Juliet Lee - week 10 - space & the final frontier

When we started on Monday and the heading of this weeks theme was space exploration the first thing I thought of was those art pieces that are like tigers or under water creatures out in space. And in a way the information we know about the universe is through how artists can conceptualize the ideas of scientists. As evidenced through the entire class, art is there to teach us when the technology hasn't caught up to our research and imagination. An example could be the Power of Ten video we watched, most of what they show us cannot be photographed by anything that we know, on the galaxy or atomic scale. It's pretty amazing how much we can learn through the visualization of concepts. That is one of the features that make us human too, our strong dependence on sight. This class has done a good job of integrating art and science even if it was quite overwhelming at times. There was a lot of information given to us in a small amount of time, and though I suppose it was nice to be given a choice as to which artist we wanted to look into further, but I felt like I lacked the sense to know how to look at their work and understand it without someone else explaining it to me. Artists have a way of explaining their art that makes me think that they are making everything up. That they really just felt like making something and worked backward to give their piece meaning. Therefore it was still the scientist who in giving their perspectives in art and science that I better understood the connection, at least as a legitimate collaboration and not as a purpose to solely create new/different art work. Although Wednesday's lecturer was a bit too heavy on the science and I found a lot of what he said to be going over my head Gekelman’s talk on plasma was really interesting. I was able to attend the symposium for Nikola Tesla and found it to be another interesting dichotomy between art and science and even to how they give presentations in front of a crowd of varied backgrounds. The first and last lecturers Milos Ercegovac and Greg Leyh, I understood what it was that they were talking about, and also their relation to Tesla. Of course when Ercegovac spoke he was very easy to understand because he just gave an overview of Tesla's varied and impressive life and he presented it in a funny presentation. The other scientist was from the Nevada Lightening Lab, and his presentation was also in order and made a direct connection to Tesla through his research on lightning and the Tesla coils. On the other hand, the artists who spoke I felt nearly put me backwards in my thinking that art should be given the respect that the sciences are given. It was sad to hear people leaving throughout the film "Monster Tree" by Paulette Phillips even though the breathing was really annoying and I also wanted to leave. Phillips related her art to Tesla because she used a magnet to hold up a tissue and filmed a girl with her hair blowing straight up into the air and never blinking giving us a magnetic look. That's what I was talking about how to me it sounds like artists just want to talk about themselves and what they created so they make a story that can let them talk longer. In this class I haven't heard a one of our artists say just enough to explain their art and their actions in a convincing manner.