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8 ACUMEN • SPRING 2021 foundation, and as someone who values the history of architecture and the arts, what I do with my techniques, with my coding, is grounded in a much more robust historical lineage. For me, that provides more aesthetic legitimacy.” MODERN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES REPRESENTATIONS OF DISABILITIES Mexican social life throughout the 1970s and 1980s was driven by one group of women known as vedettes, roughly translated as cabaret or bar hostesses. These burlesque starlets portrayed themselves as symbols of sensuality, and their lives and careers are the focus of research underway by Lilia Adriana Pérez Limón. In her book project, titled Defying National Stability, Screening Disabilities and Its Discontents , Pérez Limón, assistant professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, examines Mexican and Latina/o documentary films and the representation of disabilities, including age, physical disabilities, mental health and physical illnesses. Part of her work examines age and what that entails in a capitalist economy. These performers who rose to celebrity status are spotlighted throughout her cases. “They were at one time really famous,” she says. “They’re now in their late 80s, and some still perform. They view age differently, so I’m trying to analyze age differently. I’m looking at how we see age and how we see disability in a Mexican context.” Addressing disabilities in Mexican films takes a delicate approach, she adds, where topics such as ageism and mental health are not openly addressed. “There are a few films that have come out in the past few years that touch on this. In Mexican culture, it’s not something that can be talked about that freely,” she says. “It’s not necessarily social change they’re looking for, but these films do that work.” Pérez Limón’s book focuses on performers that include Olga Breeskin, Lyn May, Princesa Yamal, Wanda Seux, Sasha Montenegro and Rossy Mendoza. These women experienced tremendous success over their stage and film careers but also slightly darkened room, where they are shown a series of images. He uses two cameras and a method of triangulation to map where each participant looks when viewing the image. He then takes the data and writes his own programs to create graphical representations of his findings. “My visual footprint of an image will always be different than yours, and the visual footprint I have today will at least be slightly different than it will be tomorrow,” he notes. “With my work, my goal is not to draw evidence of larger perceptual behavior. That’s not my principal concern. The questions stem from more of an aesthetic and philosophical background. I’m more concerned with the creativity inherent in perception.” Han’s research runs parallel to the work he does professionally, where his studio work addresses the problem of form from a theoretical and design point of view. “The way I approach my architectural forms is they are always variable; they’re always indeterminate,” he says. “I use coding to generate my forms, and the idea is that they are never fixed, but are determined by random approximation. I’m not designing a building as a single and perfect object. I’m designing a series of formal variations, a calculus, of a given formal idea.” The broader scope of Han’s research involves finding interdisciplinary possibilities through new forms of shared knowledge, bridging the arts with the sciences. “My research hasn’t changed the front end of my work so much, but it has affected the back end significantly,” he says. “Because of the research I do now, I have a deeper conceptual ARCHITECTURE CREATIVITY OF PERCEPTION How people see works of art differ from person to person, and visualizing these varied ways of perception is the focus of research by architect Eugene Han. Han, assistant professor of architecture in the Department of Art, Architecture and Design, explores the intersections between aesthetics, computation and the psychology of perception. His design and research are motivated by problems of form in architecture. His current exploration integrates theories of phenomenological aesthetics with the psychology of perception, as established through the analysis of eye movements. “I’m trying to find ways to visualize the creativity inherent in how we approach works of art and architecture—seeing images, seeing spaces, seeing sculptures,” Han says. “Seeing is not a passive act. It’s an active performance, whether we take two seconds walking past a painting on a gallery wall or are wholly immersed and study it for hours. We can’t help but be active in our perception. It’s about the engagement between the person or groups who create and the person or groups who perceive. It’s a dialogue. Art can become quite irrelevant when it stays solely in the hands of the creator and isn’t allowed to be part of a larger discourse.” In his research, Han employs eye tracking cameras, equipment typically used in the field of psychology, to track eye movement. He places subjects in a DREW ANGERER / GETTY IMAGES, CLASOS / GETTY IMAGES, SCIMAT / SCIENCE SOURCE BRIEFS Eugene Han explores the creativity inherent in perception.