Event 5

The S.A.D. event was my favorite event so far. It inspired me so much! I think I want to be a DESMA major now. Students were so creative with their projects. I really enjoyed walking around the exhibit, and looking at all of the projects. There were so many interesting ones but my favorite one was about the Desperate Housewives. 

Ari Govan was the artist I chose to study at the exhibit. She is friends with my teammates on my volleyball team, and one of them is actually featured in her artwork holding a knife pointed at a pie. I thought her project was absolutely amazing and super creative. She made a title sequence for a TV show. She used a combination of footage from the 1950's and her own footage to create it. The show Dexter was her inspiration. 

She used a combination of art and science to create her title sequence. She used technology (her computer) to splice together different clips. She used art to sequence them in a specific order, and pose scenes to film. Her project was very successful and entertaining. 

Besides her title sequence, Ari also created posters. She was inspired by the TV shows Desperate Housewives, and Masters of Sex. She posed people (my teammate!) in a bed and with a pie and a knife. The pictures turned out really well. 

After looking at Ari's display, it made me think that a career involving DESMA would be amazing. DESMA is a really great subject because it uses both art and science. I enjoy both of these subject matters immensely. All of the projects displayed had a mixture of science and art. This exhibit showed me how amazingly talented UCLA students are, and how important DESMA is to our culture flourishing. 

Event 4

Maria Antonia Gonzalez Valerio's main idea in her speech is that art and science are intertwined. She leads an art and science group at the University of Mexico and does a lot of influential work in Mexico. She said, "science, art,  and philosophy are producing interpretations of the world, and these interpretations let us see the real world." 

The first biotech was produced in Mexico. Biotechnology is when you produce a mutant of a plant, vegetable, animal,etc. Maria produced mutant blue flowers; one was a super flower that only had petals. The other was transgenic. Maria and her colleagues created a gallery so people could see their GMO flowers. They tricked audience into thinking that GMO’s were toxic. Showed that the general public does not know what GMO’s are. 

Corn is a very important food in Mexico because it is a staple in Mexican's diets and their national identity. Scientists want to grow transgenic corn, but Maria is fighting this. Transgenic corn is illegal to consume in Mexico but is legal to test on. However, animals are being fed transgenic corn and transgenic corn is toxic. The problem of transgenic corn is becoming huge because we don’t know if the corn is transgenic or not because it is not labeled.  

Maria decided to work with  pigs. She went to an international conference and went into a field to look at pig's living conditions. She created a small exhibition, a theatrical production, and ate a dinner with pigs. She decided to clean pig bones for her exhibition but it was way harder than she thought. She wanted to show that pigs are living in horrible conditions such as being in cages so they cannot move. This problem is very close to my heart. I am a big animal lover, and hate the conditions animals are put in before they are slaughtered. We should create cages that are more humane for animals to live in. We should use science to create these cages, and art to make them look nicer so that animals can live in peace before they die.