Week 1: Two Cultures

In the lecture by C.P. Snow, the idea of a third culture that will bridge the gap between art and science will eventually emerge was brought up (Vesna 121). In this week’s reading and lecture resources, discussions related to this argument inspired me to start thinking about the topic of the separation of art and science. 

I have had opportunities to give campus tours to my family and friends. To make it easier to understand, I separated the campus by saying that our south campus focused on STEM subjects like the engineering building and life science buildings, and the north campus focused on art and humanity, for example, the film school and law school are both located in the north campus. 


UCLA Self-guided Walking Tours of Campus (UCLA Undergraduate Admission)


By doing so, I unconsciously separated art and science and it aligned with what I have been taught in my 14 years of education. In the country where I’m from, high school students had to choose between science and humanities subjects and studied their subjects of choice for the entire high school and were tested for college entrance exams. For the convenience of teaching, the schools usually separated students based on their choices. So what Smith said as described in Cambridge’s table resonated with me (Snow 4). At the same time, it seems natural that the college campus is also separated that way.


A framework for STEAM education (Yakman)


As technology is developing quickly, we must understand the relationship between art and science and contribute to the bridge between them. As mentioned in Vesna’s article, the bridge is becoming more stable as more artists are utilizing technology in their works (Vesna 122). I can very easily relate to this as artificial intelligence is a heated topic nowadays and many artists are taking advantage of this technology to create artworks. While science can be used as a tool of art creation, it cannot be denied that the aesthetic nature of art might be influenced by technology too (Chatterjee). One of the challenges is the problem of stereotypes. People’s stereotypes of science and art make them oversimplify the two concepts and abruptly separate them (Vesna). This also happens to AI because the database it used for model training is based on human thoughts and human’s stereotypes will reflected on the creation of AI, and eventually deteriorate the stereotype issue (Tiku).


No Name (Ouditt)


Works Cited: 

Chatterjee, Anjan. “Art in an age of artificial intelligence.” Frontiers in psychology vol. 13 1024449. 30 Nov. 2022, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1024449

Ouditt, Ayodhya. How Stereotypes Can Drive Women To Quit Science, July 12, 2012, https://www.npr.org/2012/07/12/156664337/stereotype-threat-why-women-quit-science-jobs. Accessed April 5, 2024.

Snow, Charles Percy. The two cultures and the scientific revolution: The Rede Lecture, 1959. University Press, 1959.

Tiku, Nitasha. “Ai Generated Images Are Biased, Showing the World through Stereotypes - Washington Post.” The Washington Post, 1 Nov. 2023, www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/ai-generated-images-bias-racism-sexism-stereotypes/.

“TwoCultures pt2.” YouTube, uploaded by UC Online, Mar 31, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUr4xxZ_0gw&t=298s&ab_channel=UCOnline

“UCLA Self-guided Walking Tours of Campus.” UCLA Undergraduate Admission, https://admission.ucla.edu/sites/default/files/2020-10/UCLA-Self-Guided-Walking-Tour.pdf

Vesna, Victoria. “Toward a Third Culture: Being in Between.” Leonardo, vol. 34, no. 2, 2001, pp. 121–125. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1577014.

Yakman, G. “A framework for STEAM education.”  The ‘Great Divide’: How the Arts Contribute to Science and Science Education, 2010, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42330-019-00057-7/figures/2. Accessed April 5. 2024.

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