Week 8: Nanotech+Art

I've been a tech junkie for my entire life. I've followed the development of nanotechnology very closely, especially the new carbon structures and their implications for consumer electronics of the future. I remember in elementary school my teacher demonstrating graphene by peeling off a layer of pencil lead with Scotch tape. Now we're at an age where entire car wheels can be made of carbon fibers.

So it's a topic I'd like to think I'm quite familiar to. So I felt that "art in the age of nanotechnology," an exhibit for nano-art having a piece completely unrelated to anything nano illustrated how misunderstood the term is.

Don't get me wrong. The exhibit has pieces that are clearly nanotechnology in some way. Boo Chapple's "Transjuicer" is a great example. At first glance it might sound like one of those bone conducting headphones like the one used in the first iterations of the Google Glass. This would use the bone itself as the "diaphragm" of a speaker, delivering sound directly to the inner ear.

The original Google Glass with a bone conducting speaker.

Transjuicer works differently. It takes advantage of the piezoelectric nature of the symmetrical crystalline structure of dry bone cartilage. Piezoelectricity is the property in which electricity directly causes motion and vice versa, compared to a conventional motor which relies on electromagnets. This is how some guitar pickups work, for example, but backwards such that the bone outputs sound instead of inputs.

Femur bone used as a piezoelectric speaker in "Transjuicer."

Thomas and Raxworthy's "Nano_essence," and Vesna and Gimszewkski's "Nanomandala" are direct exercises in nanotechnology, molecular imaging techniques such as SEM forming the basis of the pieces.

But the remaining two hardly has anything to do with nanotechnology. They misinterpret it as "technology that can't be seen." This is absolutely far from the truth; two other pieces at the same exhibit directly visualize the world at the nano-scale.

More accurately, nanotechnology is at a scale that can't be seen with an optical microscope, since the visible light has wavelengths from roughly 400~700nm, and other technology must be used to see at the scale. The very basis of Philips's "A MOTE IT IS…" shows that Philips either does not understand this. The image of the mote, the speck of dust, is merely microscopic, observed optically, not nanotechnology. Or maybe the description is leaving out that massive detail of what makes this nanotechnology.

Sommerer and Mignonneau's "Nano-scape" is even more disconnected. Particles at this scale will be dominated by magnetic attractions to each other more than that of an external magnetic field from a permanent magnet, which will more or less appear uniform to adjacent nanoparticles. It's therefore implausible that one is feeling individual nano-particles using magnets, lest the magnetic feedback is directly connected to a scanning microscope such as an AFM which literally "feels" the grooves of surfaces at the nanometer scale or smaller.

1. Porsche. "The new 20-inch 911 Turbo Carbon Wheel for the 911 Turbo S Exclusive Series." YouTube, 18 Aug 2017. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RbJbh2PraI

2. Digital image. Reckmann, Tim. "Google Glass - Front View." Wikimedia Commons. 12 May 2014. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Google_Glass_Front.jpg

3. Perth International Arts Festival. "art in the age of nanotechnology." 2010. https://art.base.co/event/2104-art-in-the-age-of-nanotechnology

4. Fukada, Eiichi, and Iwao Yasuda. “On the Piezoelectric Effect of Bone.” Journal of the Physical Society of Japan, vol. 12, no. 10, 1957, pp. 1158–1162., doi:10.1143/jpsj.12.1158.

5. Science Mission Directorate. "Visible Light" NASA Science. 2010. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. 26 May 2019 http://science.nasa.gov/ems/09_visiblelight