Week 8 Nanotechnology - Art

After digging through the “Art in the Age of Nanotechnology” link (John Curtin Gallery) for a while and pondering odd questions such as, “Can you hear the femur play?” reminiscent of other odd questions such as, “Can you smell what the rock is cooking?”, I stumbled upon our own Victoria Vesna’s collaborative project with guest lecturer James Gimzewski, which caught my attention both as an interesting art piece and one by familiar faces.

            Vesna and Gimzewski’s piece “Nano Mandala” featuring Tibetan monks from the Ghaden Lhopa Khangsten Monastery, projects images of Hindu artwork on a circular sand bed while allowing observers and artists to shape the sand during the experience. The images then begin to zoom in on themselves in a sort of mesmerizing and perplexing evolution as we go from the macro Hindu image to the molecular structure of a sand grain, and back again. The senses are further delighted as a dancer moves across the morphing table and is eventually thrown into a kaleidoscope like pattern where she appears almost like a nanoscale structure herself.  

            Another of Vesna and Gimzewski’s projects called “Zero@wavefunction” projects images of the chemical structure of buckyballs on the walls and the floor allowing users to deform them using their shadows and large physical balls that can be rolled around. Again the effect seems sort of surreal, with subtle actions causing large changes in the buckyballs that give the illusion of being a nanoscale structure yourself.

            In other news, there may be a paradigm shift in nanotechnology/art and technology in general, as engineers at the University of Utah have developed a photon beam splitter 1/50 the width of a human hair. This is potentially paving the way for computers that can run on light (faster than anything in the universe) instead of electricity, which could render computers millions of times faster than they are now. In today’s technology twice as fast is a big deal for a new computer, millions of times faster is a revolution.

University of Utah Engieneers develop nanoscale beamsplitter for speed of light computing. 

Works Cited

"Art in the Age of Nanotechnology." Art.base. John Curtin Gallery, 2010. Web. 25 May 2015. 

"Computing at the Speed of Light." Computing at the Speed of Light. University of Utah News, 18 May 2015. Web. 25 May 2015. 

Vesna, Victoria, and James Gimzewski. "Nano Mandala." YouTube. YouTube, 2008. Web. 25 May 2015. 

Vesna, Victoria, and James Gimzewski. "Zero@wavefunction, Responsive Environment/ Nano Art, 2001." YouTube. YouTube, 2001. Web. 25 May 2015.