Event Blog 1: LASER 5/21

 I attended the LASER Art & Science exhibit last Thursday, May 21st. I was able to hear from a number of speakers about projects they were involved in.

Professor Vesna introducing the speakers!

 There were a large number of presentations, but I will focus on two that I particularly liked. The main exhibit was also very interesting, but I figured that others would focus on that, which dealt with the concept of infinity. Those photos are included at the end.

My second favorite artists focused on collaborative art projects, meaning they required participation from observers. For example, they had an exhibit on pink sound where observers would listen to pink sound and the artists would record reactions. Pink sound is very similar to white sound, but is largely more natural. In white sound, all frequencies of sound are played at the same intensity, but pink sound has an inverse ratio between intensity and frequency. Thus, the deeper sounds are played at a higher volume and the high sounds are played at a low volume. I loved their picture of two individuals in the desert listening to shellphones, which was just two sea shells worn like a headset.

My second favorite artists, who dealt with collaborative art projects

 My favorite exhibit was by scientist turned artist Tamila Elul, a biology professor from UC Berkeley. She was looking at the similarities between Sam Francis's, an abstract painter, different works of art and histological stains. She was mentored by Peter Selz and conducted morphometric analysis of the cells. She was able to measure and compare both the aspect ratio and circularity of human cells as compared to Francis's paintings. The results were interesting: his paintings matched up extremely well to various different types of cells!

The main exhibit dealt with types of infinity, which I found very interesting, but very confusing. Although the artist did a great job explaining things, it definitely seemed like subject matter I would have to research to fully understand.

A picture of the installation. The lines are made of foam and wire

Another picture of the installation

A selfie in the installation! I had to leave quickly, so I snapped this picture shortly before leaving.

Overall, I definitely enjoyed the exhibition. Some of the speakers were talking about some very abstract or very philosophical concepts that were difficult to wrap my head around, but I enjoyed being exposed to so many different types of art. I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for exposure to some non-traditional art projects. I enjoyed the way some of the artists approached their work, like it was a science experiment. That methodical approach is very interesting and something I would be interested in seeing more of.