The music video for the song “Lose Yourself” by Eminem was directed by himself, Paul Rosenberg, and Phillip G. Atwell. The video was made in 2002 by Shady Records. Eminem is an American Rapper who was born in Detroit who become a household name after his first record, The Slim Shady LP in 1999. He then went on the release four other albums since then including the newest this year, Relapse. He has sold more than 75 million cds worldwide. Marshall Mathers has rose from a screw up nothing from Detroit to a worldwide superstar name Eminem. He married his high school sweetheart, Kim and had a daughter named Hallie. His publicity and popularity has made him travel so much that he has family problems and gets divorced with Kim. He talks about these problems with Kim and Hallie in the song, with clips of his family.
In the video it shows clip from his movie, 8 Mile, which was loosely based around his life growing up in the poor area of Detroit. I was drawn to this music video because Eminem is one of my favorite artists and I have listened to all of his cds, and this happens to be one of my favorite songs by him. The music video is very meaningful because he raps about his life and struggles to become who he is today, a true rags to riches story. The subject is his life growing up on 8 mile road and coming from underground rapper to worldwide phenomena.
This is art because it takes a lot of time and creativity to write a song with meaningful lyrics and even more time and creativity to create a video that can portray the meaning of that song. In my opinion art is something that one creates a work that creates an emotional reaction from the viewers, whether it be positive or negative.
I also chose this because it is a rap music video, and I'm sure there's a good chance that nobody else would choose from this genre so I hope my choice was original.
Ant Intelligence. Digital image. Dsc.discovery.com. Discovery, 10 Sept. 2010. Web. .
When recently searching for a scientific discovery I went on Discovery Channels web page. This was helpful because there are many scientific discoveries’ that are being explained. One that intrigued me was Digital Ants discovered by scientist at Wake Forest University and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.So what do these digital ants do? The ant’s act as an antivirus software but better, they crawl inside your computer looking for suspicious activity. Once the ants discover unusually activity it reports it to a superior and multiples many more ants around the virus or “worm” to control it. When a problem is fixed the ants “die” and just a few crawl through the computer. This makes it better sense because usually an anti virus program is on a timer and operates on a schedule. Most people have the anti virus operate at night. When operating during the night the computer uses most of the computers power, which then leaves the computer vulnerable to infection of a virus. The ants can operate all the time because they are so small and use minimal power.
I was drawn to this breakthrough because I hate it when I get a virus on my computer. I uses my computer a lot more than I would like to and when it is infected with a virus its difficult to keep up with school and work. This break through seems as if it could be very helpful on many computers. I also like it because it makes sense. I never knew how previous anti virus software worked and when you understand how something works I think you feel more comfortable using it. This idea is relatively simple and makes sense.
In our world this could stop people from infecting computers with viruses and control and detect virus quicker. Obviously, this would make a lot of peoples lives easier not having to deal with annoying viruses and broken computers. The scientist made this clear by explaining what the Digital Ants do and how they work.
In my opinion this is science because computer viruses is a problem that many people have and their needs to be an easy way to deal with them. This is a break through that helps people deal with the problem. Scientific break through do not have to have to be huge all the time like inventing the telescope. They can be small things that could help everyday people.
If the scientist we are discussing in class were still alive I would say that Newton could have easily invented Digital Ants. Newton was obviously a very smart man who if was still alive would be a leading scientist making ground breaking discoveries. The things he invented in comparison to Digital Ants were much more complex. Newton did not have anybody’s examples to look at. I believe he could have easily worked on the project of Digital Ants.
It's been 37 years since the last person walked on the moon. Since then, more countries around the world (aside from the USA) have been planning to launch another moon exploration mission sometime in the future. On these missions the astronauts clearly need food, water, and air. As most of us already know, when we inhale oxygen our bodies release carbon dioxide. Along with that, a basic knowledge of the digestive system would tell you that our bodies also naturally convert food and water into liquid and solid waste. So what do they do with these excretions?
They had previously developed a physio-chemical life support system that recycles water by purifying membranes and uses electrochemical processes to replenish the air with oxygen and rid it of harmful carbon dioxide. Bodily waste is ejected outside the rocket to burn up in the Earth's upper atmosphere. So why haven't we been exploring space even more since we have this technology down? The problem is that the limitations on the amounts of food they can supply their crew members also limits the amount of time they can explore.
So, right now they're working on the ability to grow their own ecosystems off planet. Who's really working hard to develop this idea? Mike Dixon, an environmental scientist at the University of Guelph in Canada. He came up with the idea of developing "green plants" that give oxygen, consume carbon dioxide, recycle the water, and supply nutrition. Also, NASA's Ames Research Center in California are studying this idea of generating a similar ecosystem. The biggest problems they're facing are that the infrastructure and power needed to support a "plant-based regenerative life support" is large, which requires a lot of material, money, and time. One plant isn't enough, there needs to be an entire ecology maintained for a long time first.
The MELISSA Project (Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative) is currently studying bacteria and organisms that turns urine and feces into vegetables, water, and fresh air. By first obtaining the idea from the organisms found in a lake, they are now trying to apply the same type of processes (of converting solid waste into nutrients and photosynthesis) to the ecosystems of human living.
In recent news, the MELISSA Pilot Plant Project at the University of Barcelona, Spain is spending the next few years testing a "crew" of 40 lab rats. If this study proves to be successful, they will eventually move onto human testing (which may take years). Also, two companies by the names of Odyssey Moon and Paragon Space Development are planning to land mini greenhouses of mustard seeds on the moon in 2014. The current research has already helped decrease chemical runoff in our environment, and has also created a new process of water recycling that reduces the amount of required water in the military's laundry.
If these experiments end up working as planned, this could mean that we may one day sustain human life on the Moon or even on Mars. The implications of this advancement are that we would have the capability of human colonization beyond just one planet.
Billings, Lee. "Living Off the Land." SEEDMAGAZINE.COM. 20 July 2009. Web. 03 Nov. 2009. "Billings, Lee. "Living Off the Land." SEEDMAGAZINE.COM. 20 July 2009. Web. 03 Nov. 2009. http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/living_off_the_land/.
This was fascinating to me because the idea that applying natural ecosystems to human life and improving space exploration could eventually lead to establishing space stations with sustainable living conditions! It's crazy to think about!
Colorblindness is one of the most common disorders found in people around the world. Although this disease is not life threatening, it does come as an inconvenience when trying to read and or look at certain materials. Researchers have been studying this disability and may have found a cure for people who have colorblindness.These researches are from The University of Washington in Seattle and also from The University of Florida. Using Squirrel monkeys as the testers for their cure, these researches used gene therapy to cure these monkeys of colorblindness.
Researches are now looking into gene therapy as a cure for colorblindness in humans. Before anything is done, researches have to be sure that this would be a safe procedure to be done on humans. Scientists are looking at the potential for gene therapy to treat adult vision disorders involving cone cells.A cone cell is the photoreceptor cell that is located in the retina of the eye; this cell will function the best in relatively bright light. The retina of the eye is a light sensitive tissue lining the inner surface of the eye. The optics of the eye creates an image of the visual world on the retina, and this serves much of the same function as the film in a camera.
As scientists go further into studying the cure for colorblindness, they have “added a red sensitivity to the cone cells in animals that are born with a condition of colorblindness that is exactly the same as the disability in humans” says William W. Hauswirth; a professor of ophthalmic molecular genetics at the University of Florida college of Medicine and also a member of the UF genetics Institute and the Powell Gene Therapy Center.“Although color blindness is only moderately life-altering, we’ve shown we can cure a cone disease in a primate, and that it can be done very safely. This is extremely encouraging for the development of therapies for human cone disease that are really blinding.”
This finding is very likely to intrigue the millions of people who face this disability around this world. This includes about 3.5 million people in the United States, more than 13 million in India, and more than 16 million in China. This problem mostly effects men, which leaves about 8% of Caucasian men in the United States incapable of discerning red a green hues that are very important in our everyday life; for instance recognizing traffic light colors. A professor of ophthalmology at the University of Washington said “If we could find a way to do this with complete safety in the human eye, as we did with monkeys, I think there would be a lot of people who would want it. Beyond that we hope this technology will be useful in correcting lots of different vision disorders.”
This study had been going on for about 10 year; this first started after Neitz and his wife Maureen Neitz, a professor at the University of Washington and also senior author of the study began training two squirrel monkeys named Dalton and Sam. Along with teaching the animals, the Neitz research group also worked with markers of standard vision-testing technique called The Cambridge Colour test to perfect a way that the monkeys could “tell” them which colors that they were seeing. This test is a lot like the tests that school officials are required to give elementary school students at the beginning of each school year; this test allows the children to identify a specific pattern of colored dots among a field of dots that vary in size, color and intensity. To use this test on the monkey, researchers decided to devise a computer touch screen that the monkeys could use to trace the color patterns. When the animals had chosen correctly they were awarded with grape juice.
Researches wanted to produce a substance called long-wavelength opsin in the retinas of the monkeys. The form of the opsin that is found in the retina is a colorless protein that works to make pigments that are sensitive to red and green coloring. While the researches were testing this treatment they used human DNA’s so that they did not have to switch to human genes when they moved toward the clinical treatment said Hauswirth. Hauswirth is also in a clinical trial with human patients to test gene therapy for the treatment of Leber congenital amaurosis, which is a form of colorblindness that often affects children. About five weeks after the monkeys had received this treatment they began to acquire color vision, almost as if it happened overnight.
“Nothing happened during the first 20 weeks”, Neitz said. “But we knew right away when it began to work. It was as if they woke up and saw these new colors. The treated animals unquestionably responded to the colors that had been invisible to them.” It took over a year and a half to test the monkey’s ability to discern 16 hues, which is one of the main properties of color.The two monkeys that are being used for this experiment and research are named Dalton and Sam; these are not just random names given to the monkeys, there is an actual reason as to why they were given these names. Dalton is named after an English chemist named John Dalton who realized he was colorblind and published the first paper about the condition in 1798.
It has now been two years since both of these monkeys have been able to see in color. Continuing to let the monkeys play with the computer and also have their vision checked is part of their enrichment. With this discovery, researches are able to a vision disorder in primates in which all photoreceptors are intact and healthy, and also providing a hint of gene therapy’s full potential to restore vision. 1 in 30,000 Americans have a heredity form of blindness called acromatopsia which causes nearly complete colorblindness and extremely poor central vision. These will be the patients that will be targeted for almost the exact same treatment as the primates. There are still many questions being asked about safety in gene therapy treatment, but it has been done successfully on the primates and it will only be a matter of time until it will be successfully done on human beings.
Sources:
1.NewsRx Health and Science. "University of Florida; Scientists cure color blindness in monkeys." (2009): 198-98. Print.
2.Dell'Amore, Christine. "Color-Blindness cured by gene injection in monkeys." National Geographic. National Geographic News, 16 Sept. 2009. Web. .
Tom Robinson is an independent photographer who has spent the last year travelling to different locations around the world, documenting his different experiences with photographs. I found his work via the Firefox application, StumbleUpon, while looking for ideas of what to use for the blog presentation. When I first started looking at his photos, I was a little standoffish because of the giant dead bird displayed as his opening photograph on the home page, but as I viewed more and more of his work I grew to really like his style. The colors, focus, lighting, and subjects of the photographs are impeccable.
His techniques, as he explains, “I very rarely crop photos. I love horizontal lines in photos ie. horizon lines, buildings etc. I love composing photos with a lot of sky and a bit of ground (or vice versa). I rarely use a flash. I often under expose by 1/3 or 2/3 of a stop to preserve highlights” (Robinson). He even discusses the simplicity of editing the photos, “I don't go mad when post processing my photos, it's usually just levels, saturation, white balance and vignetting” (Robinson). After reading this, it really affected the impressiveness of his photos, because it really is revealing the true beauty of nature, rather than Photoshopping it a hundred times to make something average appear bright and beautiful.
I wasn't quite sure if I was going to present his work to the class until I saw the “Feet First” section of his website. I basically fell in love with this part of his portfolio because not only does it show every place they've been to in a magnificent shot, but it also shows their feet (and the changes they go through – like shoes and nail polish) as they experience each location. As I scrolled down through each one of the photos in the other sections, the natural beauty of the world and the different cultures became quite clear to me. However, this section seemed to speak to me even more because when you're looking at photos of different subjects, you seem to forget that the photographer was ever really there, experiencing it. I liked the Feet First section because it added that taste of the experience to the art themselves as if it tells the story of their adventure. The best part of my viewing experience was in the end, after looking at all these photographs and after wondering who that second pair of feet belonged to, there's a picture at the bottom of the page of Tom Robinson and his girlfriend taking a picture of their feet!
I would definitely consider his photographs to be art because they are not only aesthetically pleasing, but they also took a lot of thought, time, money, and experience to make them what they are. He explains in his profile on Flickr, how much time it took to decide on which camera to bring, alone. I think the context of each photograph definitely added to my aesthetic experience, as proven by the Feet First section. As for placing it in one of the quartets, I had a lot of trouble, because I could place it in all four. I think it's obviously Mimetic because the photographs imitate the actual location, Instrumental because it has the power to inspire its viewers (to travel or take-up photography), and Emotionalist because each photo seems to evoke different emotions from its viewers, and Formalist because of the actual technical alignments and subjects of the photographs.
All in all, his work really got me excited about studying abroad next year, and inspired me to start documenting all the places I visit along the way. It also made me admire the perfection of his photographs and started getting me thinking about taking Photography as an elective. Do you like his work as much as I did? Why or why not? Did it inspire you? What quartet do you think it reflects the most?
This is a preview of a hip hop performance at the Moore Theater in Seattle, Washington. Directly correlated with the Seattle Theater Group, “Dance This” is a camp and group of high school dancers that come together to perform many different styles of dance. This program welcomes and encourages students from grades 9-12 at any level of dance experience to learn styles and techniques in dancing and performing art. This is a non-profit art program where dancers, performers, and choreographers can come together to share culture and talent through dance. It is renewed each year and new members are welcomed to join and perform new dances. While the “Dance This” camp focuses on many different styles of dance, including ballet, jazz, salsa, etc, I chose to focus on the hip hop performance titled “Orchestrate The Groove” they gave in 2007 because it is a passion of mine that I can relate well with. I found this work on YouTube, and previewed the full version of this dance as well, which is just an expanded and more complex piece to what I have chose to view in class.
When finding an aesthetically pleasing piece of art for this assignment, I knew that I wanted to find a dance clip, in particular hip hop, because I personally find it so entertaining and a beautiful example of art. This performance is so unique because it contained people of different cultures and dance backgrounds who came together to create this work of art. I am a hip hop dancer myself, and could relate well to this performance because just like them, I am taught new choreography, how to work and sync with others for a performance, and how to show and produce emotion in my dance to evoke emotion in the audience or viewers minds. I found it so fascinating that not all of these dancers were experienced and some had never danced before. Knowing this made it that much better because I could tell how much effort and work went into the preparation for the performance.
Unlike paintings or sculptures that have annotated blurbs about the content within them, a dance piece is left open to the viewers interpretations of what is happening. Dance is like ‘not having the background information before looking at a painting’ because you are required to look and see within the piece to find the meaning of it. This dance is somewhat easier in determining the meaning because there are lyrics in the song that the dancers relate moves to. Also, the expression and emotions the dancers portray give the viewer a sense of how to feel when viewing the piece and how the music makes you feel because it puts you in that particular mood. With the remix of songs in this performance, the dancers are expressing the lyrics of the songs and are telling a story through the words and their dance. The choreographers’ (Napoleon Tabitha D'umo and Daniel Cruz) technique to help the viewers understand what was being expressed was to use many different songs to incorporate variety and word usage in their dance.
In my opinion, this is clearly art because it took both the dancers and the choreographers’ skill and effort to learn and create and perform the dance. They are able to evoke emotion in the viewers (whether it is positive or negative) and make them find some sort of meaning or reasoning behind the dance. While I feel it is important to these artists that they receive an emotion from the viewers, I think the “Quartet of Tradition” that this would be categorized under would be the formalist theory. Because the dance performance itself has no real context or meaning besides the words brought to the piece, and the reasons behind each of the dancer’s intent is unimportant, it seems that the way this dance was made and how the artists formed a performance out of their moves defines this piece of art. It is valued with aesthetic properties because it informs the viewers of a story through by the visual aspects used, and the way the viewers can envision the story. But could it be considered under another one of Anderson’s theories?
I’ve noticed that both in the world around us and our classroom, in particular, we seem to judge art based on our own relation to it and whether we can define it as art or not. What I mean is that I define this performance as art because I am a dancer, and can relate what I do and what they are doing to a form of art. Other students might think otherwise because it doesn’t flat out describe what is being told and doesn’t have a purpose in mind. So my question to you all is…do you think we are more subjective to art we don’t know or can’t relate with? Do we tend to question the unfamiliar forms of art because we can’t, ourselves, see what the purpose behind it is?
Genesis II is a poster depicting the creation of the Earth. Up above in the sky you can see the image of what looks like stained glas windows, symbolizing Heaven. From Heaven water is being poured onto the Earth. This water flows down a stream and off the edge into the cosmos into a vortex. To me it symbolizes the link between the divine, the earthly, and the cosmos in general. The bright colors used in this work make it very pleasing to look at.
The main thing that made me choose this work to post was my initial reaction to seeing it. I was struck by the brightness of the colors he used and by the inclusion of the mysterious cosmic hole at the bottom that the water fell into. It really is impressive how Stephens incorporated such bright colors and a sense of connection into this work and gets the viewer's eye to follow the flow of water from Heaven into the vortex.
Although Stephens' primary joy was painting, this poster was created while he was involved with commercial works, and the images in this poster are created with digital imaging.
The following info on the artist, John Stephens, was taken directly from http://www.orangecountyfineart.com/stephens.htm. "His work has been displayed in many art galleries across the country. His work is in the permanent collection of the Flemming Museum at the University of Vermont in Burlington. During the nineties he worked intensively for New York Publishing firms, including Simon & Schuster, St Martins Press, Ballantine, creating book covers for computer games. He has created art work for STAR TREK, TOM CLANCY, PETER BENCHELY, among other projects. By the late nineties he was heavily involved with commercial projects, mainly resort development and architectural rendering of various kinds. Posters, including "Genesis" and "The Lady of Shalot" have enjoyed good world-wide sales, especially in Europe. However, painting has always been his primary passion and something he would like to devote more of his time to."
