A panel of judges from the College of Engineering honored five participants in the second annual Art of Engineering challenge.
The competition was born from the need to beautify the engineering buildings while simultaneously expressing the collaboration between art and engineering.
This year, judges presented awards in four categories: Platinum, Gold, Silver and the Dean’s Appreciation awards.
Naomi Nicole Donato’s (software engineering) “Through My Eyes: Connecting the Spectrum of Light” received the Platinum Award. The piece depicts a close-up sketch of a human eye, with the pupil constructed from a Circular Sankey Graph demonstrating the overlap between engineering departments.
“There is a spectrum of majors in engineering, and I wanted to capture the essence of that spectrum, witnessing how they are all interconnected,” Donato described.
The two parts of the piece, human and technological, reflect the working mind of engineering – those who create and perform the engineering work.
“The emotion illuminating from this piece is meant to elucidate the euphoric feelings of eureka people felt during technological discoveries, being analogous to student’s eureka moments from learning something new through their eyes.”
Diana Santos’ (environmental engineering) “The Study Group, Navigating Their Way Through Calculus,” was honored with the Gold Award.
The black-and-white art piece depicts miniature students navigating through a calculus textbook.
“The photograph focuses on the relationship between the learning process within study groups and the different ways problems can be approached,” Santos shared.
In the piece, the students in the canoe are moving across a fluid formula on the book’s page, influencing the counterclockwise direction the canoe will flow. Meanwhile, the students in the raft are floating calmly over the spot on the page where the flow integral equals zero.
“This is a visual representation of understanding circulation through vector fields and flow integration from a calculus textbook, a subject many engineers are familiar with,” Santos explained.
Damien Butler (mechanical engineering) received the Silver Award for the piece “Isometry.”
The hand-drawn piece represents the intricate tools used to create engineering projects.
“When I think about engineering, aside from mathematics or CAD or problem solving, I find myself coming back to the idea of a shop,” Butler said.
The colorful art piece shows the intricate tools that can be found in a machine shop, which Butler describes as one of the staples of engineering.
“I wanted ‘Isometry’ to bring back bold color into our minds, to take with us into our designs,” Butler said.
Jaclyn Brodersen (general engineering) and Sofia Buduchina (biomedical engineering) each earned the Dean’s Appreciation Award for their individual art pieces.
Brodersen’s piece, “Impact,” depicts her unique interests that may be nontraditional for most people pursuing an engineering path.
“I’m essentially a walking contradiction,” she shared.
While Brodersen struggled to combine her passions for engineering and art, she has come to accept her uniqueness as a positive trait that sparks creativity, which is essential in engineering.
“I belong in engineering because I’m a contradiction,” she said. “I belong here because I’m a single step in the path toward a better future. All our differences are exactly what makes us whole, and the intersectionality of life is our medium.”
Buduchina’s piece, “The Blueprint of Creativity,” uses AI-generated imaging to represent the complexity of the engineering mind.
“The design of this curated image required more than 150 iterations of generated imagery over which keyword variations were experimented with and modulated,” Buduchina explained.
The multicolored blueprint explores the design-focused and innovative approach to engineering.
When referring to her piece, Buduchina posed the question, “What better way to produce art that depicts engineering than using an engineered interface to create it?”
The winning art pieces will be displayed throughout the College of Engineering buildings later this quarter.
By Taylor Villanueva
