Unit 1: Two Cultures

2 -> 3 -> 1

Picture 1: Painting by Vasa Mihich showcasing the beauty of patterns
http://visualmelt.com/Vasa-Mihich

In my experience, much of the two culture paradigm has been instilled out of convenience and efficiency from the outside institution onto us individuals. Instead of spawning a third culture to serve as a liaison between the two culture discussed by C.P. Snow in his lecture at Cambridge “"The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” and further expanded upon by Victoria Vesna in “Toward a Third Culture: Being In Between “, I believe that a paradigm shift towards a more holistic single entity would ultimately create a society with much less friction between the disparate ways of thought and may provide a creatively fertile environment to bloom a second intellectual Renaissance.

It wasn’t until time became scarce that I was forced to choose between Science or the Arts. As a child, science and the humanities were not so separate, as both drove our intuitive curiosity to understand our outside world.  Both were accessible enough to alchemically flow between writing, drawing, and hypothesizing further on our observations of nature. In our free time after AP testing, my high school math teachers had us use the ideas behind Pascals Triangle to create intriguing works of visual art.

Sacks Spiral: A variant of a method of visualizing the prime numbers
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sacks_Spiral_Divisors_100000.png

In Higher level education systems and large corporate structures (which now even physically resemble each as highlighted by Professor Vesna in her Lecture Part III of the ‘Two Cultures’ unit) there is a tangible pressure to distill our focus onto narrower and deeper pools of knowledge which I hypothesize stems from both having less time and higher expenses involved at such institutions. For employable advantage, we buy into this societal bias and many find themselves abandoning their previous interests in musical performance or ceramics for a highly specialized and ‘employable' skilled major in college.  As modular cogs in a larger production machine, we individuals are easier to replicate, replace and retrain from the perspective of the employer. As time is money, this ‘shortcut’ tends to lead to more of both with high consistency much like a "production line" (RSA video), stagnating innovation to a level of mere maintenance and that seems to be part of the issue.

I’ve been working full-time for the past year as a designer in a medium sized design studio. I was chosen to exhibit three software applications my studio has been working on at the worlds second largest game industry expo last month. I found myself frantically jumping two modes of thought, tapping into my programming knowledge (Mathematics / Economics B.S.) to talk to game developers or hardware engineers and my arts / design background (Design | Media Arts B.A.) to talk to game / concept artists and sound designers all for the sake of explaining the same app experience.

  

A large motivating force for us was to inspire people to invent novel experiences for a bleeding-edge technological device, the Project Tango tablet. However, with industry professionals that were too far into the art or too far into the tech, it was difficult to have meaningful conversations on where this tech could go and serve humanity, and much of my time was spent talking about our rendering workflow or how many frames per second such a device could churn (aka boring conversation). With the lay person, such as those visiting the event for mere entertainment, it was a pleasure to bounce both possible and impossible applications of such a device. I much preferred those conversations where the attendee was open to the holistic experience versus those so focused on one minute aspect of game development while blindly ignoring all other aspects of the experience that didn’t immediately pertain to their professional interests.

In that space, I was a representative of the ‘Third Culture’, and being a “privileged” mediator between the two extremes was not as creatively inspirational as when I was having conversations with those closer to the Third Culture. Much like Vesna, I believe that a Third Culture may be necessary to ease the friction between the two cultures, but I think long term sights should be on developing a unified culture that embraces both the Sciences and Humanities as one entity to ultimately progress humanity.

Works Cited 

Project Tango - Google. "Say Hello to Project Tango!" YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BUbVc7qVpg>.
"RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 20. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U>.
Snow, C. P. “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” New York: Cambridge University Press (1961). Web. 2 Apr. 2015.

UCLA. "Fees Graduate and Undergraduate Fees" Web. <http://www.registrar.ucla.edu/fees/gradfee.htm>
Vesna, Victoria. “Toward a Third Culture: Being in Between.” Leonardo 34.2 (2001): 121-25. Web. 2 Apr. 2015.

Vesna, Victoria. "TwoCultures Pt3." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=15&v=4FOEuxrwxd0>.