Extra Credit Event 2

For this event I went to the Art + Brain + Morpho Nano Catalogue launch. First there was an online example of the book that I am posing next to. According to the catalog intro, most of the stories and structures were organized by Patricia Olynyk and Professor Vesna. While the Morpho Nano portion came from David Familian, a professor at UCI. Their catalog really explores biological dynamics and different parts of cellular structures.  First Professor Vesna did a short introduction and Professor Olynyk and the other professors all concisely explained their contribution to the catalog. I really appreciated the event because well for starters there were excerpts of the catalog virtually. I also liked how everyone was allowed to mingle and keep looking at different ideas/concepts that led to the catalog. It was also really cool to see Professor Vesna around colleagues and to see her in what she does best. This was my final event and I can see that this was a representation of DESMA 9 all in one, because it literally combined elements that I never would have thought, and they all came together. I enjoyed my time in this course throughout the quarter and it was a wonderful experience.

Extra Credit Event 1

On May 26th I attended the Replica Praesens: A Lecture on Synthetic Life by Sam Wolk, in Broad Art Center. I enjoyed this lecture because visually seeing life activity represented on the screen was really interesting. The third picture represented different color grids intensities that indicate concentrations of nutrients. He used a strip of DNA for a plant that sprouted, and each cell represents a given value for the plant. Wolk was saying that with the replication now they can define a whole species and create a population of diverse creatures from that species, given the values from plant DNA. For the second to last picture, species template, we can see an entire strip of plant DNA and the red dots are the plants waiting to sprout. This lecture was visually appealing, as I am a visual learner. Normally I kind of see these things as absurd, like I do not take the time to explore them. But this on the other hand was very interesting and I genuinely enjoyed my hour. This event was cool in the sense of reading into the slides and being able to discuss the entire live of plants & animals. Definitely a new field, that I might look into.