Week One: Two Cultures

I'm most likely a decade older than most of you. In 1998, I came to UCLA as a musical theater major, but I started working as an actress in the television industry and left to pursue a career which has taken up most of my heart and soul ever since. As time has gone on, I've craved a sense of completion in my academic studies and now that I've started a family (I met my husband at UCLA and we have two little boys, age 3 years and age 7 months), I feel like I have a bit of a pause in life to finally finish my theater degree (two courses to go!). Desma9 appealed to me because I'm fascinated by the online technological world, particularly blogging (I have a website called Move LifeStyle), and how it ties into pop culture and the arts. My goal in this course is to come out better equipped to understand the current tie between the internet, the art world, film & television and entreprenurial forays into technological advances. 

The ‘science’ part of the course’s title was sort of a footnote in what I thought we’d be studying but after reading CP Snow’s article and watching all the course material (I particularly enjoyed the video about education reform and David Bohm’s On Creativity), I’m making a bit of an adjustment in my conceptualization of the next 6 weeks. Although many of the course materials described two distinct worlds, I think often science and art are trying to solve the exact same problems, just through different strengths. For example, I've long thought psychology and acting to be studies of the same exact thing -- human nature-- but through two different lenses. When you put art and science through a lens of 'solving problems' I find the two factions can converse quite easily because it’s all about creative thinking, whether you choose to apply that to scientific discoveries or storytelling. Bohm seems to share this sentiment in regards to creativity: “So now, we have seen that the artist, the musical composer, the architect, the scientist, etc., all feel a fundamental need to discover and create something new that is whole and total, harmonious and beautiful. Few ever get a chance to try to do this, and even fewer actually manage to do it. Yet, deep down, it is probably what very large numbers of people in all walks of life are seeking, when they attempt to escape the daily humdrum routine...”

Obviously if put to a choice between the 'two cultures,' I consider myself firmly on the side of the artists, having worked in a professional artistic capacity for 15 years and as a student of theater for 13 years prior to that. I was drawn towards the arts from a young age, beginning in theater at age 6, but excelled in sciences as well, winning a scholarship at age 11 to attend an overnight conference/girls camp at the Science Museum of San Diego. However, like a lot of young girls, my interest in science began to wane with the dawn of adolescence, which is why now as an adult I’m particularly interested in organization such as GirlGeeks and Girls Who Code which are trying to make the STEM fields more appealing to young women.  Nowadays, in my field I seem to find small use for sciences, unless I’m playing a character who works in that world. In those cases, I’m excited when afforded any opportunity to delve into the scientific world (in the past I’ve portrayed a scientist, an IT tech expert hacker, and a particle physics buff, complete with full-body tattoos of atoms). Overall, the chance to immerse myself in the academic world is one I’m not often afforded and having been away from it for a decade, I find it to be a welcome return.

Imagery / Sources
Fritjof Capra, "The Tao of Physics"
CP Snow "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution"
Girls Who Code
RSA's "Changing Education Paradigms"
David Bohm "On Creativity"
Stephen Wilson "Myths and Confusion in Thinking about Art/Science/Technology"
Move LifeStyle
Engaging Girls in STEM
Artist/scientist info graphic via InfographicZone
Comic book drawing via Faust's Fantastic Forum
Photograph of Autumn Reeser as Katie Andrews from No Ordinary Family, ABC/personal collection