SameerKDESMA9_event2

Event 2

The event I attended was UCLA’s Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (aka. LASER). It was a night filled with multiple lectures that were presented by several artists. However, I found the presentation of the featured artist, Haytham Nawar, to be particularly interesting. The project he talked about was about the symbolic and artistic meaning of bread from all around the world that can be now seen in his book, Collective Bread Diaries: A Taste of Protest. The title of his book indicates the symbolic aspect of his project as he argues that bread is a representation of protest. He mentioned he was Egyptian and the example of how bread was used in the protest of the Arab Springs, which is his motivation to start his project of drawing different types of bread. However, he added that bread has been a symbol of protest all around the world in places such as France, United States, Iran, and China. This made him realize that bread, as a symbol of protest, is not secluded to just Egypt. He opened his idea of bread diaries to the public and invited other artists to share their own pieces of art, which eventually resulted in a collection of bread diaries.

When Nawar was explaining his work, I wondered how it connected to the “science” part of LASER. However, after sharing how he publicized the project and encouraged other people to contribute their own visual art of bread, he made clear of the connection between art and science. Once the artists submitted their work, an Amazon machine called mechanical turk was used to replicate it. The mechanical turk provides a “human workforce to complete jobs that humans can do better than computers” (“Introduction to a Mechanical Turk”). It can be seen that the “job,” in the case of this project, refers to the artists' drawings of bread. This kind of technology allows him to reproduce the visual arts of the contributors from all around the world as the mechanical turk will recreate the drawings to scale. Nawar compares the mechanical turk to artificial intelligence as it learns patterns from human behavior through collective data. The connection with Vannevar Bush’s work, mentioned in the “Robotics + Art” lectures, can be seen as Bush tried to create a machine that would “index” information and access them at will (Vesna). The mechanical turk makes the information, which is the drawings of bread, accessible to Nawar.  The connection between science and art was now obvious for me as robotics, in the form of the mechanical turk, allowed for the transfer of art from different parts of the world.

Nawar’s recreation of art can be related to Walter Benjamin’s argument that art loses its uniqueness and decreases in value if it is reproduced. Depending on one’s stance on Benjamin’s perspective, the precise scaling technology of the mechanical turk either is of the quality of the original art or decreases it. From what I observed, it seems that Nawar disagrees with Benjamin’s argument as he conveyed that each piece of art expresses the different voices of protest from all around the world. Therefore, Nawar suggests that he does not consider the reproduced art by the mechanical turk to be any less valuable than the original piece.

I would definitely recommend going to this event as Haytham Nawar presented a clear example of the converging cultures of art and science. Furthermore, there were other artists who presented their own work that night, and each of them connected art to science in various ways.

Haytham Nawar’s Collective Bread Diaries: A Taste of Protest

Examples of the drawings of bread

Selfie with Haytham Nawar

Citations:

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Print.

“Introduction to Amazon Mechanical Turk.” Amazon, Amazon, docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSMechTurk/latest/AWSMechanicalTurkGettingStartedGuide/SvcIntro.html.

Nawar, Haytham. “COLLECTIVE BREAD DIARIES: A TASTE OF PROTEST.” COLLECTIVE BREAD DIARIES: A TASTE OF PROTEST | UCLA Art | Sci Center + Lab, artsci.ucla.edu/node/1385.

Vesna, Victoria. “Lecture Part 2.” Robotics + Art. 12 Oct. 2012. Lecture.