Felix Candela

This past week we attended a lecture on the works of Felix Candela and how his use of technology has helped to create these sculptural beauties. The professors at the MIT lecture were very interesting and made his works open my eyes at least to different methods we can derive building ideas from. Candela uses these saddle like structures to create buildings with a thin layer of concrete but still very elegant and functional. When we think of concrete designs we think of these massive blocks kind of sitting in space. Candela used a method where he could create these shapes off a grid and using straight lines. I found in amazing how he took this very grid like rigid thing and created a flowing structure even though it is completely comprised of straight elements. I think that Candela proposes a great way to look differently at how we design and how by understanding the weight and stresses on a building could allow for these interesting new shapes to be created. He becomes a great influenence on the discovery of pushing certain materials we may never have thought to be able to use in certain ways to a limit.

StelArc and Bill Viola...

On tuesday, we had a presentation on two different topics that were polar opposites, StelArc and Bill Viola. StelArc is an artist who in a way somewhat scares me and makes my stomach twist with his puncturing of his skin with hooks and suspending himself in different areas. I can understand how for StelArc this may have somewhat of a religious meditative kind of effect on a person. You are pushing your body to do something you may not have know it is able to do. His whole idea of the body as a structure and everything being attached is just a material over the structure interested me even though the images of him doing it grossed me out. There are many different cultures who have been doing these kind of ritualistic things for centuries. Bill Viola on the other hand uses many different video techniques to show different elements that are in the world that we can all relate to in some way or another. For some cultures around the world the elements are important to us because they are main sources we use in our daily lives to sustain life. While watching some of Viola's videos I felt more at ease and calm with the trickling water rather than StelArc's shock and awe technique that he uses.

Robo Scientist...

While reading some articles on Yahoo! today I came across one that really caught my attention. This article was one that talked about robots actually starting to take the place of scientist. Researchers are now able to create a robot that can reason, formulate theories and discover scientific knowledge on their own. Now this is very scary to me. I understand that a robot can be helpful in getting into small areas and being very precise and accurate but I do not know if I would trust it running on its own to open me up. The article explains that for right now they are performing "humble" tasks but soon scientists hope that these beings will be able to unravel complex biological systems, designing new drugs, and model the world's climate or understanding the cosmos. One of the creators of this machine from Cornell makes that statement that these machines will not make scientist obsolete any day soon but believes that one day they will be able to perform the research development needs of scientists. I wonder though is science all about researching and developing things on your own so that you are familiar with what it is you are doing? What is the need for machines to figure everything out for us just so that we can in turn pretty much repeat what it is they are doing? Does that then make us a living machine following the same repetitive pattern in our own lives almost becoming a slave to these machines? I think we can see this today in our own world with the internet. No longer are the days of researching in the library under stacks of books searching for answers, we can just hope on our hand dandy computer. But really what do you get out of the research if you are really not experiencing it for yourself and just repeating what is being shown or told to you. All I know is, it seems like machines are more and more over powering our daily lives and I am scared to see what happens when we are all just sitting around one day kicking ourselves for bringing about our own downfall with careers and daily tasks. We must realize our limits and make sure we are maintaining control over the situation, because right now it seems we are just trying to constantly out do each others and in return I see many of us becoming lazier and lazier.

Always Dreaming of a Utopian Dream...

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley shows us this idea of a "utopian society" where everyone belongs to everyone and everything is pretty much predetermined for them leaving them not a lot of ability to change and become what I feel it means to be a human. To me these people in Brave New World are just robots interacting with the things surrounding them but not realizing that these things were already all laid out for them. To be a human in my eyes is being an individual with your own distinct characteristics that is a part of a greater whole that learns from events that happen in their lives and reacts in a certain manner not pre programmed in our mind. To me it is that freedom of choice that is my utopian dream.

Freedom is something that means alot to me and is a big part of my life that I feel I am always working and striving to achieve and up hold within our society. America seems to be an example of this idea of freedom and kind of always being an beacon of light to other places in the world as the "land of the free and home of the brave". Yes we do have freedom here in America but sometimes it still feels as though we are trapped in a way. For example, this idea of freedom of speech. Sure we can say what we want but there is always someone there kind of censoring what we are saying to make sure that certain things do not provoke some ideas to occur with people. With these freedoms can come some set backs such as drugs. In our world today we use drugs to escape from the world around us, forget about our worries and even sometimes be someone who we are not. We can also see this in Brave New World with people taking SOMA to go on these mental vacations because they are feeling depressed and need to escape from their problems instead of facing things head on. If you are at the point where you are trying to escape your freedom by allowing yourself to fall into such a set back I feel as though you are just harming yourself and pushing away from this freedom by comitting yourself to something so powerful that can metally control you.

Lastly, with this idea of freedom and the utopian dream in general I feel that you are always striving for it but ou can never fully reach it. Yes maybe you can find a utopian mentally but in the physical world I feel it is much harder to escape unless you are seculded by yourself and never really see anyone. The interactions of people and the creation of conflicts are something that hold us back. Instead of talking things out with one another we use violence and guns to prove whose freedom is better than someone else's. In the end the utopian dream becomes that holy grail that we always strive to achieve and can see but never really touch.

Cloning Debate...

On friday we had a class debate on the issue of cloning with three different subcategories to touch upon. I was placed on the side of having to agree with this idea of cloning and to decide what the good aspects were to having it. Now in my mind before we even started the debate I thought that I would have a hard time arguing against something that I really did not know much about or believe in. To help me understand this topic a little better I went and researched some articles about the basics of this and some actual good things that can come from it.

When I first thought cloning I immediately thought of embryotic stem cell reasearch, little did I know though that you can also use things like bone marrow to do stem cell research. This slowly changed my mind a little bit about the whole topic and I think using bone marrow and other forms of stem cell research is great in helping us discover cures for diseases or even creating organs and other things to help us. Still I am a little touchy on the whole embryotic stem cell research only because I still feel that it is a human life that you are experimenting on.

Overall though I thought that the debate went really well. I know that not alot of us agreed on which side we are but I think in a debate you sometimes have to just keep and open mind and listen to all that is being said around you. Sometimes by just listening you can learn alot about a topic. I feel like everyone was engaged in the conversation we were all having and not too many were bored. I found the debate very interesting to hear what people had to say about this topic and how they could relate it to certain events that they might see possibly happening in the future. We just need to know when it is the right time for this and when it is not because we have to remember that we should be the ones controlling our world not the technology surrounding it.

After the debate we had the two presenters come in and talk to us. They gave some good insight on how the art and technology has helped to give them a little bit of a background into what they do in their professions now. One of the presenters stated that you should make sure you take every opportunity that you can. I took this to heart because right now I am studying architecture but I do not necessarily want to be stuck behind a computer at a firm. I would like to try to be a consultant of some kind to a construction management firm and make sure I know a little bit of every aspect of the industry so that I do not go in looking like a fool who thinks they know everything.

Cyborg Manifesto

While reading the "Cyborg Manifesto" I became very confused on just how a robot and in any way reflect what a human is. In my mind a cyborg is no more than a machine that has a set plan in mind to do certain goals. As if they are programed from conception to do certain tasks. As a human we have emotion and feelings where as we can create cyborgs to have emotion and feel the point is do they really understand and create a memory of just what that pain is or the consequences of the actions they have just done to make this pain.

Another thing I questioned in this reading was how can you relate just feminism to the cyborgs. Even though we can program these cyborgs to be either feminine or masculine I feel like the cyborg is just an organism not necessarily a gender. The human DNA is what determines a persons gender, for the cyborg it is the pattern you encode into the cyborg. When I think about the difference between masucline and feminine I begin to think about what it is to be a man or a woman. With men, if you watch what kind of video games they play, you can see a need for conflict to be around them in order to achieve a "right" of being a man. With women, you see more of a want to change the environment they are in, maybe this is embeded into women to have more of a nurturing nature. Still I have a very hard time relating feminism alone to being a cyborg.

I guess we just have to ask ourselves what it is a cyborg actually is and what is its purpose and function in our world. As long as we do not become some kind of mad scientist and let our powers go out of control then I think we will be ok. But what happens when you lose control of what you have created? Frankenstein was a prime example of this even though he was not a cyborg.

The Man Who Fell to Earth...

In the last class we watched the film "The Man Who Fell to Earth" starring David Bowie, who is an alien who has come to earth in search of water because his planet has run short. While here we discover that he has many patents for new technological advances which could make him a very wealthy man and allow for him to possibly return to the world that he had come from.

This film poses a very interesting question to us all, what if there is life out there beyond what we know, are these beings more advanced than us? We have wondered for a very long time what exactly might exist beyond our reach out in space. So examples are crops fields having mysterious patterns left in them over night, flying saucer sightings, and some people claiming to be abducted in their sleep. Do these beings from other worlds really exist and are they trying to make contact with us or are they just observing until they decide to make a move at a later time? We should keep in mind that in the universe we are just a small minor particle within it and that many things could exist outside the world that we are trapped in. Many people will say that the government is just trying to hide things from us and that they are "weather balloons" that are part of a routine check, but there are just somethings you cannot fake. I think that we all have to keep an open mind about things that could exist around us and not lock ourselves into some kind of self bubble.

Yesterday I was reading an article on Yahoo.com about a girl from Buffalo, NY who was constantly being harassed by her ex-boyfriend through texts messages and online. She went as far as to get her phone number changed and changed her emails and online profiles for various websites. One night she receives a text message from an unknown number and who does it happen to be... her harassing ex-boyfriend saying, "you should keep to yourself and stay away from other people." This has now been termed as "textual harassment, and the fact that most of us would have a hard time ignoring it because the alert constantly going off until it is acknowledged. One problem is that most people must pay for text messages and as the victim said, "I am paying to be harassed".

Does this set an example of just less and less private our lives seem to be becoming with the aid of more and more forms of technology? Even when trying to create a new life and become annonymous we are unable to because in the end we are connected in some way back to that life that we were. Many people would argue that we do have complete control over what is happening with technology and how it is effecting our lives. For this college student though how was she to control the fact that someone was still looking for her for the pure enjoyment of harassment. I feel that this article sets a prime example of how we are not in control of how people can find us or what we are connected to via the internet. If someone is looking for you they will find you and no limits, that is why I do not trust the internet and I try to keep tabs and control over what may be posted about me. I know I cannot control everything but the world seems to be becoming smaller and smaller where people can know each other countries away from each other. With the growth of more and more technology we are seeing a shrinking in our everyday world and easier access to things that were once far far away and unexplored.

Guy & Dolls

Yesterday in class we watched a documentary called "Guys and Dolls". At first I thought, "Oh wow this is going to be something about the play"... not what I expected at all. This documentary was about guys who purchase these life like dolls in order to have some form of companionship. For many these dolls were a way to have some form of company because they have been "rejected" by society. For others it seems like it is almost a way to get some form of revenge on the women that have deserted them, presenting a more threatening image.

It disturbs me how in both cases it seems like women just kind of become these objects that you can do what ever you want with as long as they do not disagrees or hurt you. I am glad that these people are happy with the life that they have chosen but are they really happy with their life or just living in a false sense of reality. Companionship is usually something that all people need in order to survive and feel needed, and as one person said, "I feel a connection when I look into her eyes and by just being with her." As humans we have the ability to be alone but I think we all might face that feeling of can we survive the loneliness and no human interaction. Even the people in this documentary will still go out in the world and view others but because they have that security blanket of the doll at home they feel that maybe people are judging them more but maybe they are just not putting forth an effort. In the end I think that this is just a convenient escape to trying to interact in the world and not have to deal with the idea of rejection.

Who's really in control...?

There always seems to be this reoccurring theme of who is actually seeing and in control of what people may find out about us online. Recently there was an article about Facebook and its user terms on Yahoo. In the article the founder of the site states, "on Facebook, people own their information and control who they share it with."

In a way this is true because of the many different privacy setting allowed on the site to block certain people from seeing things or deleting things that were maybe posted of you like that unflattering picture you were hoping no one would see. But in reality are we really in control? Anyone could really get that information if they want it that bad. Not only that but others can post whatever they want about you and no matter how many times you delete it chances are it is still out there on the internet somewhere.

I think now we need to be very careful of what it is we post and other people see on the internet. This can have many effects on different aspects of your life, for example, say you are looking for a job, that person may not hire you because they went onto facebook and see photos of you making an idiot of yourself. Bosses are not going to want someone on their team who could potentially be a detriment to their company.

Frankenstein man or monster?

Frankenstein has purposed the question of how do we determine when someone is a man or a monster. I guess it all depends on who is seeing the monster and interacting with him. His creator is someone who cannot even stand being near him but becomes one of the only people who the monster can have a conversation with. Everyone else who sees him gets frightened and either tries to harm him or runs away. But the reactions that he receives effects him emotionally and causes his mood to change very drastically. In a way the monster is seeing more beauty in the world that some "normal" people are.

He talks about the ways in which the seasons and how the sunlight and nature just uplifts his spirits, almost making him forget about the things happening around him. The monster is even friendly and willing to help people out when they are in danger. Then a whole different person occurs when he begins to be judge off of his looks. I feel bad for him because deep down he probably is this caring, nurturing person who does not realize his own strength when he does something wrong or hurtful.

We can think about this in our everyday lives. How many times have you walked around and made fun of how someone looks or their clothes or how they act? What if you were to find out that people were making fun of you? You obviously would not be happy about it, maybe even to the point of being harmful to them or even yourself.

Shepard Fairey

This past weekend I went to the ICA to view the Shepard Fairey exhibit. I never realized how much of an influence he has had on many people from political views to musicians to average everyday people. While viewing the exhibit I was very interested in how he made the art by using newspapers as his canvas and either stenciling or silk screening over images.

The messages he shows through his images are sometimes very radical if you stand there and just look at them. He depicts how in war there is this idea of hope, and the good things versus the bad. He uses this image of roses in guns which we see back in the 60s to show a kind of protest and how we have that option to take arms and fight or to try and create some kind of peace.

Othe interesting images that were in the exhibit were those of famous figures through out history. Some examples were of TuPac, Malcom X, Martin Luther King Jr., memebers of the band the Sex Pistols and more. His reason for creating these images was because he feels as though sometimes we take them for granted and do not completely give them the credit that they deserved and the accomplishments they have helped us to strive for. You can tell how much the punk movement played on him through the ways is which he talks about rising up against authority and his many different images of the Sex Pistols band members.

This exhibit was very interesting, before coming to it I knew very little about what his art was about other than he uses the image of Andre the Giant as propaganda and "obey". Now I better understand just what kind of message he is trying to depict.

The Importance of Art

Art is sometimes something in our world that we very easily tend to over look and not take the time to understand what it is we are looking at.  Yesterday we went to the MFA to examine the many different eras before us in art and how they have gradually changed from very clergy/ religious themes to focusing on the rich of society to still life and those elements in our daily environments.  Many paintings were used as studies to examine different aspects of a setting and to evoke some kind of emotion from the viewers.  

When we came to this painting of a monk done by El Greco there was something that stopped me and really drew my into the painting.  Maybe it was the abstractness of the elements in the painting or how it seems very mystical or it could have even been the way in which Greco draws down and lengthens the elements of the painting.  Either way the painter undoubtably gained my attention to examine what is happening.  I was able to be drawn into the painting because of the emotion that is being portrayed in it.  It made me step back and wonder.  Just by making a person stop and think about that painting means they have helped you to take a piece of something you may be familiar with and relate it to some other event that is occurring or has happened in the past.

The Art of Aging...

Now I understand that we are all a little scared to become old, but that does not always mean it is a bad thing.  Many people now are resorting to plastic surgeries to "drink from the fountain of youth" rather than for medical related issues.  We have become a society looking more and more like robots that cannot function or show emotion because we are so filled with injections and implants.  There has got to be some point in a person's life where they have got to draw the line though.  In class, while talking about this whole idea of growing old and if you would resort to plastic surgery to try and save some years it made me think about the show "Nip Tuck".  Personally I like watching this show because in a way you become like a psychiatrist and wonder sometimes what possesses people to adjust themselves like this.  And the one line from the show that always sticks in my head is "What don't you like about yourself?"  Not, "How can we help you?" or "why are you here?" but immediately put yourself down so we can try to lift you up with some "amazing" age restoring options.  I also thought about this lady who I have seen on the tv who said she is 34 years old and has had over 40 plastics surgeries done in here life.  That is more that 1 a year since she was born!!  And honestly she looks worse than ladies who are her age cause it is so fake/ unrealistic.  

You begin to lose sight into life and how aging is actually all a part of this journey of slowing down and just letting life lead you where you need to go and what you need to look like.  We were asked if we would ever consider plastic surgery for non medical reasons, but for reason to turn back the hands of time.  I say bring on the wrinkles!  I would rather age gracefully than to inject or cut my body open in the sake of keeping a few years.  Plus who is to say that by looking a few years younger you will actually live a little longer?  I am ready to just let time take its course and if I am that scary looking then people have the option not to look at me.  In the end we are all gonna sag a little and get some wrinkles no matter how many times you get surgery done.  It is a way of life, and as long as you are happy that should be all you need.

"The Birthmark" by Nathaniel Hawthorne was an interesting story that can be applied to what we see in society today.  The story talks of a woman who was born with a hand shaped birthmark on her cheek.  Her husband tells his wife that she is perfect but that her birthmark brings out this sort of ugliness that he cannot stand the site of.  This is something that she has had to live her whole life and is already insecure about it.  The husband is constantly trying to create a cure for it and she finally breaks down accepting to try this scientific remedy he has created.  After taking the potion she goes to sleep and the mark begins to disappear, little did they know that the disappearance of this would be her death.

After reading this story it really made me think about how we see people in our world and the society around us.  We constantly are being shown these images of people who everyone would consider desirable and perfect at some levels.  Needing perfect hair, perfect clothes, perfect skin, placing this false image of needing to only see gorgeous things on the outside.  None of us on this planet are perfect we were all born with some kind of defect and it does not always have to be on the outside.

A personal example for me would have to be my cousin Nicole.  She was born with down-syndrome and cannot help the way that she is.  Sure sometimes people stare at her and point or make ignorant comment like "hey look at the retard" but they are seeing the outside and not the inner beauty.  Nicole is one of the most fun-loving people in the world, she lives her life not listening to what people are saying about her but makes a difference by letting it role off her should and not being consumed in that rudeness showing the world that she is a strong woman who has had to overcome some obstacles in her life.  One night I had heard my aunts and my father discussing Nicole, and not once did I hear them ridicule her or wish that she was never around because of her sometimes embarassing antics.  We have accepted her for the person we see on the inside, the girl who just wants to have fun and play out in the yard with her sheep dog Paco.

I think that sometimes people have a hard time trying to see the good inside of people rather than just looking at the outside because we have become a society that is too busy to take time for anything.  We look and immediately make decisions because we do not want to make and effort to, we do not have the time to slow down.  I sometimes wonder is we just slow down a  little and stop rading so much into what is beauty and what is not we would have a lot less problems in the world, maybe even a lot less unneeded surgeries to enhance ourselves for the sake of beauty.  Just take a look at Michael Jackson, he is a prime example of someone who was beautiful on the inside and so talented, and then he got sucked into how he was looking on the outside that he now looks like some kind of alien from another planet.  Plain and simple though I think we all need to not judge people because we ourselves are not perfect.