Rebekah P Desma 9

As a third year nursing student, I spend up to 12 hours at a time in the hospital setting, being surrounded by various medical equipment and procedures. When Professor Vesna described different medical scans such as CT scan, MRI, and x-ray as art, I had to stop and think for a second. Can such devices that are used to diagnose illnesses and look into the human body be considered art? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DakhSjja5y0 Or how can these medical advancements not be considered to be art? There is, indeed, an art to reading and understanding the internal workings of the complexity that is the human body. Outwardly, human anatomy may seen healthy and tan and active, yet internally there can be a completely opposite reality. Art evokes emotion. The results of the lines and contours of these graphs and x-rays evoke emotion. With a single mass noted on an x-ray strip, there can be heart-shattering sadness and agonizing emotional turmoil and pain. Yet, the diminishment or d...

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin notes the shift of culture and society and its response to the advancements of technology, particularly through film and photography. Even in the “History of Information,” it seems to be that this modern culture is shifting from the printed book to e-books and Kindle readers, even robotics have this effect. As we progress as a nation in technology, the convenience from these innovations increase as well. For example, the art in technology is that it improves daily living by enhancing things of the past. However, is this advancement always beneficial? In the Disney Pixar movie, “Wall-E,” the art of film is used to explore the risks of an overly dependent society on technology. Society responds well to industrialization since it makes life overall easier and more “enjoyable.” Yet, this movie explores the fine line between convenience and dependency as humans no longer walk around but rather do everything o...

Metaphors on Vision: Films by Stan Brakhage is a compilation of films by the non-narrative filmmaker, Stan Brakhage. Stan used a handheld camera to explore and play with exposure and in-camera editing to create a different and avant garde art style of filmmaking. In this presentation, Brakhage’s “Songs 1-5” and “Song 23” were featured and shown. “Songs 1-5” were filmed with an 8mm lense camera after his high quality 16mm camera was stolen. However, this simplest and lowest type of camera explored minimalism in the film arts. Although ridiculed for his use of a “kid’s toy,” Brakhage was able to break through barriers by creating simplistic masterpieces that used artistic expression to bring intimacy and a delicate nature to the realms of private everyday life. He mastered the film art of superimposition which consisted of rewinding and re-exposing the camera as well as layering different films on top of each other such as in “Song 1” of his wife. This portrayal of his wif...

In my 7th grade fine arts class, we learned about cubism and the works of Pablo Picasso. The intricate shapes and abnormal colors that were scattered across a blank canvas created masterpieces of chaos and beauty, appealing to the internal cry of the messy soul. Our art teacher instructed us to use pastels to draw various musical instruments such as violins and pianos and harps out of geometric shapes. Then we cut the rectangular sheet of paper into four smaller rectangles and were told to rearrange the rectangles facing different directions and in different orders like how a cubist artist would. Cubism defies the natural inclination towards structured math and geometry by exposing them to art This abandonment of traditional art’s constricting linear perspective freed the cubist artists to express themselves in chaotic, unconventional ways by entering the fourth dimension of art. This new dimension of perspective explored the geometry of shapes and shadows of lines that older f...

Ever since I was younger, I grew up being taught to draw a line between scientific exploration and self-exploration, between intellectual pursuits and artistic expression, between the expansion of knowledge and the expansion of creativity, between science and art. Similar to Snow’s opinion, I can see how culture and society has widened the chasm between natural scientists and literary intellectuals. As a nursing major, I struggle to navigate through maze of figuring out if my profession is science or art. Let me shine some light on this topic. On one hand, the studious labors of a nursing school education primarily consists of physiology, anatomy, chemistry, biology, and physics of body mechanics. Tests and research papers increase knowledge and the depth at which the normal functions of the human body can be explained. Memorizing normal lab values of the human chemical makeup and the pharmacology of which drugs would be appropriate to administer boil nurses down to natural scien...