Cheata Se

Growing  up with a father who has cardiovascular diseases, I am very familiar with the medical technologies such as Electrocardiogram (ECG), Computed Tomography (CT Scan), and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), etc. However, I was not aware of how these technologies came about or how much they owed their origins to the arts.  ECG illustration  da Vinci's anatomical drawing   For centuries , both scientists and artists have always been interested in the internal workings of a human body, specifically the muscles and bones structures. Artist like Leonardo da Vinci had researched and sketched the anatomical structures to make his paintings more realistic. However, he actually became so obsessed with the human body that he completely shifted from being an artist to a scientist in the last 12 years of his life (Sooke, 2013). Had his anatomical drawings been published in his lifetime, they would have tremendously affected the evolution of science. Therefore,...

Humanlike Monster: Frankenstein Before this week’s lectures and readings, I was under the impression that the Industrial Revolution revolutionized only the manufacturing processes, which undoubtedly changed the way people think and live forever. However, I have never considered its direct impact on arts.  As Professor Vesna had mentioned, we can see the effect of industrialization on books and movies as early as the 1820s (Vesna, 2012). In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley centers on a mad scientist who tries to create life but ends up producing a manlike monster instead (Shelley, 1998). Personally, I believe that Shelley may have written the book as a response/solution to the employers’ horrible treatments of their workers as if they were machines. Had Victor Frankenstein been successful with his unorthodox experiment and created a well-behaved being, he would have solved the issue of labor inefficiency as well as improved humankind. People then would have had as much extra h...

From this week’s readings and lecture, I have learned that throughout history, math has always been a part of arts, and vice versa. These two topics have never really been separated. If you look at math itself, it is the study of numbers, combinations, shapes, and symbols, which all are the characteristics of arts (Vesna, 2012). Despite many people believing otherwise, arts is more than just drawing. According to the Dictionary, arts is an expression or application of human creativity and imagination. It is not defined or limited to anything specific.  The Last Supper Another proof that arts and math is interrelated can be found in the history of arts. Artists, dated all the way to ancient Egyptian, to the Renaissance era, possibly even to current day, have used math to either perfect their arts or illustrate their ideology (Henderson, 1984). For example, Leonardo da Vinci used mathematical concepts to produce a perspective, which created the impression of depth and realit...

On April 7th, I went to photographer Luther Gerlach’s “Paper and Light” lecture at the  Getty Center. He mainly examined the art and science behind 19th-century photography, as well as the evolution of photographic technology throughout time. Gerlach's personal collection of cameras and lenses He first started introducing a variety of the early 1800s photographic materials, such as the lenses and large-format cameras. One specific example he gave was the “camera obscura,” which was a Latin name for the camera in a darkened chamber (Gerlach, 2018). He also shared with us that camera lenses do not produce an upright image but rather an inverted “real image” of the object, as shown in figure 1.2, which resonated with what I have learned in physics class. The reason why we don’t see an upside-down photo in the camera is that our brains correct it. Then, when you move closer to the focal point or zooming in, you can see a larger inverted real image as shown in figure 1.3 ( Mi...

Division of UCLA campus  As a third-year political science major, I am very familiar with the concept of two cultures that Dr. Charles Snow introduces in Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. It is indeed true, just as Snow argues, that people perceive literary intellectuals as a complete distinction from natural science despite their correlation and interdependence (Snow,1959). I have had friends from the South Campus who said that Political Science is not a real science — a fact that I secretly agreed until now. The north-south division on UCLA campus only strengthens such notion.   Political Science is both humanities and science  However, after learning that the separation between art and science is a relatively new phenomenon, it finally occurs to me that there may be no such thing as less scientific or less literary, that everything is interrelated (Green, 2014). It makes me more appreciative of my degree and, more importantly, comfortable wi...