Week 3 Robotics + Art

I was 10 years old when my father took me to accompany him on a business trip to Amsterdam. He was an agent for a discount cloth retailer called Zeeman, and he arranged for me to get a tour of their super-advanced warehouse. The man showing me around spoke of a robot that automatically sorted and arranged a large number of boxes. I was very excited imagined seeing something like the image below but all I saw was a machine that looked like a crane. My perception of robotics was entirely shaped by art and science fiction.

My perception of a robot

Art and robotics have more in common than you may think. The famous Matrix trilogy illustrates Descarte’s famous mind and body problem. Descartes says that we cannot be sure that we are our bodies and we are physically present in a particular place. The Matrix portrays a world in which robots are in control of humans who are actually living in a simulation but they do not know that they are actually sleeping in a machine. The movie is a great combination philosophy and artificial intelligence depicted artistically through a movie.

In the Matrix since birth, humans are controlled by robots

A living example of an individual who embraces robotics and art is Dr. Mari Velonaki, who is an artist and Director of the Creative Robotics Lab at the University of New South Wales. She makes artistic statues like Diamandini that can walk and interact with humans. People perceived the statues as having “ a will of their own.”

Brooks, Katherine. "If The Future Of Art Is Robotics, At Least It Will Be Adorable." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2015. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/14/robo-faber_n_4269146.html>.

Descartes, Rene. "Meditation 1 by Rene Descartes." Meditation 1 by Rene Descartes. University of Oregon, n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2015. <http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/descartes/meditations/Meditation1.html>.

"Diamandini Robotic Statue by Mari Velonaki." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=34&v=BMqS3AeCCTU>.

Lim, Angelica. "What Roboticists Can Learn From Art, and What Artists Can Learn From Robots." IEEE Spectrum, n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2015. <http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/diy/what-roboticists-can-learn-from-art>.

"The Matrix Trilogy." SparkNotes. SparkNotes, n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2015. <http://www.sparknotes.com/film/matrix/section1.rhtml>.

Mathematics and Art

As Victoria Vesna mentioned, it is common to be biased towards math or art while growing up. Even though I was always fond of math, I enjoyed art as well and took a few art classes outside school. Even though I was exposed to both disciplines, I never noticed the strong overlap. Victoria Vesna’s lecture, covering the historical origins of art and how artists incorporated mathematics to improve art, was very enlightening.

To a casual observer like myself, Giotto’s paintings do indeed have depth perception, however it is difficult to understand the geometry creating the depth perception. The image with lines explains, that by inclining lines above eye level upwards and below eye level downwards, as they moved away from the observer, Giotto was able to implement depth perception in his paintings. The concepts of the vanishing point and the golden ratio are equally fascinating.

It is extremely fascinating how the Fibonacci spiral, a depiction of the golden ratio, has been observed everywhere in nature, from fruit-lets of a pineapple to the galaxies of the Universe.

Looking back at my school days, I remember studying symmetry as a chapter in Math. However, oddly enough, our perception of human beauty, a very artistic notion, is also defined in part by symmetry. As mentioned in an article in The Economist it has been established by biologists that symmetrical people are more attractive.

Last summer I visited the infamous Louvre museum in Paris. The art was indeed enrapturing, but I think still missed out as I was only viewing the art in isolation. I missed identifying the vanishing point, or the golden rectangles used in the Mona Lisa, or the beauty of the symmetry. I have changed my perspective of both art and science and I am certain I will appreciate the Louvre much more if I go back to visit Paris someday. 

References

"Does the 'Earlier Version' Display Leonardo's Mathematical Principles? - The Mona Lisa Foundation." The Mona Lisa Foundation. N.p., 12 Sept. 2012. Web. 07 Apr. 2015. <http://monalisa.org/2012/09/12/leonardo-and-mathematics-in-his-paintings/>.

"Facing the Facts." The Economist. The Economist Newspaper, 16 Aug. 2014. Web. 07 Apr. 2015. <http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21609537-theory-about-why-symmetrical-faces-attract-has-just-fallen-wayside-facing>.

"Gods Fingerprint→ The Fibonacci Sequence - Golden Ratio and The Fractal Nature of Reality." YouTube. YouTube, 4 May 2014. Web. 07 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VrcO6JaMrM>.

Tyler, Cristopher, and Michael Kubovy. "Perspective: The Role of Perspective: Page 2." Perspective: The Role of Perspective: Page 2. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Apr. 2015. <http://www.webexhibits.org/sciartperspective/perspective2.html>.

Vesna, Victoria. "Mathematics-pt1-ZeroPerspectiveGoldenMean.mov." YouTube. YouTube, 9 Apr. 2012. Web. 07 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMmq5B1LKDg>.

Two Cultures

I grew up in India and attended high school there. My high school experience is a great example of the distinction between art and science, and the respective stereotypes that C.P. Snow talks about in his famous lecture on two cultures. My high school batch was divided into three sections: the science class, the commerce class, and the humanities class. There was minimal academic interaction between the three sections as even the common subjects like English were taught by different teachers in the different sections. My batch was the second batch in the school’s 150 year history that was allowed to take science courses along with a humanities or commerce course. I belonged to the science class and I had the option of taking a Psychology course instead of Chemistry, but I wasn’t bold enough. While you might think that newly introduced flexibility would be welcome, only a few from the science class decided to be adventurous. I wasn’t particularly fond of chemistry, but as per the stereotype, the science class students were smarter and the science class subjects were the most challenging. After two years of thoroughly disliking Chemistry, I realized that I should have chosen what I was interested in. The physical distinction of a science class and an arts/humanities class impacted my education. The distinction even manifested itself in tests. One test question was “Is Commerce an art or a science?” This exemplifies C.P. Snow’s claim that curricula at educational institutions are responsible for creating a distinction between two cultures: art and science.

"Is Commerce an art or a science?"

Since coming to UCLA the distinction has been fading away for me. Even though I was a Business Economics major I was able to enroll in a variety of courses including Computer Science,  Psychology, and Acting. The division between North and South campus did not hold me back. A subject area that I grew deeply interested in is Behavioral Economics; the intersection of Economics and Psychology; disciplines that are taught at the opposite ends of campus at UCLA. Behavioral Economics is a recently emerging subject area, and is evidence of the ‘Third Culture’ that C.P. Snow mentions in his essay The Two Cultures and A Second Look.

Humans are loss adverse as predicted by Behavioral Economist's  Kahneman and Tversky 

Fortunately, the gap between art and science, is getting smaller. The fact that IBM’s Watson, a machine that integrates human linguistics and computer science, won the American television gameshow Jeopardy, is a huge milestone in this direction. 

References

Snow, C. P. “Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” Reading. 1959. New York: Cambridge UP, 1961. Print.

Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures: And a Second Look. N.p.: n.p., 1963. Print

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Print.

Vesna, Victoria. "TwoCultures Part1." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 05 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNI7dF3DIAM>.

Vesna, Victoria. "TwoCultures Pt2." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 05 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUr4xxZ_0gw>.