DESMA9_sectionA

Schumpeter's Wave Acceleration Graph.

I found it interesting that a wave function, which is used to describe the ups and downs of a capitalistic economy, can also be used to represent the pace of innovation over time. Beginning in 1785 with water works, textiles, and iron, Schumpeter has created this wave function that includes five peaks and five valleys between then and ending in 2020. Each peak corresponds to a time of rapid innovation while each valley translates into a period of slow innovation. As he analyzed the graph, Century pointed out that the peaks of the wave function occur during times in which art and science come together to further our innovations, which many times includes technology. Through this, it can be seen that, as a human society, we are far more productive when we refuse to segregate art and science into two completely separate fields of study but instead mesh the two in order to create a masterfully innovative world. This also means that the unwritten “Law of Moderation,” also holds true in the case of art and science. That is to say, we are far more productive when we have some art and some science as opposed to separating the two into two different worlds, each of which contains only an abundance of art or an abundance of science, not both.

An example of the "Law of Moderation" in terms of food.

Overall, I think that this lecture was very informative in regards to summing up the intent of this class. This class was especially relevant to us here at UCLA as was commented in Week 1 by Professor Vesna. Michael Century articulated the point about how art and science never interacted but over time, people began to utilize the two together in order to accomplish common goals. He labeled the future as a question mark since we will have to wait and see whether or not humans will once again segregate art and science, such as in the case of UCLA’s north and south campuses. All in all, Century’s lecture and this class opened my eyes a little to see how we cannot separate art and science while still expecting to progress forward with our innovations. The two areas work too well together to separate them; whether society wants to admit it or not, art needs science, and science needs art. It is just another rule of nature that ultimately cannot be broken.

- Travis Johnson

On the first day of the Sound and Science Symposium I was able to attend the lecture by Curtis Roads from UCSB Department of Media Arts and Technology. It was a very interesting lecture but some of the terms he used were very advanced and hard to grasp, but overall I was able to get the basic idea of his research topic. Curtis Roads is a composer of electronic and electroacoustic music while specializing in granular and pulsar synthesis. He began the lecture by introducing the concept of electronic music and how it is very similar to traditional music by at the same time very different.

Electronic music involves the use of electronic musical intruments or electronic music software to create and even though their methods are very different, electronic and traditional music do have similarities. Curtis mentioned that it is possible to compose electronic music to sound exactly the same as acoustic music which definitely shows the technological aspect of electronic music. Later in the lecture, Curtis went on to describe some differences between electronic music and traditional music. For example, Curtis mentioned that electronic music opens the homogenous notes to limitless heterogenous notes that is only achievable by electronic means. Heterogenous notes are not static and fixed but can evolve into different things and does not share the conventional environment that applies to the homogenous notes created by acoustic instruments.  Also Curtis mentioned a very advanced aspect of electronic music which is that softwares are able to take in real locations and make that location into sounds that reflect how it would sound within that location. For example, if a piece of music is entered through the software you want the music to sound as if it is within a church, then the software is able to apply multitude of different effects such as echo that will transform the music into the desired location. In my opinion, this is a great example of how art and science can allow for the creation of extremely innovative pieces.  Some of the other differences that Curtis mentioned were for example, the composer is the performer in electronic music unlike in traditional music where the composer often does not perform their work. Also notations in electronic music is no longer symbols but instead graphical. Electronic music allows for a unlimited array of microtone scale which is extremely difficult to achieve with traditional instruments.

Curtis contributed to the creation of many programs such as Pulsar Synthesis and Emission Control. During the lecture, he briefly talked about each one, for example, Pulsar Synthesis is a program that allows the transformation of one music piece into another that is located in a different location like I mentioned earlier. This program shows a very promising future with further development. Even Curtis mentioned that he often wonders if it is possible to create a program that takes in a piece of music and project a location which the music is most likely placed within.

Throughout the whole lecture, Curtis played numerous pieces of music which he composed and each one shows how sound can be broken down into single particles that he called grains and by changing the granules slightly, you are able to produce very different results using electronic means. I think that Curtis’ lecture showed a field that many do not often encounter and it was a great experience to listen to his lecture and his research.

This past Thursday, I attended Michael Century’s lecture at the California Nanotech Science Institute.  I thought it was an appropriate culmination to this DESMA Art, Science and Technology course, as his lecture discussed on whole the unification and impact of art and science on society.  

Michael Century started off talking about the stages of interaction between art and science that society had undergone throughout history.  The first apparent “wave” was a period of stability in the middle ages, where society was mainly run under a unified Church system.  As a result of this, most of the information was “compartmentalized”:  there was very little interaction between the different fields and also between theory and practice.  The second “wave”, which Michael Century described as the “Threshold”, came during the Renaissance Era.   In contrast to the last epoch, there was much interaction between theory and practice and scientists and artists.  A fine example of was Galileo, a scientist, and his assistant, Cigoli, an artist.  Interdisciplinary meeting places, such as academies, readily allowed for this free flow or “un-compartmentalization” of information.  They were known as the home of the dilettanti, “those who were interest in many things”.  As a result, there was wave of new inventions, such as the printing press, microscope.   The third wav, a period of re-compartmentalization, occurred after 1600s.  Dualism and specialization were characteristics of this epoch.   Now, we approach the current stage that we are currently at: the “Information Age”, as Michael Century dubs it.  Yet again, it is a period of de-compartmentalization, social fluidity, reflexivity and hybridity. 

As one can see from above, history truly does repeat itself.  In this case, it continues to work in a pattern, alternating between stable and threshold period.   Based on Schumpeter’s graph of the “Waves of Innovation”, these transitions are often triggered by new and significant inventions, such as textiles (in the first wave), steel (in the second) and electricity (in the third).  Currently, we are climbing up the fifth, most recent wave that was prompted by developments in digital networks, media and software.  However, Michael Century points out that this wave differs greatly from all the past ones, in the sense that it relies on “intellectual” technology and not “physical” technology.  As these technologies affect more the way people see and perceive things and not how they do things, the cultural impacts they have on society will potentially be deeper. 

Michael Century ends his lecture, asking us to speculate on the future.  When will the next stability era arrive or will there even be one?  What will be the trigger for the next wave?   Personally, I do not see another “stability” era coming any time soon.   He states that, at this point in time, it is not about inventing new technology, but more about using that technology in new and innovative ways or as Michael Century states, “filling in the dots of the wave”.  Truly, the key to that lies in the unification of art and science.   And after having seen the imaginative and provocative final project proposals of my peers, I definitely think we are doing just that.  With so many new technologies and with art and science interacting ever so closely now, I feel that society will be on a “threshold” and be progressing – in terms of innovation and change – for a very long time.   That we should be able to experience and see these changes take place in our own lifetimes is an extremely exciting thing. 

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On February 27^th I went to David Szanto’s lecture on Slow Food’s University of Gastronomic Sciences. I was expecting to find a really interesting lecture on the functions of the human body and some integration of art (since our class is based on Art and Science). However, I was utterly disappointed by the lecture. It was not even a lecture, more so an advertisement of the university David sponsors. We sat through an utterly unexciting list of courses that are offered and various countries the students get to travel to while getting their degree. I guess the most interesting part was how they had an Italian professor who was talking about freezing fresh Oysters and the students were given wrong translations stating the lecture to be on freezing fresh ostrich.  You get the idea on how boring this lecture was.

Instead of learning about the courses, I would like to have learned about various cultures and how it directly impacts the processing of food (since gastronomy is the study of the relationship between culture and food). I would especially like to hear about the difference in the processing of food in different cultures. So much of our food is processed and full of preservatives and it would have been interesting to learn what the difference is in American production and preservatives versus European. Worldwide it is believed that American food is utterly fattening and I would like to learn the details especially since David commented exclusively on the various cultures the students get to experience through the University of Gastronomic Sciences.  I would have also liked to learn about the adverse effects these food and preservatives have on our body.

By Komal Kapoor

A few weeks ago I went to hear Linda Weintraub’s lecture “Drop Dead Gorgeous: Beauty and the Aesthetics of Activism”. Linda described beauty as the intereaction between the viewed and the world. Interestingly, she commented on how beauty is not really a visual phenomenon but based on a set of cultural values. I think this is apparent in every day attraction between people. Certain groups ofpeople find certain traits as more attractive for example darker skin, or bigger eyes. Linda further asks the question about what beauty looks like when it is represented in productive ecosystems. This reminded me of the ideal facial structure we have talked about in class, and naturally produced ideals are often considered as beautiful.

Andy Goldsworthy is an artist she introduces us, whose art I have come to really appreciate.  His art is composed of articles from nature that he sets up in perfect structures. Humans are delighted by nature at its simplest, and it is even more pleasing when it is arranged in simple shapes and distinct colors.  

Linda progressed her lecture with a discussion of how there can be beauty even in the “uglier parts” of nature, like a rust pattern or bacteria design. Furthermore, the beauty in death and decay that is shown in Michel Blazy’s tower of moldy oranges and Gregor  Schneider’s mission to display a person dying in a gallery. These are interesting notions I have not really considered before. I really like a remark a student brought up about how there is an ongoing competition to make the goriest horror movies and the reason for that is maybe that we have become so numb and push ourselves to feel something through these movies. So I am not really sure if we will ever find death as beautiful or artistic, but we do accept it in our popular culture in movies.

By Komal Kapoor

On Friday I attended many lectures for extra credit, the one I’m going to blog about is titled “Aesthetics of Natural Radio” by Douglas Kahn. Now I want to first start off by saying this was one of the most boring lecture that I attended on that Friday so this blog may not seem interesting because I hardly found anything fascinating, or even helpful. Usually the lectures that occurred Thursday and Friday spoke on things that somewhat related to nature or was fascinating. For the most part the lecture was about whistlers which had something to do with nature but was still not so interesting. The kind of whistlers I’m describing is defined as a very low frequency electromagnetic (radio) wave generated by lightning. Frequencies of whistlers are 1 to 30 kHz, with maximum usually at 3 to 5 kHz. Although they are electromagnetic waves, they occur at audio frequencies, and can be converted to audio using a suitable receiver. So the lecture wasn’t about an ordinary whistle, but a whistle developed through nature. In the lecture Douglas reported that “whistler documented over a period of six years from 1888 to 1894 at the Sonnblick Meteorological Observatory in Austria, in a 22-km long telephone line”. I didn’t see any importance in this quote; I just wrote it to help describe the main points of his lecture. I actually now that I think about it found something interesting about whistlers, that they were used in WWI. Douglas quoted “whistlers commonly heard in wireless gear (air and earth) used in communications and surveillance”, so I suppose they were very helpful in the WWI.

In a more described way, what causes an  earth whistler is when we have a situation when in the ionized gas that exists in the region of space; frequencies just so happen to not travel at the same speed, which in return produces a whistling tone that decreases in frequency with increasing time. Now that I think about it, things that occur in nature are unique because they occur for a reason. We humans have found ways to utilized some of natures attributes to the world by turning them into things that could benefit us on a personal level. It has also been said by educators on Wikipedia that there has been whistling sounds heard on Jupiter, which indicates that lighting strikes there. So if lighting is apart of nature and some signs of nature have been reported to have occurred on Jupiter, maybe there is life out side the earth atmosphere. There being life outside the earth atmosphere is pretty hard to phantom because we have searched and found nothing. Do I believe that there is life else where besides earth? Well it’s hard to think not but I also believe that man is the next thing closest to GOD. I believe man is God’s greatest creation, who has great powers, but has also created a world of chaos.

I notice that I digressed from the topic and that’s only because the lecture  was not all that interesting, but when I think about life and how things work in nature, I find many interesting things. The world is beautiful.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistler_(radio)

http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/space-audio/sounds/EarthWhistlers/EarthWhistlers.html

Joshua Wilson