranal Observatory in 2015. Or the  PhD thesis by astrophysicist and Queen guitarist Brian May, which in its body contains b...

The exhibition held its opening reception yesterday. After finishing up work it looked like a good place to go to wind down, so I made the 40-minute drive there. The exhibition was admittedly a little small. It's trying to convey so much information, so many ideas, but was constrained by space in how much it could get across. At first I thought, "Is this really all there is to it?" then the introduction speech began, giving a demonstration of the companion app Research Angewandte that gave an augmented reality extension of each exhibit. It was a clever way to get across the space restriction. It was also a clever way to get across an idea which saw a lot of synergy with Margarete Jahrmann's piece, "Relation." This, too, uses AR as part of the exhibition, and invites the user to participate by using an app to take a photo of the exhibition. The app would put a caption on the photo then automatically post it on the exhibition's Twitter account...