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• 1 media/colorful-marble-effect-background-with-free-space-text_236836-18436.jpeg 2022-05-08T19:44:41-07:00 Intro: Why this topic? 34 image_header 2023-08-07T17:45:53-07:00

  This topic is extremely close to home and an attempt to understand the history behind my polymathic interests.
  
  All my life I have been split in two directions, art and engineering. When I was little I loved drawing comics, scrapbooking with my mom, and making crazy art projects our of simple elementary and middle school assignments. I also loved taking things apart, and sat at the edge of my seat watching science shows and documentaries and Youtube makers. I loved science fair and learning from my electrical engineer grandpa.
  
  In middle school I had the opportunity to be the Teachers Assistant in wood shop in order for Me and two friends to participate in the 2016 Tech Challenge, where the task was to make a glider to deliver ping pong balls. I had so much fun researching how airplanes worked and putting together different types of gliders, all while documenting the process into an artistic engineering notebook. 
  
  In high school I joined robotics and all at once jumped into the many sub teams: mechanical design, 3d animation, media/graphic design, electrical, software, business finally narrowing to the fist 3. I was designing robots and machining parts with Computer Aided Design and Computer Aided Manufacturing, but I was also making the decals for the robot, the monkey mascot suit, the murals on the crate, the merch and buttons and shirts... 
  
  I began to follow more and more makers on Youtube, people who came up with a project idea and executed it with knowledge of both various types of engineering and art. These include Mythbusters legend and now Tested maker Adam Savage, OK Go of zero-g music video fame, musical engineer Wintergatan’s Martin Molin (a favorite is this video where he breaks art, engineering, productivity and lessons learned), Mark Rober, Simone Geirtz, Xyla Foxlin, James Bruton, Dean Kamen (My favorite interview with him (esp. 11:28 to ~19:00)), Stuff Made Here’s Shane Wighton, Psy DeLacy, David Kelley, Destin Sandlin (Smarter Every Day) and more… I was inspired by their ability to create anything they put their mind too. The broad field I'd been exposed to is sometimes called "creative engineering" (as per Mark Rober's class offering) and more often just lumped into the diverse "maker community". The field broadly seems to include one-off personal projects with no ties to commercial or industry interests that are designed to create delight, provoke conversation, or solve a problem no one really needed solving. It has a faint whiff of the Dada satirical, nonsensical style, mixed with the practicality of solving creative challenges with technical nuts and bolts. 
  
  
  
  
  
  This includes Simone Geirtz's "useless robots" such as the breakfast machine, the lipstick robot and the Styrofoam mannequin head that slams into a keyboard and kind of rolls back and forth in a rough approximation of internet commenting. Sifting through elaborate cosplay mechanisms, porch pirate glitter guns, and self centering basketball hoops, one wonders is some of this art? Does it have utility? 
  
  That's where my journey started as I was forced to look into career pathways in college. The internet gave me successful role models that delighted, educated, and inspired with their personal passion creations, but not often shed light onto how such creative innovation might have further utility in the world and specifically in industry. 
  
  This began my subconscious search for an industry (and job) that could most explicitly support a union of artistic and technical thinking. The jobs I wish for and my interdisciplinary major in "Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation" at USC is preparing us for, don't yet exist, instead I happened to fall into the industry most likely to create these opportunities.
  
  Summer before I started college, I happened across USC's Rocket Propulsion Laboratory, the first undergraduate run club to have their rocket reach the Karman line (edge of space). I knew I had to join because the achievement was incredibly audacious and the environment reminded me of robotics. As a progressed within the club, I reflected on the factors which steered me to the space industry. Notably, the 2019 and 2020 FIRST Robotics game themes of "Deep Space" and Star Wars sponsored "Infinite Recharge", which heavily advertised NASA and future-thinking space designs.
  
  
  
  The more I thought back, the more I realized my associations with the space industry were very artistic. I think of the Earthrise photograph, the iconic vehicle exterior of the Space Shuttle, looking at stars in my backyard, the ubiquitous JPL planet view posters, galaxy photos from Hubble, mission patches, SpaceX's black and white graphic design.. and on and on and on. Despite being one of the most technically complex industries, it is also the most reliant on art for its message and justification of purpose. The space industry relies on the marketing value of being in awe at the endless possibilities for humans living in space, discovering our place in the universe, or otherwise. Without that--the arguments misguided naysayers bring up about diverting brainpower from problems on Earth or polluting the environment quickly stifle public inspiration. 
  
  The 21st century general public view of space is clouded significantly by Public Relations (PR) blunders such as the "billionaire boys club" and "rockets pollute the atmosphere" (while true not even close to significant compared to other other sources). This flies against the rhetorical "space advocacy package" that has "changed little since the the Apollo program of the 1960s and 1970s", which includes: "that we need to explore space to save humanity from extinction, that we need to use space resources to prevent further destruction of Earth's ecosystems, that we need to explore space to inspire student interest in the sciences, the we need to conquer the space frontier to avoid societal stagnation, that humans are explorers, etc." (Schwartz) I will not discuss the accuracy of these claims as Schwartz in The Value of Science in Space Exploration does, just present them as existing. 
  
  A particularly powerful claim is that of "spinoff technologies", the idea that innovations resulting from challenges solved to enable space missions trickle down to solve problems on Earth (conveniently catalogued on this Wikipedia page). This argument is so important NASA even publishes the Spinoff journal that covers roughly 50 new technologies at year that were initially developed for space. 
  
  Let's zoom back to to the other size of the equation, specifically at Art & Technology collaborations. Herin lies a key similarity that sparked my thesis, just as designing for the novel environment of space results in technological innovation that benefits Earth, the novel environment of artists collaborating with engineers similarly results in innovations with value to our life and society. 
  
  What's more, the pursuit of exploring distant worlds or looking back on Earth from the moon does not bring to mind a technical utility like designing a bridge that width-stands 20 years of foot and car traffic. This begs the joking statement that just as much or indeed because space exploration is for "humanities" sake, it is for arts sake. 
  
  To structure the argument I have a few lenses. Overarching, I have the temporal constraint of 1960s - present with a focus on America, Europe, and Russia (this notably omits developing nations and as such sadly an element of diversity in my scope). Firstly, the public rhetoric behind the divided cultures of humanities and sciences which sparked the Art & Technology movement in the 60s and the continuations of these discussions today (including a personal view). Secondly, the lense of the space industry (military as well as commercial) as the environment for art and technology collaboration, where I argue it's goals an especially strongly positioned one to need and thus springboard such collaboration. Third, the history of this movement through the "Long 60's" marked by the first satellite launch Sputnik and ending with the last Apollo landing.