week 1

Starting the quarter with Two Cultures couldn’t be more perfect for me. As a Filipino and white woman, the relationship between the two cultures I have always straddled is something I think about often. Recently, I have realized the space I occupy as a mixed race person of color is in entirely liminal – I exist in the inbetweeness of inbetweeness. I have explored this aspect of my identity, and how others react to my ambiguous racial identity, through a piece I performed last spring on Bruin Walk. I chose to exploit the way my phenotype is scrutinized by strangers on a daily basis by making my race even more of a performance than it already is and having people guess my race to win a prize. 

Connecting cultures is critical to my existence, but being critical of binaries is difficult when it’s so engrained in our day to day lives. Even as students at UCLA, as mentioned by Professor Vesna in the lecture, we are divided by North and South Campus majors, as if the sciences and humanities exist as opposites of one another. Binaries like this are so common because they are much more simple to push onto people then a nuanced ways of viewing things. News media very often reduces complex issues down to a question of something being either “good” or “bad.”

The Daily Show
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Those who embark on what John Brockman calls the Third Culture work outside of this binary system. Rather than focus on simply work in the arts or in science, they bridge the gap in efforts to end the gap. By doing so, artists and scientists are able to, as Kuhn says, “shift the paradigm” of the current dichotomy that is art versus science.

As Professor Vesna noted, the idea of Left Brain and Right Brain is problematic.

Now, the question is, is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Graham-Rowe, Duncan. "John Brockman: Matchmaking with Science and Art (Wired UK)." Wired UK. Wired UK, 3 Feb. 2011. Web. 01 Apr. 2015.

Stewart, Jon. "October 29, 2013." The Daily Show. Comedy Central. New York, New York, 29 Oct. 2013. Television.

Vesna, Victoria. "Two Cultures." UCLA, Los Angeles. 30 Mar. 2015. Lecture.

Graham-Rowe
Guess Martina's Race Photo: my personal archive
Left Brain, Right Brain photo: http://claritics.com/claritics-to-host-a-panel-on-the-art-vs-science-of-game-design-at-gdc/