Skip to main content

Event 1: Linda Weintraub Lecture

I went to Linda Weintraub's Lecture at the Broad Art Center on April 18th. Throughout her presentation, Weintraub explored various contemporary arts dealing with eco-materialism. One particular project that stood out to me was Daniel Steegmann Mangrane's "Phantom". Using Oculus Rift technology, he was able to create a virtual reality environment of, what I later found out, the Brazilian Mata Atlántica rain forest. With his collaboration with ScanLAB Projects, there was an effective communication between "literary intellectuals" and the "scientists", a real life example of the third culture forming that Snow theorized and Vesna elaborated upon in her article.

Oculus headset in use in empty room
Snapshot of the wearer perspective

With this technology, Weintraub explained that there was no orthodox "frame" to separate the artwork from the surroundings. This harmonized with her lecture's overarching theme of connecting one's body to the materiality of the surrounding world. She emphasized the importance of foraging rather than scanning to become fully engaged in nature and also be aware of the impact you can have on the environment.

Weintraub's foraged plants

Despite having been to multiple hackathons, I've never got the chance to develop with the Oculus Rift. Mostly this was due to my disinterest with game development, as most of the headset's usage is toward that field. However, this event showed me there's a wider range of potential to be explored with this technology, such as treating PTSD or designing architecture, as I later found out. We could even possibly preserve the "experience" of natural habitats that might be endangered. With the addition of Touch, the wearer would theoretically be able to interact and immerse oneself with an environment.

Selfie with the event poster

I would overall recommend going to this event to regain a sense of consciousness through the artwork that you are a part of this natural world, as it is easy to forget while living in an urban setting such as Los Angeles.

Sources

"Oculus Rift: 5 things you can do with the VR headset apart from gaming."The Independent, 28 Mar. 2015, independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/oculus-rift-launch-shipping-gaming-applications-design-architecture-medicine-ptsd-a6956596.html. Accessed 19 Apr. 2017.

"Phantom (Kingdom of all the animals and all the beasts is my name)," Daniel Steegman, danielsteegmann.info/works/41/index.html. Accessed 19 Apr. 2017.

"Rift + Touch." Oculus Rift, oculus.com/rift/. Accessed 19 Apr. 2017.

Snow, Charles Percy. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution: The Rede Lecture. London: Cambridge U P., 1959. Print.

Vesna, Victoria. “Toward a Third Culture: Being in Between.” Leonardo, vol. 34, no. 2, 2001, pp. 121–125., www.jstor.org/stable/1577014. Accessed 19 Apr. 2017.


Comments

  1. UnknownApril 26, 2017 at 11:24 PM

    I found the way you and Linda Weintraub discussed the benefits to technologies such as the oculus rift beyond just simple enjoyment. Using it to fully immerse in the world to gain a new expense or even treat things such as PTSD was an idea I had not considered before, and was very thought provoking.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 7 - Neuroscience + Art

Aristotle, the father of psychology, had believed that the brain was merely an organ built to cool down the blood in the heart and lungs. With developed technology, science can now confirm with microscopes and electricity that the brain is the conductor of thought and emotion. In a lot of literary works and art, the heart seems to always be romanticized as the driver of human passion while the mind is always portrayed as the rational counterpart. Artists and even scientists have challenged this notion through beautiful depictions of neuroscience. Split Santiago Ramon y Cajal is considered to be the father of modern neuroscience, as he has won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in medicine and physiology. However, according the Vesna's lecture, he referred to neurons as "mysterious butterflies of the souls" and their dendrites as the wings. He obtained his artistic fulfillment within science, as he spent hours drawing natural scenes that would be later used in textboo
2 comments
Read more

Week 1 - Two Cultures

Reflective of John Brockman's views of the "third culture" to be contemporary scientists, the field of computer s cience stands to be substantial evidence to his beliefs. With such a broad range of study, from artificial intelligence to web design, I in no way feel as if I'm only part of either the "scientist" or the "artist" side of the supposed separation when majoring in Linguistics and Computer Science. As an enthusiastic designer, I love taking care in integrating the proper aesthetics through front end web development. In my free time, I also enjoy mindless doodling or even some recreational reading. I'm also especially interested in studying the natural language processing area of CS, a discipline that uses linguistics to analyze and appropriate human languages for a variety of purposes, as researcher Chowdhury explains. My interests might seem to be a little abnormal for a "STEM" major, but these disciplines, in reality,
1 comment
Read more

Week 4 - Medicine + Technology + Art

As an artist, an understanding of anatomy is a necessity for realistic human illustrations. I frequently use anatomical references myself for guidance whenever I'm drawing people. In Vesna's lecture videos, she explains that the dissection of the human body during the Renaissance helped both artists understand anatomy for their drawings and scientists document the findings for medical purposes. She jokingly attests that every artist that works with the body has Henry Gray's Anatomy  on their book shelf, despite it being written for the medical community. However, this confidence and knowledge of human body is leading technology towards bodily modifications that step outside of plastic surgery. Female Anatomy Reference - condensed version by ReneeViolet Professor Kevin Warwick at the University of Reading is experimenting with the concept of cyborgs - a human fused with computer parts. He underwent surgery to install a silicon chip in his forearm. This allows his com
1 comment
Read more