Achieving NanoBliss

The Nanobama story made the big time a couple of weeks ago, but I failed to do justice to the University of Michigan's John Hart, who brought us this politically well-timed piece of nanotube sculpture. (Just as an aside, I wonder whether the EPA under Obama will decide whether carbon nanotubes are toxic?)

Aside from his page devoted to his little president-elects, you should also check out nanobliss, where he highlights more of his work, including the carbon-nanotube scramble you see above.

Those tubes, by the way, are said to be self-organized. If so, then they have much in common with the way I seem to organize my own life. Nanotubes: Me, you, same.

Hart writes:

The visualizations and the underlying fabrication techniques are new media for art, science, and architecture; and for promoting popular awareness and education about nanomaterials and related technologies. Forms under development include museum/gallery exhibitions and laboratory experiments, and advertising and informational pieces in scientific and popular literature. More here

Backgrounder
Nanotubes gerrymandered into 'Nanobama'
Nanotube interconnects and hot Indian babes
Nanotubes and nanotox? Maybe not
Nanotubes and the tale of the rats
Nantero sings a happy tune
An armchair nanotube quarterback

She branded me with science

  

"I studied nanotechnology in school and got my enormous Bohr atom during that time," writes the guy above left in a blog post on The Loom called Branded with Science. This image popped up during a routine nanotech search, which brought me to what is apparently a trend among those whose relationship with science goes more than skin deep. You can view a gallery of science tattoos here and also over here.

Little art, big production

Turn up your speakers, open your windows, don your Viking hat and click the "play" button!

Backgrounder
Pretty little things
Time for a little art
A little splash of color

A place for all your little crap

It's about 2:30 a.m. and I'm all pooped, but just got all flush with excitement over this pico-potty, courtesy of Gizmodo.

But, alas, I see that it is an old commode from '05 being passed as new by Wired, the little shits.

But, I do have to give the headline writer credit when he asks: "Does the Electron Nanotoilet Contain Schrödinger's Scat?" Poetry.

OK. Gotta go drop the boys off at the pool now.

Backgrounder
Play 'Freebird'!

Pretty little things

Nano Lite-Brite (LiveScience)

Most inventors see nanotubes as microscopic building blocks, but others are exploring their ability to glow under light. Researchers at Vanderbilt University have studied new crops of nanotubes that brilliantly fluoresce—a technology that could be useful in treating cancer and other medical conditions. More here

She Calls It ‘Phenomena.’ Everyone Else Calls It Art. (By Cornelia Dean, New York Times)

When people call Felice Frankel an artist, she winces.

In the first place, the photographs she makes don’t sell. She knows this, she says, because after she received a Guggenheim grant in 1995, she started taking her work to galleries. “Nobody wanted to bother looking,” she said.

In the second place, her images are not full of emotion or ideology or any other kind of message. As she says, “My stuff is about phenomena.”

Phenomena like magnetism or the behavior of water molecules or how colonies of bacteria grow — phenomena of nature. “So I don’t call it art,” Ms. Frankel said. “When it’s art, it’s more about the creator, not necessarily the concept in the image.”

As first an artist in residence and now a research scientist at M.I.T., and now also a senior research fellow at the Institute for Innovative Computing at Harvard, she helps researchers use cameras, microscopes and other tools to display the beauty of science. More here

Salad Dressing-Like Mix Restores Art (Discovery Channel

A salad dressing-like mixture of water, a bit of oil and a sugar-like molecule can safely clean ancient frescoes, according to a new nanotechnology research.

Scientists at the University of Florence, Italy, have discovered that the oil-in-water microemulsion — basically tiny droplets of oil suspended in water — can penetrate a painting’s pores and scrub away grime and acrylic resins.

The potion has proven particularly effective in cleaning frescoes that had been coated in thick layers of paraloid, an acrylic copolymer widely used by conservators in the 1960s. More here

Backgrounder
Time for a little art
A little splash of color

Time for a little art

I am not the artist of the family. That's my wife's department (She works at the Detroit Institute of Arts). So, I'm probably not qualified to spot an art "trend." But, as all the real scientists and engineers who read this blog know, lack of qualifications has never stopped me from openly expressing an opinion before, so why stop now?

Trend or not, there has been some recent news involving nanotech and art. The picture above comes from Jessica Burns, a junior at Central Columbia High School in Pennsylvania, who took first place in a Nanotechnology Digital Art Contest sponsored by Clarion University, where students can minor in nanotechnology. Jessica's piece is called "Up, Up, and Away with Nanotechnology," in keeping with the contest's nanotech-and-the-environment theme.

And my old friend and former Small Times correspondent Jack Mason continues his passion for science and art with a partnership with the Insight Art Connection. You can view and purchase his celebration of the tiny over here. The piece pictured here is called "Nano Under Glass."

NanoArt blogger Cris Orfescu tells us about art that, unlike much of my writing, is Finnish-ed. (That was supposed to be a joke. Never mind).

The 1st International Festival of NANOART - Finland 2007 (from Cris Orfescu's NanoArt blog)

The 1st International Festival of NanoArt will be hosted by the Kotkan Valokuvakeskus Gallery in Kotka, Finland between May 4 and May 31, 2007. The show is curated by Cris Orfescu (USA) and Timo Mahonen (Finland). ...

To view the artists' NanoArt albums please visit http://nanoart21.org/nanoart2006.

NanoArt is a new art discipline related to micro/nanosculptures created by artists/scientists through chemical/physical processes and visualized with powerful research tools like Scanning Electron Microscope or Atomic Force Microscope. The monochromatic microscope images are processed further to create pieces of art that can be showcased for large audiences to educate the public with creative images that are appealing and acceptable. To read more about NanoArt and Nanotechnology please visit http://www.nanoart21.org/.

Backgrounder
A little splash of color
Laurie Anderson's spirit in the sky
Tag-teaming with nature to build nanomachines

A little splash of color

Small wonder Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology - which deals with the minutest of technological scales - has a big role in new exhibit -- Inland Valley (Calif.) Daily Bulletin

Shouting their presence in loud shades of red, blue and yellow, artist and scientist Cris Orfescu's images look first like abstract pieces. The colorful curves, angular lines and sudden bursts that command the canvases appear to be the fantastical expression of the artist's whim and creative taste.

Then familiar objects begin to appear in the abstract renderings. One resembles a falling leaf; another could be a bird of paradise.

That exploratory process is what Orfescu hopes viewers experience when they look at his work on display this month in a two-man show at La Casa Decor Interiors in Los Angeles.

That way, when he explains that the images are actually what he calls "nanoart," showing colored images of such impossibly tiny objects as dust and dirt particles, he hopes onlookers will have a greater connection with nanotechnology.

"The whole idea behind this is I want people to understand a little bit more about nanotechnology," Orfescu said. "I'm trying to make a parallel with the macro world --- the one we see with the naked eye." More here

NanoBot Backgrounder
Laurie Anderson's spirit in the sky
The Art of Nano

Laurie Anderson's spirit in the sky

Seattle - Laurie Anderson - Performance and Lecture (Archinect)

Center on Contemporary Art is very pleased to announce an artist-talk and mini-performance by internationally acclaimed performance artist, Laurie Anderson Tuesday, November 9th at 2 PM at CoCA.

"In this new work, my ambition is to write an epic poem made of songs, images, and stories that relate in new ways; my plan is to invent a language that will explore the contemporary meanings of freedom and time."

"Research for this piece involves a lot of travel as well as my work with NASA where, as artist-in-residence, I am looking at nanotechnology and imaging."

"My dream is to make a work that will focus on spirituality and consumerism, a work that will attempt to be a true portrait of this country at the beginning of our century." More here

NanoBot Backgrounder
I'm ready for my closeup, Mr. Heisenberg
Turn on, tune in, tiny out
Nano's got the look

NanoBots as envisioned by Encarta

Discuss

Update: Daniel Moore adds:

I was reading the caption to the nanobot picture in Encarta that you linked to and found this sentence a little odd (emphasis added):

“A *micro*scopic, computerized robot, also known as a *nano*bot”

Umm… wouldn’t that make it *nano*scopic???

Sure, Daniel. But it's just another reason not to believe everything you read online.

The Art of Nano

Ladies, germs and mad scientists, I give you

ubercorrespondent and guest NanoBot blogger Jack Mason:

As a journalist, I've found nanotechnology an absorbing beat: fast-moving, thought-provoking and wide-ranging.

I never expected it to be an artistic inspiration. I've long marveled at some of the images of structures and materials made at the molecular level, strange and beautiful vistas smaller than the wavelengths of light visible only with tools that can sense or feel their actuality.

Six months ago, my fascination with those scenes of the unseeable lead me to start playing with some of the nanoscopic pictures I'd come across in the small tech world. From the start I tried to imitate how some of the nanoscientists I cover work: I blended and morphed pixels from multiple images much the way they are cajoling different atoms to form novel structures and patterns.

My metaphorical methods extended to digital techniques of self-assembly and layering. Where nanoscale researchers apply physics, chemistry and clever engineering to synthesize new materials, I employed software and the wetware of human visual intuition.

Last Friday, I picked up the first finished effort of the art project I've dubbed NanoTechno from Silicon Gallery Fine Art Prints, a shop in the Old City section of Philadelphia. The 3' by 4' image mixes a variety of images with a little digital manipulation to evoke, at least for me, the wonder of the nanoscale.

While the artistic merits of these experiments are as yet unproven, what's really interesting is that the printing technology used to make the digital physical is intriguingly small tech.

As Silicon Fine Arts' proprietor Rick Coyte explained, his $80,000 Iris 3047 printer uses an array of ultrafine inkjets that sprays droplets of special ink about the size of red blood cells. A piezoelectric crystal deposits about four million ink droplets per second to create an image with an apparent resolution of 1800 dpi. The result is so rich and smooth, that museums frequently make reproductions of invaluable paintings with the process. (see http://www.fineartprint.com/iris.htm for details).

Now that my process is public, I want to take my nano-mimetic motif a step further and make this project a multidisciplinary collaboration. First, that means reaching out to the nanoworld for high-resolution images of small tech devices, materials and structures, the raw materials for artistic amalgamation. And second, I'm calling out all around the Web to other artists interested in collaborating and extending NanoTechno into new forms and media.

Got images? Ideas? Suggestions? Send them my way. Jackmason@nycmail.com

Discuss