Week 9 | Space + Art | Star Destroyers to Black Holes

Professor Vesna begins the lecture stating that this week's lecture on space covers everything from robotics to nanotechnology and biotechnology. Space technology has intrigued not only scientists but artists as well, which led to the the creation of many of our childhood fantasies. As a child, I will never forget the inspirations that I had to become an astronaut by all of the artwork of space from images of foreign planets, astronauts, and space shuttles to movies such as E.T and Starwars.

Concept art included in the upcoming Star Wars VII

It is breathtaking to observe how the mixture of engineering and artwork has presented such a wide variety of magnificent artwork seen in the Star Wars.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fonNJMP2rNM>

While Hollywood has been accredited with most of the artwork related to UFO, Space Crafts, and Aliens, these recurring themes are popular throughout the history across the world as demonstrated by the site below: http://www.ancestryofman.com/art/

My favorite movie of all time, interstellar. features a marriage of artistic inspiration and scientific reality never accomplished before. Physicist Dr. Kip Thorne made sure that the almost artistic inspired images portrayed in interstellar was an accurate representation rendered from algorithms from existing scientific perspectives.

Physicist Kil Thorne describes the black hole.

Although the black hole has never been seen by human eye, an artistic representation rendered through physics algorithms was portrayed in interstellar.

Rendered realistic portrayal of the Black hole
<http://images.techtimes.com/data/images/full/47219/black-hole-jets.jpg?w=600>


As a result of this movie, the marriage between the arts and science has never been so strong as scientific publications actually spewed out from the creation of the movie. I was particularly taken aback when I found out the supercomputer resources necessary to compute the complex algorithm to produce the images we see in the theater. While just a decade ago, I remember most of the artwork and movies were based on fictional imagination. But with the current advancements in not only space technology, and computational sciences but also the arts including video and movie production, I cannot wait to witness what the future of space discovery and art has in store for us.
From this week's lectures, I found the video regarding the magnitudes of measurements particularly interesting. While we normally think about millimeters, centimeters, and meters as common measurements, we rarely think about exactly how far the entire spectrum of magnitudes can travel. An angstrom (10^-10m) can be comprehended as the distance of a hydrogen bond in water while 10^10 meters is so large that we cannot even visualize our planet immediately.

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXRNEyrkosM>

Science based art isn't the only form of Space Inspired art available. Here we see how mediums including fire and spray paint have created beautiful artwork that any artist or scientist can appreciate. In fact, a large part of the artwork is the performance in creating it as you can see above.

Video demonstration regarding the power of 10 to understand measurements from nanosciences to space

<https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0>

Space is a fitting ending for our course after we explored many established fields such as mathamatics and biotechnology. We also explored other fields including neuroscience and nanoscience that are burgeoning fields like space.


In a way this course teaches us that artistic motivations and inspiration can stem from all aspects of reality from the scientific experiments so small we cannot visualize without advancements in recent technology to physical entities so large that are so many magnitudes beyond our planet that we can barely comprehend. As our science and technology develops, so will the art.

References

"Champagne Supernova by Matt Sorensen Spray Paint Art, Space Art."YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 23 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXRNEyrkosM>.

Maynard, James. "'Interstellar' Team Publishes Scientific Paper On Black Holes." Tech Times RSS. N.p., 13 Feb. 2015. Web. 14 Apr. 2015. <http://www.techtimes.com/articles/32733/20150213/interstellar-team-publishes-scientific-paper-on-black-holes.htm>.

"Powers of Tenâ„¢ (1977)." YouTube. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Apr. 2015. <https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0>.

"Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens." StarWars.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Apr. 2015. <http://www.starwars.com/films/star-wars-episode-vii-the-force-awakens>.

Thorne, Kip. "Kip Thorne - Why Black Holes Are Astonishing." YouTube. Closer To Truth, n.d. Web. 23 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj1AfkPQa6M>.