Event 1 | Hox Zodiac: Snake | Juan Larson

Hox Zodiac Calendar (https://mailchi.mp/ucla/ucla-sciart-lab-studio-2552385?e=28317bdb5b)

For my first event this quarter, I attended the Hox Zodiac: Honoring the Snake event hosted by professor Victoria Vesna and Siddharth Ramakrishnan. The presentation featured three guest speakers: Lucie Strecker, Carolyn CC Hart, and Amir Baradaran. This was the sixth event in their Monthly Animal Gatherings series and was specifically focused on the snake.

Ouroboros or Snake Consuming its Own Tail (https://www.quora.com/What-s-the-name-of-the-snake-pictured-eating-itself)

The presentation was specifically focused on the snake and its symbolism. During the event, the speakers explained the symbolism of the Ouroboros and how it thematically relates to concepts in life. I was particularly interested in guest speaker Amir Baradaran's work on artificial intelligence and augmented reality. I felt like his work was a great example of the merging of art and technology as he was capable of developing technology that drew heavily from ideas of art. 

From this event, I learned a lot about how a singular idea can be understood and demonstrated in a variety of unique and meaningful ways that each slightly alter the meaning of  the idea to be more personalized. I liked learning about the variety of research being done on snakes and their venom and the potential technological developments that could be made from that research.

Venom Being Extracted from a Snake (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/01/how-make-snake-venom-without-any-snakes/605347/)

Overall, I thought the event did a great job of highlighting the connection between culture and technology and how the two ideas can be intertwined. I would recommend attending these events in the future because it was very interesting and helped provide a contextual example of how the things we are learning in lecture relate to the world around us on a broader scale.

Works Cited

Wilson, Stephen. New York City, New York, 2000, Myths and Confusions in Thinking about Art/Science/Technology. 

Graham-Rowe, Duncan. “John Brockman: Matching with Science and Art.” Wired, 3 Feb. 2011. 

Bohm, D. “On Creativity.” Leonardo, The MIT Press, Apr. 1968, https://www.jstor.org/stable/i270886. 

Snow, C P. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, 1961, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. 

Vesna, Victoria. “Toward a Third Culture: Being in Between.” Leonardo, The MIT Press, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1577014.