Computer Science Alumna Lina Kogan Blends Art with Technology in New Exhibit – USC Viterbi
Lina Kogan stands in front of 1 of the numerous items displayed all through the Recent exhibition. Photo/Lina Kogan.
USC pupils and faculty collected in the USC Michelson Middle for Convergent Bioscience Jan. 25 for “Current,” the exhibition of Ukrainian-born artist, pc scientist, and USC Viterbi alumna Lina Kogan, who graduated in 2000 with a master’s diploma in computer system science and multimedia and creative technologies. Her do the job brings together minimalism with computers—literally. Laptop or computer chips, keyboard keys and wires weave their way during Kogan’s performs, bringing a distinctly technological search to the canvases.
Kogan, also a experienced personal computer scientist, merges artwork and technological know-how in her pieces as a matter of pattern. The bits of tech embedded in canvases in the course of the room are allegories to her previous, pastiches of her knowledge escalating up in the Eastern Bloc.
Back again in Kyiv, Kogan went to artwork faculty as a child. Having said that, when it came time to leave for college, her mothers and fathers pushed her to a specialized degree—engineering, computer science—because she’d shown an aptitude for math.
“I loved portray and generating from an early age,” Kogan reported. “But I was kind of steered away from it— away from artwork.”
When Kogan arrived to the United States in 1992 at 20 a long time aged to go on her training, this passion was nonetheless alive and properly. Even though performing towards her master’s degree at USC, she also took on ceramics, drawing, portray and sculpture lessons in addition to her classes, cultivating an curiosity in sculpture and reigniting her fervor for making.
“I just liked the three-dimensional aspect of it,” Kogan claimed. “I was building all over again, sculptures and ceramic artwork, and that’s how all this started.”
Given that 2005, Kogan has been exhibiting her work at museums, art galleries and auctions, all the although functioning whole-time in Information Engineering with Aerojet Rocketdyne.
Resource Code What do you Hear
Lina Kogan’s titular piece, “Source Code”
The title of the exhibition, “Current,” is very related to a certain piece, according to Kogan. She showed the piece, titled “Source Code What do you Listen to,” in the course of her presentation at the begin of the function together with the definition of ‘Current,’ highlighting the truth that it refers to both of those a minute in time and an electrical charge. The titular perform is awash with an extreme purple hue that sinks to the bottom of the canvas and is interspersed with keys, steel piping, and an archaic-seeking pc punch card.
“It goes back again to the history of computing. I received that card from the Museum of the Record of Computing in Santa Clara,” Kogan stated. “It’s symbolic to me, because my mother utilized punch cards at her work as a software program engineer and would convey them again, to Kyiv. It is quite generational How do we respond to events from the past? How does that translate to currently? What is the connection in between previous and new?”
The keys at the bottom appear at a glance to be random letters strung collectively, but in reality spell the Slavic term for ear in the Cyrillic alphabet, yxo, bringing an added indicating to the various bits and baubles.
“The title is self-explanatory from time to time messages get missing in translation,” Kogan said. “Sometimes know-how will help us get the message across, but other situations we’re so bombarded by a variety of stimuli from this technological know-how that it can make us reduce aim, and we could miss essential messages because of that.”
Landscape
Kogan poses with the consumer of her piece, Landscape, which was used to aid the war in Ukraine.
A further higher-profile piece of Kogan’s is Landscape, emblazoned in the colors of the Ukranian flag with a splash of extreme red close to the topmost still left corner. The actual physical canvas is a stout 40 by 40, a menagerie of severe strains and metallic surfaces. Kogan utilised bullets and other parts of components to create the texture, a haunting effect that underscores the brutality of the condition in her household place.
“As the war broke out, I started off to see a large amount of artists emphasize Ukraine, significantly by portray sunflowers. At initial, I assumed this was not so much my design and style, and the flag shades were being not my palette,” Kogan explained. ”But the war went on—a day, to a week, to a month—and as I was processing what was taking place, I recognized I had to do a thing to specific all of my feelings about the injustice and absurdity of the predicament. That piece just variety of came out, even though I didn’t prepare it.”
Inside of a thirty day period and a fifty percent of the war’s outbreak, the piece was accomplished, and instantly showcased in fundraisers and artwork shows to raise money for Ukraine. The painting was marketed to a collector in the Bay Place, and Kogan donated the proceeds from the sale to NovaUkraine and Help save The Youngsters Ukraine.
“I was confused by the assist of other artists that just needed to donate their items to be a part of that auction,” Kogan mentioned. “We had a total collection of exhibitions in July.”
Kogan is grateful for the opportunity to use the exhibition at USC to increase consciousness and showcase her art to a neighborhood that she was as soon as a aspect of, a little something she believes goes higher than and beyond just economic aid for humanitarian help for the war.
Students from equally Computer Science and the Japanese European Languages division attended the Present-day exhibition.
“It was a extremely, pretty private practical experience for me, especially for the reason that there ended up so a lot of distinctive kinds of individuals there, from the pc science department to these learning Russia and Ukraine,” Kogan stated. “Both arrived up and talked to me just after the exhibition, and so lots of people today recognized with those people two sides converging, that creative aspect and that technical side. I was specially touched by a youthful woman in the very same boat as me, who wanted to be an artist but is studying computer system science per her family’s advice. I was pleased that my example confirmed her that it is doable to keep on on both of those paths with out compromising both.”
The exhibition shut with a poem of hers, accompanied by yet another piece, Cloud Computing:
Milky clouds dissipate to expose
The earth painted more than,
patched, weathered and peeled
Make your bubble on the clouds,
metallic fluffy clouds wired
with silver lining of rain 🌧️
Bubble into your Scantron
Random responses you know
That bubble up to the floor,
Appear on, use your brain! 🧠
Messages are encrypted
In safe connections you manufactured
Your magnet draws in
All you preferred to listen to
All you wanted conveyed
Lifestyle computes the way you would like to really feel
In your transparent fragile bubble
On the shiny brittle shifting cloud
With a persuasive magnetic field.
Posted on March 10th, 2023
Past current on March 10th, 2023