Hearth's Desma 9 Blog

Something that interests me is the ways that art has historically and currently been called upon to fill a need that medical technology is not yet equipped to handle. The new military technologies that emerged during World War 1 were devastating, with many soldiers that survived the war ending up horribly disfigured by machine guns and shrapnel. Since plastic surgery was still in its infancy, they had the ability to keep these men alive and maybe restore some functionality to their faces, but the psychological effects of having lost ones' face in the war needed to be addressed.   One man pictured before and after donning his facial mask. (Source: Anna Coleman Ladd papers, Archives of American Art, S.I.) To address this need, the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department was born. Francis Derwent Wood, the program's founder, said: "I endeavour by means of the skill I happen to possess as a sculptor to make a man's face as near as possible to what it looked like before h...

  A video showcasing the motion of 'Can't Help Myself.'      Hearing the topic of the intersection of robots and art, a piece immediately came to mind that I had seen go viral a couple years back.This is "Can't Help Myself" by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, which was installed at the Guggenheim in 2016. It is an automated robot arm that slowly leaks dark-red liquid and is programmed to keep the liquid within a certain area, even though its very motions to do this task only cause it to leak at a higher rate. Many people felt emotionally connected to this robot, like the Tiktok users quoted by AUTHOR who "find this sad and sympathize with the robot by saying ‘’it looks so tired and unmotivated:(.’’ and ‘’I just want to turn it off to let it ‘rest’"."   The piece at the beginning of its exhibition and at the end, showing the splattering of liquid all around the space it is in. The robot was eventually turned off in 2019, after just three years of existence...

     The intersection of math and art brings back memories of playing with a Spirograph back in elementary school to create curving paths that started out looking chaotic but always looped back on themselves and created beautiful symmetric paths that could almost look like three-dimensional curvature sometimes. Prof. Vesna's notes in lecture on vanishing points and perspective really interesting because this is something I have struggled with in my own visual art. In the end, this is a mathematical technique to help visualize 3D space on a flat page.    Vintage Spirograph art showing the various patterns possible.        These days, my creative hobbies lean more into the fiber arts, so I wanted to explore how these interact with mathematics. It turns out there is a ton of interconnection between fiber arts, mathematics, and the first computers! Knitting patterns are composed almost entirely of two stitches, the knit and purl stitch, with...