Tehya's Basin

My revision strategy:

My overall goal is to redirect my essay onto a less broad topic and to clarify my points and quotes so they meld better with my essay.

Steps:

1. Focus my essay onto the way different cultures see beauty. (Create new points)
2. Look back through my sources to find better and shorter quotes.
3. Find out how to properly cite podcasts.
4. Check for grammatical errors.
5. Have it peer-read.

My biggest challenges will be to refocus my essay onto a more narrowed topic. My first issue when I wrote this essay was I took to wide of a scope, which made it very difficult to keep my essay from feeling scattered and thoroughly explained. It will also be a challenge to correctly make my work’s cited, since I have never actually cited a podcast before.

If any challenge arises I can always use the English books I have, the internet, and asking my peer’s for their advice. If any challenges arise I can also always change routes to avoid any weird wordings and confusing points.

For my multi-modal essay I believe I want to incorporate a few pictures I myself have taken of things that usually seem to be universally beautiful and/or rarely beautiful, as well as incorporate a few items society and the modern era see as “beautiful” to get at the overall gist of my essay. Maybe about 3 or 4 images, but not too many my essay gets lost in them. I may incorporate some spatial modals but I am not yet clear on how it will be set up or why, other than just to display and draw more attention to my images.

Why do we all see beauty differently?
Some of us think of beauty as something in its rawest form, others see beauty as something perfect and flawless in every way. For some people nature is beauty, for others superficial items are beautiful. But what causes us to see things so differently?
Our upbringing is one source of this; memories, culture, personal tastes. All of these contribute to our positive and negative associations with different things. Then of course is the difficult to understand, personal tastes.
Memories; Brandi podcast.
She grew up in new England and descried it as “being harsh”. After living in other places that didn’t have the extreme seasons that we have here she learned to love and enjoy the true natural and extreme opposites of our seasons. This could have led to her affliction to the “raw” main coast. She describes it as “The water is harsh and it’s cold, and it’s really windy… it’s the grey swirling water” as she describes the beauty and artistic qualities of the Maine coast.
I think it’s important to include the connections art and beauty have. Has art become synonymous with beauty? If it’s beautiful to you is it art?
Art, just like beauty depends on personal taste. True art, usually evokes some type of emotion or thought.
“True beauty is whatever speaks powerfully to both sides of our nature at the same time.” “When we recognize beauty in a piece of (Art), we see things that we know we have neglected or betrayed.” (Armstrong)
“Art is one of those things you think of as once it’s produced it is what it is, it’s not changing. But there’s the art of something that changes, that’s never quite the same every time—every single time there’s always something a little different in what the tide brings in with it… more like a moving art.” (Brandi)
What about the raw form of nature is so appealing especially when all of our lives we’ve been told that humans prefer symmetry? It’s the acceptance and appreciation of imperfections. In a world we always seem to be trying to reach visual and mental perfection, some part of us mays till yearn to accept and love the imperfections and flaws that we try to cover up. Seeing it in nature, we realize that it’s something that adds to the beauty, it adds to the “moment.” That moment no matter how hard you try will never be replicated, no matter how hard you try. Because nature is moving art, as every second passes it changes more and more. Is this the unexplainable appeal of nature? This imperfection and harshness?

Quotes:
“But the relationship between beauty and symmetry is not an absolute. The Rococo art that was popular in Europe in the 18th century was rarely symmetrical, and Zen gardens are prized for their lack of symmetry.” (Anthony Brandt & David Eagleman)
Naysayer: beauty/ art is simply based on optimum complexity?
“In 1973, the psychologist Gerda Smets ran experiments using electrodes on the scalp (known as electroencephalography, or EEG) to record the level of brain activity produced by exposure to different patterns. She noted that the brain shows the largest response to patterns with about a 20 percent level of complexity.” (Anthony Brandt & David Eagleman)
“The biologist E.O. Wilson suggested that this preference might give rise to a biologically-imposed universal beauty in human art” (Anthony Brandt & David Eagleman)
How culture is related to art?
“Although we come to the table with biological predispositions, a million years of bending, breaking and blending have diversified our species’ preferences. We are the products not only of biological evolution but also of cultural evolution.” (Anthony Brandt & David Eagleman)
“Although the idea of universal beauty is appealing, it doesn’t capture the multiplicity of creation across place and time. Beauty is not genetically preordained.” (Anthony Brandt & David Eagleman)

For a science based article I choose: http://nautil.us/blog/why-beauty-is-not-universal
This article explains the differences in what we think is beauty from around the world from paintings to music. They describe our modern preferences as not a biological evolution but a cultural evolution. How our ideals for beauty aren’t something engrained in our genes like a preference for symmetry but something that our culture and early lives influences. I think it provides great insight to how beauty preferences are accumulated throughout a lifetime.
The first podcast I chose to use was https://tcasey.uneportfolio.org/124-2/ because I really enjoyed the ideal of art and beauty as something imperfect and always changing. It gives me a context to explain why something so imperfect and unpredictable as nature is considered beautiful and artistic and how it differs from one person to another.
The second podcast I am thinking to use is https://jlynch12.uneportfolio.org/beauty-podcast/ I am thinking of using this because once again it describes a very harsh and taxing journey that when they looked back on it was beautiful, not because it was calm but specifically because of the harsh visually stimulating factors. They discuss how beauty isn’t always these grand scenes but how it can be the much smaller simpler things, and how it is important to your life.

“To regard beauty as a luxury adornment or a social signifier was to miss the true potential of the experience.”
True Beauty is not something that can raise your social status nor is it something you can truly buy. To me true Beauty is something that connects you back to yourself. It’s something that makes you stop and live in the moment, it reminds you of your inner-most self. However. from what I have experienced, my community just as in what Schiller explains sees it as one extreme “driver”. It has become something superficial which it is not. Beauty is not tied to monetary value, just because a diamond, gold and other precious metals and gems are expensive and in demand does not make them beautiful. Just because something is perfect does not make it beautiful. The most beautiful things to me are things and people in their rawest and truest form. They are not concealed and polished with fake facades of perfection, they are as what they are meant to be. I know not all people share this view it is as some say, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” However, the question is are their ideals of beauty truly “true beauty” or is it what they want to see as beauty not what they truly feel is beauty.

My chapter of choice from “They Say I Say” was  The art of quoting. In this chapter it discusses ways to introduce quotations, something I seemed to be missing a bit in this essay. I found their description of what the introductory/ lead-in claims should show and explain most helpful when I re-read some of my paragraphs. I realized I had a few quotes that weren’t introduced nor described very well in how it related to my claim.

Original:

In order for science to overcome their current self-limitations, they need to integrate the artistic focus on the big picture thinking. In Marine biology field work, we are frequently exclusively looking at one single input, one single species or quadrant. However, the environment is far too complex to be able to compensate for only a single input. It is often that in science we complicate things far more than what we ourselves can understand. In art, especially painters have a specific focus on attention to details. When you’re painting you pay attention to every single little detail in the area around you so that it can feel as real as it possible and can adequately represent and replicate that area. In science you can’t merely focus on one single input “before you break something apart, it helps to know how it hangs together” (Lehrer). An example of this maybe if you’re in the forest and studying the distribution of a plant. If you’re only focusing on that one quadrant you may be missing a bigger picture. For all you know the trees around the section of plants are dying, could that have any effect on the distribution of this plant or its population? What is it that is causing the trees to die and could it have any impact on what you’re studying? Or more specifically in marine biology you would look at how does the tide influence this animal or plant or how does the, sunlight and weather conditions all the abiotic conditions affect this organism and how could it cause it to react differently. Art is very much about recognizing the connections between everything that surrounds us and us. Scientists should take art to help them evolve and strengthen this tool.

Revised:

I order for Marine sciences to overcome their current self-limitations, they need to integrate the artistic focus on the big picture thinking. In Marine biology field work, we are frequently and exclusively looking at one single input, one single species or quadrant. However, the environment is far too complex to be able to compensate for only a single input. Jonah Lehrer an American author and neurologist discusses in “The future of science…is Art?” how science could benefit from the integration of art. He brings up the idea that “before you break something apart, it helps to know how it hangs together”. In marine science you can’t merely focus on a single input, at least not until you’ve looked at the bigger picture around you. It is often that in science we complicate things far more than what we ourselves can understand. In art, especially painters have a specific focus on attention to details. When you’re painting you pay attention to every single little detail in the area around you so that it can feel as real as it possible and can adequately represent and replicate that area. An example of this maybe if you’re in the forest and studying the distribution of a plant. If you’re only focusing on that one quadrant you may be missing a bigger picture. For all you know the trees around the section of plants are dying, could that have any effect on the distribution of this plant or its population? What is it that is causing the trees to die and could it have any impact on what you’re studying? Or more specifically in marine biology you would look at how does the tide influence this animal or plant or how does the, sunlight and weather conditions all the abiotic conditions affect this organism and how could it cause it to react differently. Art is very much about recognizing the connections between everything that surrounds us and us. Scientists should take art to help them evolve and strengthen this tool.

Barclays Paragraph:

Science needs many disciplines from other fields in order to perform at its best. Science is typically seen as a cut and dry way of looking at the world, however when you intergrade the disciplines of art you can un-limit science and allow it to perform at its optimum capacity. Mark B. Boslough, an Albuquerque scientist specializing in impact physics, explains in his paper “We Must Protect U.S Investment in Scientific Knowledge” that “Science is sometimes slow, but it always involves making educated guesses that eventually lead to testable predictions.” We know that science doesn’t always have all the answers, there are many times it takes multiple trials’ and errors’ in order to come to an agreed upon answer. John Lehrer, a neuroscientist, and writer, explores the impacts art could have in science if integrated, in his article “The Future of Science…Is Art?” In this article he explains how Bohr, a famous physicist used “cubism” to redefine the “structure of matter.” Before this time the structure of matter was seen more like an orbit instead of the complex multidimensional structure it is. Science is often so complex to the point we have a difficulty grasping the exact concepts we have created. By integrating other disciplines from fields such as art we can better understand what it is exactly that we’re looking at by unlimiting it from the current strictly factual sphere to our real world understandings. So in order to “speed” science up to where we can better understand and work through the principles we use, the integration and implementation of other fields and their disciplines is required.

Annotations:

Naysayer Paragraph:

Science requires an incredible amount of discipline but, yet it still provides the same creative aspects as art. There is a reason why many schools haven’t incorporated S.T.E.A.M instead of S.T.E.M, that’s because S.T.E.M provides the same type of creative discipline as art. Yo-Yo Ma, while discussing the values of art describes the valued of integrating art into S.T.E.M as “Collaboration, flexible thinking, and disciplined imagination.” Yo-Yo Ma believes that the integration of art is the only thing that can bring this and truly balance out the strong black and white discipline of science, technology, engineering, and math fields. However, isn’t this exactly what S.T.E.M is? Collaboration, flexible thinking, and disciplined imagination. While S.T.E.M certainly seems quite rigid and black and white, it’s widely known and accepted as a forever evolving and changing creature. It’s widely understood that much of what we know in science is simply just a theory. We are taught to be flexible in our deductions because of all the incredibly intricate variables that exist in our natural world, there are no true concrete answers in science, only hypothesis’s and theories. In order to create hypothesis’s, we have to use our imagination in a disciplined way. What do we think will happen, what could happen? And decide which is more likely in the given situation, and then accept that it could be far from the truth. We also have to work with our teammates, work together to find the answers to large scale problems, share data, and share critiques. These disciplines are at the very core of what we learn to do as scientists, so there is no need for art to teach us the things that we already know and do so well.

This article was first published in January 2014 on the World Post, an online news and blog site that was created through a collaboration between Huffington post and Berggruen institute on Governance. This article was written by Yo-Yo Ma, an accomplished Cellist and songwriter. In his bio he has won over 17 Grammy Awards and multiple awards for art, and economic forum, and a medal of freedom. My purpose for reading this text is to better my understanding between the connections of science and art.

The point of this essay is to explain why art is so important and so connected to the “Hard sciences.” That the world is complicated and without the “necessary edges” understanding the importance of it’s opposite then they can become unstable. As he says “To reach excellence… need to filter imagination through the discipline of knowledge.” They work together but not well apart.

Unfamiliar words:
Neural: relating to a nerve or the nervous system.
He uses it to help describe the way our right and left hemispheres work in regards to our neural pathways.
Repertoire: a stock of plays, dances, or pieces that a company or a performer knows or is prepared to perform.
He uses it to describe something any Cellist would have knowledge of.
Meridians: A (geographical) meridian (or line of longitude) is the half of an imaginary great circle.
He is using this to describe a type of pathway that connects the “Necessary edges.”