Hammer Museum + Arts Party (Extra Credit Event)

To explore art and technology at the interface of a museum and a university, I visited the Hammer Museum during the Arts Party 2k15: Transferral (a free event for UCLA students).

This event, involving various workshops provided by UCLA design and arts students who form the Hammer Student Association, is provided to expose the general intellectual population of UCLA to developing arts.  While this is focused in on art and interaction with art, some of the various pieces were prime examples of the heavily intertwined spheres of art and technology.

One piece involved the filming of a short music video using random crowd-goers as extras and shooting pieces freely due to the ease of current video technology.  This was something more generally expected as this involved a few students dressed up as shown below, as well as green screens and a simple camera setup.  Despite the commonality of this workshop, it demonstrated how advanced technology has greatly increased the availability of various medias for expression and art.

To contrast with this, there were also workshops directly applying advanced technology to provide an aesthetic experience; this mainly was concerned with the virtual reality headsets (Oculus Rift Virtual Reality headsets).  These headsets allowed the wearer to be transported to a world of color and fruit in an encompassing experience that many attendees have never had before, demonstrating how science and technology in fact add to and extend the boundaries of art and aesthetics.