Event 3

My third event was at LACMA with my roommate. While walking there, we passed under Levitated Mass, a boulder suspended in the air, bridging two separate fields. Before even getting to the museum we both commented on the fact that this solid connection between two conventionally separate spaces was similar to what we have learned this quarter in the bridging of art, science, and technology which are thought to be separate fields. It’s funny how we start to see connections when we aren’t expecting it.

Most of the time I think of how science influence art, in the chemical technology that goes into making pigments, physics that go into making a statue stand without tipping over, math that is used in architecture, and technology used in photography, lighting, and videography.

However, I have to remind myself that art equally influences technology. Without creativity and futuristic ideas to fabricate the concept of a moving, mechanical vehicle, we wouldn’t have cars or skyscrapers or a busy city like LA as we know it. Chris Burden’s Metropolis II represents an entire urban complex as a twenty-first century city with 1,100 custom-designer cars, 18 highways, and a variety of architectural structures made of wood, glass, natural stone tiles, and other materials.

 The See The Light exhibition was most inclusive to our course, covering photography, perception, and cognition and how photography parallels vision science and neuroscience. Emerging in 1839 in the context of the Industrial Revolution, photography served to give visual form to the experience of modern life and the modern visions of fast, factual, reliable, and replicable things. Its materials and meanings have evolved to reflect the social, political, and economic priorities of any given time and place. Experimental modernism and naturalism used photography as a medium to restore balance within the individual psyche and within society after WW1 with the dualism of perception and sensation.

Photography and psychology work together to capture viewers’ emotion, imagination, and attention by use of the scientific instrument and artistic tool called a camera.

Frederick H. Evans’ A Sea of Steps does just this; it makes perception subjective and engages the viewers’ mind.

The 80’s experienced huge leaps such as the development of staining methods to make nerve cells visible, tonal range enhancement, extended spectral range of emulsions, and recording of electrical activity in the brain. A big advancement was half-tone printing in 1881 as a photomechanical process that allowed photographs to be printed with texts in books, newspapers, and magazines.

 

I saw an image that was used in class in the context of a photographic timeline. This helped me better understand the mutualistic evolution of art and technology to be used in medicine for X-rays.

My last stop was Camera Obscura, which tied everything together. In a pitch-black room, an inverted image of the reality of the world around us was projected onto a wall with moving cars and upside down people. Experimental psychology was used to address the unfolding of sensation into interpretation, which validated photographers in their quest to make subjective pictorial statements, as opposed to objective material records. This is exercised in how the viewer questions reality and perception, two subjects that art and technology can manipulate and put into perspective.  

LACMA is an absolute must, it applies to every topic we covered this quarter.