EricL

Medicine and art? When I first looked at the topic of this week, I was like “what”. Even till now, I am still quite confused about how are this two areas related. So this made me go back to the very beginning of the class and look for the meaning of art. When I looked up the Oxford dictionary, art is very much related to creativity and imagination and not specific to visual. So far, we have been constrained to the visual arts. Thus, this week’s topic is a branching out to the less discussed side of art. With a fresh understanding in mind, medicine and med-tech are definitely parts of art. Medical drawing “have been made possibly since the beginning of medicine”.   Human body is a complex system where organs works hand in hand. A carefully drawn medical drawing can correctly depict our internal structures. Especially when the majority of us have the common structure, these drawings allows the doctors to “see” through our body without actually opening us up. Nowadays, with the...

The first event I attended was a series of talks on the topic of Eco Materialism and Contemporary Art. The main focus has been on the social and environmental issues and how are they being portrayed with modern arts.  I arrived the auditorium while during the talk by Ms. Linda Weintraub was talking about the praying robots. It was a really interesting topic about Eco-Arts and was very closely related to our readings. Her key point was about technology advancement and human’s dependency on technology. Indeed, since the industrialization revolution, we have enjoyed so much benefits from the technology advancements and are believing in technology more blindly than ever. Robots are tireless and precise at work which make them a better choice than human. Under the current technology, we cannot employ robots to do everything. However, as technology continue to grow, more automation of industry will happen and eventually a full automation society may be achieved. What happen to u...

http://www.johanscherft.com/ Robotic and art may seemed as disjoint categories. However, in the modern society with the current technology, they are not completely different. In particular, robots are now appearing in abundance in work of arts like movies and paintings. Through the creativity of movie directors and artists, robots are presented to the audience with amazing functions. Of which, some may inspire science to progress to achieve those functionalities. For example, bionic limbs appeared much earlier in comics and TV shows/movie 6 Million Dollar Man  than the actual thing(Misra). Moreover, robots nowadays can become artist themselves, with better technology, robots can be built to create art(RobotArt). This is really revolutionary where robotics were always thought as tools that only follows command without creativity. But now, we can have robots like AARON that paints(Moss).  http://bionic.wikia.com/ Art is ever-growing and changing, especially with tec...