Event 2: North > South campus walk (again)

Retracing the North > South > North walk at the end of the quarter felt completely different than when I first did it. The first time, walking past Powell Library, I felt grounded and familiar. But as I crossed Bruin Walk and walked toward the Court of Sciences, I remember feeling like I had entered a different ecosystem: faster, more technical, less like “me.”

This time, I paused deliberately in that transition zone right by the crosswalk between the breezeway in Mathematical Sciences and Kerckhoff. The fountain’s sound and circular motion felt symbolic of the course itself, where ideas and disciplines continuously ripple and overlap. As I passed the Biomedical Library and the Mathematical Sciences building, I didn’t feel out of place like I used to. Instead, I felt curious. I remembered Vesna’s vision of a “third culture”—a space where artists and scientists co-create new knowledge—and I saw it unfolding right in front of me.

In front of the CNSI (California NanoSystems Institute), I stopped and thought about Neuroculture by Frazzetto and Anker, and how the brain is now viewed both as a biological structure and a symbol of identity. This made me reflect on how the physical act of walking—an embodied, sensory experience—has shaped my learning. The Embodied Mind argues that knowledge lives not just in thought but in movement, gesture, and sensation. I felt that truth as I climbed the Kuruvungna Steps back up to Royce.

This walk no longer felt like moving between opposites. It felt like stitching something together. That’s how this course has changed me, not by choosing between art and science, but by helping me walk right through the space between them.

Works Cited

Frazzetto, Giovanni, and Suzanne Anker. “Neuroculture.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, vol. 10, no. 11, 2009, pp. 815–821.

Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press, 1991.

Vesna, Victoria. “Toward a Third Culture: Being in Between.” Leonardo, vol. 34, no. 2, 2001, pp. 121–125. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1576669.


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