by Blair Georgakas

      It is human nature to get caught up in our own lives.  We are so concerned about our work, relationships, and finals that our lives become everything we know and everything that is important.  We think the world is this massive place and it is in comparison to us.  But let’s think bigger.  We forget that Earth is just one planet of our solar system.  Our solar system is just one of many in our galaxy and our galaxy is just one of all of space.  How significant really are our lives?  How significant is even our planet?  Earth is just one tiny blue dot in hundreds of thousands of miles of space.  It makes me wonder why I am even here.  What is the point of me living this life?  On a grand scale, my life does not really mean anything.  It reassures me that it really doesn’t matter about that one test I failed or the one time I really made a mistake.            Thinking about how small Earth is in comparison to space is so interesting to me.  We question whether or not there are other life forms.  But I don’t see how it’s even a question.  In my mind, there has to be more life out there.  How can we really believe that our planet is the only one of millions that has life?  Isn’t it naïve and almost arrogant to believe that we are the only planet with life?  The question now is when we will discover it.

Folly of science?

                Whenever I hear of these great breakthroughs and ideas in nanotechnology such as buckyballs, nanotubes, and their possibilities to store medicine or build strong structures I think of how far science in general has progressed. I have always felt that science was always advancing, that it always had a purpose to push our understanding of our world further. I still do think that science does expand our understanding of everything but ever since I heard James Gimzewski speak about science, I have found it funny how scientists often have no idea what they’re doing as scientists (in the general sense).

                Gimzewski made it sound like he simply stumbled upon his discovery of the nano-gear, and yet he got an incredible amount of publicity for what he doesn’t seem too surprised to find. He transformed great discoveries like the buckyball and nanotube into useless chunks of carbon when all these years, the media has been praising them. Gimzewski changed my view of today’s scientists from people who are complete experts on the outcomes of any of their experiments and research into more loose ended professionals who deal with discoveries as they come.

                Of course I don’t think Gimzewski really means to be negative about such discoveries. After all, with more research, who knows what we can make of all the useless discoveries in nanotech. I think he was spot on when he emphasized how much more important imagination was compared to knowledge. By seeing beyond all the useless stuff we have created so far, we can possibly discover something of a true break through. We may even find something that can make useless discoveries usefull.

                I guess we can go full circle here and conclude out quarter with Gimzewski’s statement about imagination. What would science be without imagination? Science would just be the study of what is. Without art, without imagination, without something different, absurd, creative, or whatever, we wouldn’t be here with our tiny laptops, modern medicine, artificial flavoring, hemi cars, ect. ect. Science would be folly without imagination.

 by Blair Georgakas

Can false memories be created? Some researchers suggest that false memories can actually be implanted in patients’ brains through therapy.  Others believe that those patients have just recovered repressed memories of real traumatic experiences.  However, there is a significant amount of evidence that supports the idea that false memories can in fact have a huge impact of people’s lives.  There have been countless incidences where children were repeatedly told by family or loved ones the details of an event that occurred whether they were true or not.  The children have been told so many times that eventually they truly believe that they remember it for themselves.  Children have actually been tricked into believing they were responsible for some bad event that happened and accepted guilt and consequence because they believed they deserved it.

            In 1992, a woman by the name of Beth Rutherford came to get help from a counselor.  Her counselor helped her through therapy to recover memories of her father raping her from the ages of 7 to 14.  She even remembered her mother helping hold her down while her father forced intercourse.  Through more and more sessions, she remembered getting pregnant twice and was forced to kill the baby herself using a coat hanger.  When she went into the doctor to get examined, results showed that she had never had sexual intercourse in her life and had never been pregnant.  Beth ended up suing her therapist for a million dollars after her father was forced to resign his position as a clergyman due to the accusations.  A similar case took place in 1997 in which Nadaen Cool sued her therapist for 2.4 million dollars.  She started receiving psychiatric help in 1986.  In the process she came to believe she had memories of eating babies, being raped, watching her 8 year-old friend be murdered, and of having sex with animals.  The therapist even performed exorcisms on her body to call Satan from her body.

Blair Georgakas 

Our guest speaker, Richard Clar designed a project in which he truly used his creativity to its fullest in order to blend art and technology and throw them into a unique environment, space.  I was fascinated by his originality and curiosity.  Richard Clar designed a dolphin that orbits in space and transmits dolphin sounds.  What was really intriguing about the art piece was that it also had a purpose.  The purpose of it was to communicate or send out messages to extraterrestrials and search for extraterrestrial intelligence.   I was amazed at how many different areas of knowledge he incorporated in just this one project.  In my opinion, it would have been even more successful if there was someway the dolphin in space could also detect messages being sent from extraterrestrial intelligence.  There was no way to find out if the calls from the dolphin were in fact heard.

Why did he choose to make the satellite resemble a dolphin?  Dolphins are commonly recognized as a symbol for intelligence.  While we, human beings, are trying to communicate with other forms of intelligence in space, a dolphin seems to be an appropriate sculpture.  It recognizes the fact that there are many forms of intelligence.  Dolphins also communicate primarily through the “acoustic sphere.”  They can take in 20 times the information from noises as we can in the same amount of time.  While we get most of our information through our eye sight, they get most of theirs through hearing.  The idea is that extraterrestrial intelligence might have a better chance of picking up and understanding dolphin voices.

http://www.arttechnologies.com/site-2005/projects/space-dolphin2.html

http://www.arttechnologies.com/site-2005/projects/space-dolphin.html

by Blair Georgakas

Is art or science more important to society?  Our obsession with wealth has greatly influenced the science world to mass produce new technologies that will make our lives more convenient so they can sell their products and consequently make huge sums of money for large corporations.  However, what drives the ideas of what to produce?  The answer is the media.  The media is constantly brain-washing society with what is seen as “in” and beautiful.  This is art.  Essentially, the human population is obsessed with art, with things that appeal to our senses.  The movie industry is so highly regarded because we enjoy being entertained.  Actors and singers that go big make millions of dollars because of the art they produce.  Because the media has such a huge impact on our opinions, we have become consumed with body image as well.

                The media has convinced us that beautiful  women are skinny, tan, and big in the chest.  Since we regard art so highly, our body image has become so important to us.  What is better to beautify than ourselves?  This kind of thinking has made the art of plastic surgery become so popular.  We are influenced by the artists we look up to especially in film and music where plastic surgery is quite common.  This last Saturday, Kanye West’s mother, Donda West, died due to complications from her multiple plastic surgery procedures.  She was only 58.  Her heart had some condition and was just not quite strong enough for the procedures.  It is amazing to see just what people are willing to risk in order to be appealing to others. 

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iNzp3q-nbIhOi1ij8DS6V0iOHU0Q

So I actually had a lot of fun doing this project. It was more creative and innovative that allowed me to use my creative side, (being a DESMA student we generally all loath lecture classes) but this one wasn’t bad.

There were a lot of good ideas, first the “Transformer” robot was pretty funny in its design and even though it was a scientific impracticality it still was intresting to see what people where thinking.

There were a lot of them that replicated similar designs just adding a elmement or tweaking the original design, including my own, and some of them were actually quite done. You know how they say if you have one persons imput the outcome can only be so much, but if you add more people a new idea or design might be better than the original.

I already put my 2 cents in on how we should have done the powerpoint, but making sure there was sufficient info to grade us on by adding footnotes, and that was fine. But when I think back as to what we could have done differently to maybe improve on the project, is to perhaps have a paper to go with our presentation. Have a 700-1000 word essay to accompany our slides, and that way we could have been more liberal about how we were going to present it.

Now, I understand we are trying to present this all in 1 min, like a comercial on TV, but I felt rushed. I wanted to explain my work to people and have them appreciate it, and I think a minute didn’t really accomplish that. If next time maybe we can work in groups, (I know we had the option to work in pairs but maybe next time 3-4), and have parts of it ready to turn in during TA sessions, we could have had more quality presentations.

Also people ran over time so much, making it under a min was maybe 30-45% of the class who presented. Maybe the idea above it too much for a midterm, and it doesn’t seem long enough for the final, but it would definetly be something I would love to do as a project, maybe even create that work that we are presenting for the final.

anyway really fun stuff, I enjoyed it and hope that anyone else who takes this class gets to expierience the same thing (or better )

-Leo

leonardo Maros

603-406-848

by Blair Georgakas

I thought the midterms were extremely successful.  We could have simply taken the class period and written a short essay about our idea and how we would go about creating it for the midterm.  However, the presentations gave us a huge advantage.  They gave us the opportunity to hear about everyone’s ideas, enriching our own insight and broadening our perspectives of just what art and science can consist of.  Not only were we able to focus in and thoroughly develop a proposal in one specific area of interest, we were also able to gain an appreciation of the possibilities that exist for the future.  I really enjoyed listening to the projects because it showed me just how creative each individual in our class is and I learned something new about each person and his or her interests.   

                One project that interested me was the project about robotic limbs.  She suggested new ideas to make amputees live more comfortably by creating legs that connect to the nerves.  A sensor would be placed in the brain to detect the person’s desires of how they want to move their limbs.  Then, the robotic leg would pick up its signal and move like any normal leg would.  This incorporated many of the same ideas as my project did and I was fascinated at how the same idea could be used with completely different functions.  My project focused on brain-computer interface and how we can place electrode arrays into human or animal brains in order to control robots just by thinking.  I used the idea of brain-computer interface to control robots in a fun and light-hearted fashion.  I had robots fighting in a boxing match.  She, however, used the idea of BCI in a more practical way. 

                Another project that I found intriguing was the project about beauty and whether beauty is based science or whether it is in the eyes of the beholder.  At first thought, one would not think of beauty as scientific.  However, she presented an interesting idea that beauty can be traced back to specific face structure for men and women through history.  She actually morphed famous faces into the ideal structures in order to compare what we think is beautiful to what scientifically is beautiful.  The idea is perplexing, yet deeply fascinating.

 by Blair Georgakas

The topic of Artificial Intelligence brought up last week really sparked my interest.   We talked about ELIZA, the computer therapist which was programmed in 1966 and parodied a Rogerian therapist.  In class, we logged onto a website and had a short and very superficial conversation with ELIZA.  Her responses mostly consisted of rephrasing what our professor typed in.  It reminded me of middle school when everyone was obsessed with instant messaging.  My friend had told me about a “computer friend” otherwise known as “Smartchild.”  Smartchild was a computer program which basically did the same thing as ELIZA.  It would talk and respond to someone as if it was a person.  However, its responses were very limited.  They came up with others as well.  Soon I was talking to new computer friends like MLB, which gave me updates on major league baseball games and news. 

                ELIZA influenced many other interactive computer games.  One of the biggest ones was Dungeon, which was created in 1975 by Don Daglow.  It is a role playing game where players chose which actions their characters would take and gained experience points.  Another game that spawned around the same time was Adventure, programmed by Will Crowther.  ELIZA undoubtably inspired the creation of Adventure in some way as well.  Adventure was the first game to really set off the whole genre of interactive fiction.  Interactive fiction software includes games in which input is required by the user.  A person using the software controls characters with text commands.  A more recent example of an interactive fiction game is Myst, which came out in 1993 by Macintosh.  It was a game of adventure where the player had no real time limit or threat of dying.  There are no obvious goals in the game and it requires logical thinking.  I have never actually played the game myself, however I remember when I was younger my dad used to play all the time.  I always wondered what the whole game and obsession was all about, but was always too young to understand any of it.  Now realizing the game revolves around logic, I understand why my dad in particular enjoyed it because he has always loved mind games.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst

http://www.worldvillage.com/wv/gamezone/html/reviews/myst.htm

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/play_pr.html

There was a lot of talk this week about robots and people trying to make robots more and more like humans.

Well, I suppose the fundamental question then is are we ready to be able to make another thing that can create something thats potencially better than us?

 Various movies have come out to discuss this topic already, Matrix, AI, or even I Robot. They all, to some degree, potencially show how robots might one day dominate humans. Now even thought these movies are fiction they are based on some VERY reliable research that is being conducted. So the scary thing, is that someday they might become true?

As we continue to create and use machines in our everyday use, they become less and less reliant on the user and more self sufficient, without us really paying much attention to the evolutionary process of machines. I read newsweek and time magazine every once in a while and the things that some people are discovering seem unworldly. The idea of AI seems like a kid brother to the idea of nano-technology and the things that some scientists think they can do with it. I would be more scared of the little robots than the big ones if they were actually able to pull off what their talking about. 

In the past, humans tend to be very self destructive, and eventually I believe that we’ll be using technology to either blow up the earth, kill eachother in some type  bioengineered nontechnology weapon, or to create a machine with AI great enough to replace humans as teir 1 on the food chain. Either way, this kind of technology requires a huge amount of respect and discipline that the human race doesn’t have. Greed, fear and selfishness run rampant is every population and by putting something of this caliber into the mix, lets just say your not trying to bake cookies.

Maybe, by the time we finally achieve these technologic breakthroughs, humanity might be ready for them, but as the world is now; I don’t think were quiet ready for AI.

 -Leo

Kinetic art is an art that has been around for awhile but now is evolving faster and faster. Most of the kinetic art that we see today is in robots. Robots are designed in various ways for a multitude of uses. Many people make robots to perform different tasks. For example, there was a television show where people would make robots to fight eachother. The survival of the robot would depend on the design of the robot. Robots can be designed in other ways.
Some robots are being designed to look like humans. There are many different aspects of art that go into a human like robot. First of all, it takes a lot of artistic abilities for someone to make a robot out of metal to look like a living being. Also, artisitic ability is required to make the robot act human like. The movements of humans is hard to replicate by a nonliving object but artists have to constantly work on getting robots to act and move like a living being.
Now the controversy is that if it takes art to make robots, can robots make art? I think that this question can be answered in two ways. Firstly, I believe that art has to come from one’s soul. Robots cannot accomplish this obviously because they have no soul. THe soul of a person is what makes art. For example, robots have been made that can play instruments. Although the robot is capable of making the sound, I do not believe that it is true music. Robots can’t put in the expression into music that is needed to make genuine music. On the other hand, I think that it is an art to make robots that can create some kind of art, if you can call it that. It is in art in itself to make a robot that can paint a picture or to perform some kind of music but I don’t believe that is a true piece of art.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=0wDZI15tiR0

http://youtube.com/watch?v=t39ZkWvDUWk

http://www.jeffbots.com/artists.html

http://www.lxxl.pt/artsbot/index.html

http://www.halo.gen.nz/robot/

Blair Georgakas 

Where and when was kinetic art first made?

                The first pieces of kinetic art trace back to 1920 by Naum Gabo and his brother, Antoine Pevsner, in Moscow.  Through the late 1950s to the 1960s, kinetic art became popular.  It started out as art pieces that also incorporated motion, mostly by wind, a person’s hand, or a motor.  However, when we think of kinetic art of the present day, we visualize high-tech machines producing sounds and movements that react to observers and their actions.  Kinetic sculptures are a rare form of art that we often do not even correlate with the arts at all.  We think of these machines as nothing more than technology driven by science.  But amazingly, this technology that is driven by science then produces some of the most beautiful and captivating pieces of art of all.

What is your definition of art?

                Art, for me at least, is anything that is an expression of its creator.  For my definition of art, art includes almost everything.  There are millions and millions of thing that initially may not seem to be art, but a valid argument could prove that it is.  Art is either driven by some feeling or inspiration or it brings it out in someone else.  From this interpretation of art, almost all technology can be viewed as art.  This certainly includes kinetic art.  Kinetic art is produced in hopes of letting people interact with it while enjoying themselves.  With this intention aren’t cars then seen as art or laptops or even sports?

 Blair Georgakas

How did math rock get its name?

                Never having heard of math rock in my life before,  I was intrigued when we were first introduced to its name.  Thinking of math rock, I wondered what exactly it is.  Why is it called math rock?  Is it actually based on mathematical equations?  I felt like I had been sheltered and my mind had been shut for years of such a unique idea and all the possibilities we, as humans, are capable of.  I pictured math rock as a chaotic sound with jumbling numbers of beats per measure that were somehow related to a mathematical calculation. 

                As we started getting the history of math rock and learning what it really was about, I realized my assumptions were far off.  Math rock is not at all based on the structure of an equation and beats to a measure, but rather the opposite.  Surprisingly to me, math rock is free to be whatever it wants to be; free to be unexpected.  I found out that it strung off of rock, creating its own genre of music that was different from the same predictable rhythm like so many other sounds during the time.  The name math rock developed only after this new type of music was being discovered.  It got its name not because its sound and math are directly related, but rather because the music gives off the same feeling as an overwhelming and seemingly never ending challenge to solve a calculation would.

What did math rock teach you about the connection between science and art?

                Math rock gave me a new understanding of the connection between science and math.  Typically we think of the connection in video games, where the two directly rely on each other to create a successful product.  We do not at first glance think that science and art are related at all unless we are thinking of the ways in which they need each other, like in the example of video games.  However, after learning more about math rock, I now realize they have a deeper connection.  They can connect in an emotional sense.  The energy and feeling one culture gives off can influence the other, just as math inspired rock and consequently created math rock.