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Brazil, Canada, and an innovation, science, and technology forum in Vancouver (Canada)

Thursday, June 13th, 2013

The Brazil-Canada Chamber of Commerce (BCCC) is presenting, in partnership with Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) Beedie School of Business, an all-morning forum on June 17, 2013. From the SFU Vancouver Events: June 14 – 21, 2013 announcement (Note: Links have been removed),

Monday, June 17 [2013]

Brazil-Canada Business, Innovation, Science, and Technology Forum

Time: 8-11:30am

Place: Segal Graduate Business School, 500 Granville St.

Cost: $35-70, register online

Join us for a morning focused on Business Innovation and Science & Tecnology opportunities in the Brazilian economy. The opening speakers, Ambassador Sergio Florencio, Consul General and Dr. Jeremy Hall will provide an overview of the landscape in Brazil. The panel discussion includes industry leaders who have piloted extensive business in Brazil specifically in the agriculture, mining and infrastructure fields: Marcelo Sarkis, Heenan Blaikie; Ray Castelli, Weatherhaven and Rogerio Tippe, Javelin Partners. If you are interested in conducting business in Brazil and would like to understand more about the dynamics of the Brazilian economy and how businesses operate, please register now.

If the event is about business, innovation, science, and technology, it seems curious the only mentions of science and/or technology in the event description are confined to a few of the panelists’ interests in agriculture, mining, and whatever they mean by infrastructure.

Brazil is one of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia,India, China, and South Africa) countries and, from what I understand, this very loose coalition is eager to take a leadership position vis à vis science, technology, and innovation supplanting the dominance of the US, Japan, and the European Union.

In the early 1990s, I wrote a paper about science and technology transfer and noted that Brazil was entering a new period of development after years of the country’s science and technology efforts (scientists) being isolated from the rest of the world in a failed  attempt to create a powerhouse international enterprise.

Some 20 years later, the decision to join the rest of the science and technology world seems to have been successful. Brazil is set to host the 2014 World Cup for soccer (or, as most of the world calls it, football) and the summer Olympics in 2016. (Sports are often correlated with science and technology advances.) I don’t believe any other country has ever attempted to host two such large international sports events within two years of each other. That’s a pretty confident attitude.

There are two areas of science and technology research in Brazil that are of particular interest to me, brain research and the work on cellulose nanocrystals (CNC), also known as, nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC).

While the focus was on Miguel Nicolelis and Duke University (US), the recent announcement of brain-to-brain communication via the Internet featured a research facility in Brazil (from my Mar. 4, 2013 posting),

Miguel Nicolelis, a professor at Duke University, has been making international headlines lately with two brain projects. The first one about implanting a brain chip that allows rats to perceive infrared light was mentioned in my Feb. 15, 2013 posting. The latest project is a brain-to-brain (rats) communication project as per a Feb. 28, 2013 news release on *EurekAlert,

Researchers have electronically linked the brains of pairs of rats for the first time, enabling them to communicate directly to solve simple behavioral puzzles. A further test of this work successfully linked the brains of two animals thousands of miles apart—one in Durham, N.C., and one in Natal, Brazil.

The results of these projects suggest the future potential for linking multiple brains to form what the research team is calling an “organic computer,” which could allow sharing of motor and sensory information among groups of animals. The study was published Feb. 28, 2013, in the journal Scientific Reports.

“Our previous studies with brain-machine interfaces had convinced us that the rat brain was much more plastic than we had previously thought,” said Miguel Nicolelis, M.D., PhD, lead author of the publication and professor of neurobiology at Duke University School of Medicine. “In those experiments, the rat brain was able to adapt easily to accept input from devices outside the body and even learn how to process invisible infrared light generated by an artificial sensor. So, the question we asked was, ‘if the brain could assimilate signals from artificial sensors, could it also assimilate information input from sensors from a different body?’”

One of Nicolelis’s other goals is to have someone with quadriplegia kick the opening ball for the Brazil-hosted 2014 World Cup (Walk Again Project). From my Mar. 16, 2012 posting,

It is the exoskeleton described on the Walk Again Project home page that Nicolelis is hoping will enable a young Brazilian quadriplegic to deliver the opening kick for the 2014 World Cup (soccer/football) in Brazil.

Moving on to the other area of interest, CNC research , which in Canada is discussed in terms of the forestry industry (I’ve blogged about this extensively, the search term NCC should fetch most if not all of my postings on the topic), is taking a different tack in Brazil where the focus is on pineapple and banana fibres. My Mar. 28, 20111 posting (Nanocellulose fibres, pineapples, bananas, and cars) focuses on cellulose and plastic,

Brazilian researchers are working on ways to use nanocellulose fibres from various plants to reinforce plastics in the automotive industry. From the March 28, 2011 news item on Nanowerk,

Study leader Alcides Leão, Ph.D., said the fibers used to reinforce the new plastics may come from delicate fruits like bananas and pineapples, but they are super strong. Some of these so-called nano-cellulose fibers are almost as stiff as Kevlar, the renowned super-strong material used in armor and bulletproof vests. Unlike Kevlar and other traditional plastics, which are made from petroleum or natural gas, nano-cellulose fibers are completely renewable.

My second and, to date, only other posting (June 16, 2011) about the work in Brazil features a transcript of an interview with CNC researcher, Alcides Leão.

Finally, I have a few factoids which I will tie together, loosely, and try to show how they relate to this forum. First, São Paulo, Brazil hosts the world’s second oldest and one of its most important biennial visual arts events. (BTW, the next one, Bienal de São Paulo,  is in 2014.) Second, the recent Council of Canadian Academies assessment, State of Science and Technology in Canada, 2012, stated that Canada rates very highly in six areas, one of those areas being the Visual and Performing Arts. Admittedly Canada’s prominence in the visual and performing is fueled largely by efforts in Québec (as per the assessment), still, one would think there might be some value in trying to include that sector in this  forum and encourage the local visual and performing arts technology industry to make connections with the Brazilian industry.

Finally for those of you who have persisted, here’s the link to buy tickets for the June 17, 2012 forum.

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Stranger Visions at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars June 3, 2013 in Washington, DC

Friday, May 31st, 2013

I got a notice from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Science and Technology Innovation Program about an art/science presentation taking place on June 3, 2013 in Washington, DC. From their May 30, 2013 announcement,

Stranger Visions: The DNA You Leave Behind

Heather Dewey-Hagborg is an information artist who is interested in exploring art as research and public inquiry. In her recent project Stranger Visions she creates literal figurative portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material collected in public places. Working with the traces strangers unwittingly leave behind, Dewey-Hagborg calls attention to the impulse toward genetic determinism and the potential for a culture of genetic surveillance. The project raises questions about the DNA we leave behind, privacy, and numerous legal and bioethical issues.

Designed as a provocation, Stranger Visions has been featured in the international news media, including Smithsonian, CNN, the New York Times, and National Public Radio.

In this exhibit and policy discussion, Dewey-Hagborg will discuss her process and progress on Stranger Visions. She will join Professor Sonia Suter of the George Washington University Law School and Dr. Todd Kuiken and Eleonore Pauwels of the Synthetic Biology Project  in a discussion and public Q&A about the bioethical, legal, and policy dimensions of the work.

You must register to attend the event. No RSVP is required to view the webcast.

Click here to RSVP. [If you are attending in person; viewing the webcast does not require an RSVP]

*** Webcast LIVE at [http://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/stranger-visions-the-dna-you-leave-behind]***

 

What: Stranger Visions: The DNA You Leave Behind

When: June 3, 2013 from 3:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Who:Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Information Artist and Ph.D. Candidate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Professor Sonia M. Suter, George Washington University Law School; Nancy J. Kelley, JD, MPP; Founding Executive Director of the New York Genome Center; a representative from the FBI is tentatively scheduled to discuss their methods and protocols surrounding DNA collectionand analysis.

Dr. Todd Kuiken and Eleonore Pauwels of the Synthetic Biology Project will moderate the session.

Where: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

6th Floor Board Room

Ronald Reagan Building

1300 Pennsylvania Ave NW

Washington, D.C.

For directions, visit: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/directions

To learn more about the Synthetic Biology Project, visit: http://www.synbioproject.org/about/

It was not immediately apparent to me that this event is being held as part of the Center’s Synthetic Biology Project event series. Interesting approach to bioethical and other issues.

ETA June 3, 2013: Eleanore Pauwels, one of the Wilson Center researchers on the panel, wrote a May 31, 2013 commentary on some of the issues raised by Dewey-Hagborg’s work on Slate.com (Note: Links have been removed),

… Heather Dewey-Hagborg, a 30-year-old Ph.D. student studying electronic arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., has the weird habit of gathering the DNA people leave behind, from cigarette butts and fingernails to used coffee cups and chewing gum. She comes to Genspace to extract DNA from the detritus she collects and sequence specific genomic regions from her samples. The data are then fed into a computer program, which churns out a facial model of the person who left the hair, fingernail, cigarette, or gum behind. Using a 3-D printer, she creates life-sized masks that offer a depiction of what the anonymous DNA donor might look like. And they may be coming to a gallery wall near you, with a show at the New York Public Library slated for early 2014.

Such a process might seem artistically cutting edge to some. But, for most of us, the “Yuck!” factor kicks in quickly. Whether you find it cool or creepy, though, this DNA-profiling experiment raises a number of legal and ethical questions that no one knows how to handle. To what degree does the DNA we leave behind in public spaces belong to us? Does a facial mask without a name raise the same issues as a photo? In either case, what exactly is our expectation of privacy?

Just because an individual sheds DNA in a public space does not mean that he or she does not care about preserving the privacy of the genetic material. There was no informed consent given to access that data. On the other hand, some might say the major problem is not unauthorized access to data but misuse of data. It is easy to imagine a scenario in which someone sequences the genome of an acquaintance (or rival) who left a cigarette behind. If the person who tested the cigarette found a risk gene for a mental disorder and posted the results on Facebook with the smoker’s name, the information could affect his social and professional life.

…  To what extent do genetic traits (such as ancestry) tell you about how a person looks? Based on the analysis of these genetic traits, how accurate is the 3-D facial model produced by the computer? At the request of a Delaware forensic practice, Dewey-Hagborg has been working on a sculpture from a DNA sample to identify the remains of an unidentified woman. This opens another black box at the connection between law enforcement and what we might call “DIY forensic science”: Here, what is the role of the state versus that of the individual?

I recommend reading the commentary in its entirety. As for the questions Pauwels raises, I’m wondering how I’d feel if I saw a mask that l00ked like me at the New York Public Library in 2014. Of course, that begs the next question, would I recognize myself?

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Unpredictable beauty at Princeton University

Friday, May 17th, 2013

Princeton University recently held an ‘Art of Science’ exhibition, which has now been made available online and here’s the one I liked best of the ones I’ve seen so far,

People's Second Place: Bridging the gap. Credit: Jason Wexler (graduate student) and Howard A. Stone (faculty) Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering When drops of liquid are trapped in a thin gap between two solids, a strong negative pressure develops inside the drops. If the solids are flexible, this pressure deforms the solids to close the gap. In our experiment the solids are transparent, which allows us to image the drops from above. Alternating dark and light lines represent lines of constant gap height, much like the lines on a topological map. Â These lines are caused by light interference, which is the phenomenon responsible for the beautiful rainbow pattern in an oil slick. The blue areas denote the extent of the drops. Since the drops pull the gap closed, the areas of minimum gap height (i.e. maximum deformation) are inside the drops, at the center of the concentric rings.

People’s Second Place: Bridging the gap. Credit: Jason Wexler (graduate student) and Howard A. Stone (faculty)
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
When drops of liquid are trapped in a thin gap between two solids, a strong negative pressure develops inside the drops. If the solids are flexible, this pressure deforms the solids to close the gap. In our experiment the solids are transparent, which allows us to image the drops from above. Alternating dark and light lines represent lines of constant gap height, much like the lines on a topological map. These lines are caused by light interference, which is the phenomenon responsible for the beautiful rainbow pattern in an oil slick. The blue areas denote the extent of the drops. Since the drops pull the gap closed, the areas of minimum gap height (i.e. maximum deformation) are inside the drops, at the center of the concentric rings.

There’s more about the real life and online exhibition in the May 16, 2013 Princeton University news release on EurekAlert,

The Princeton University Art of Science 2013 exhibit can now be viewed in a new online gallery. The exhibit consists of 43 images of artistic merit created during the course of scientific research:

http://www.princeton.edu/artofscience/gallery2013/

The gallery features the top three awards in a juried competition as well as the top three “People’s Choice” images.

The physical Art of Science 2013 gallery opened May 10 with a reception attended by about 200 people in the Friend Center on the Princeton University campus. The works were chosen from 170 images submitted from 24 different departments across campus.

“Like art, science and engineering are deeply creative activities,” said Pablo Debenedetti, the recently appointed Dean for Research at Princeton who served as master of ceremonies at the opening reception. “Also like art, science and engineering at their very best are highly unpredictable in their outcomes. The Art of Science exhibit celebrates the beauty of unpredictability and the unpredictability of beauty.” [emphasis mine]

Adam Finkelstein, professor of computer science and one of the exhibit organizers, said that Art of Science spurs debate among artists about the nature of art while opening scientists to new ways of “seeing” their own research. “At the same time,” Finkelstein said, “this striking imagery serves as a democratic window through which non-experts can appreciate the thrill of scientific discovery.”

The top three entrants as chosen by a distinguished jury received cash prizes in amounts calculated by the golden ratio (whose proportions have since antiquity been considered to be aesthetically pleasing): first prize, $250; second prize, $154.51; and third prize, $95.49. [emphasis mine]

…

The physical exhibit is located in the Friend Center on the Princeton University campus in Princeton, N.J.. The exhibit is free and open to the public, Monday through Friday, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

There are three pages of viewing delight at Princeton’s Art of Science 2013 online gallery. Have a lovely weekend picking your favourites.

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Constructing and deconstructing identity: buck, beck, and more in Vancouver, Canada

Friday, April 26th, 2013

I finally got back to the Rennie Collection located in Vancouver, Canada (it’s been a little over a year since my last visit [Mar. 22, 2012 posting about the Damian Moppett show]). The current show running from Mar. 2, 2013 – June 8, 2013 features Robert Beck/Buck. From the Rennie Collection’s (March 2013?) news release,

In 2008, Robert Beck changed his surname by a single vowel to Buck. [emphasis mine] This act of artistic self-nomination, a work of art itself, was precipitated by what he had achieved through his work as Beck, which was often autobiographical in content and persistently diverse in form. As an alias, Buck appealed to the artist for its precision and associations: stag, son, cash, to throw off. To substantiate this artistic transfiguration, Buck created the shrine (from e to u), 2012, a makeshift memorial of candles, flowers, and stuffed animals. [emphasis mine] The transitory work, susceptible to entropy and the elements, provocatively re-frames the now-common practice in which a community marks the site of a violent event, a fatality or loss, as a place of collective mourning.

Working in various mediums (drawing, sculpture, photography, and video) the artist utilizes many artistic procedures, including appropriation and installation. [emphasis mine] He has returned repeatedly to the universal themes of family, memory, identity, authorship, and loss. While his own singular experiences are central, Beck wittingly withholds information to solicit the viewer’s own unique associations. Beck has described his work as a way to “create an index by which I could make sense of earlier, often traumatic experiences [...] so to transcend them. Evidence of this riddles my work: bodies, holes, camouflage, mimicry, memorials, erasure, guilt, corruption, sex, and death – even my own! And so much of it is haunted by the presence (or is it the absence) of the Father.” Beyond his own father, Beck is referring to the Name-of-the-Father, a psychoanalytic term, via the Church, that designates one’s given name, as well as the symbolic order of things.

Several works by Beck are again relevant in the wake of recent shootings in the United States, notably at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and the Century movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. The thirteen images of teen shooters in Beck’s Thirteen Shooters, 2001 echo Andy Warhol’s 1964 mural Thirteen Most Wanted Men. In 2004, Beck fired a 12-gauge shotgun into three 25-lb buckets of mortician’s wax to create 01/25/04 ‐ Shots No. 12, 13, 14. Traces of a violent event, the resulting holes in the wax evoke an injured body, yet the “wound filler” substance also implies its repair. The work exemplifies Beck’s ability to exploit the meaning inherent in materials, and suggests why his work evolves from one medium to another.

Beck’s scrutiny of violence in American culture extends beyond its effects to its causes, and thus envelopes private realms like home and family. The title Screen Memory, 2004, a series of five silver-gelatin photographs refers to Sigmund Freud’s 1899 essay concerning the paradox of childhood memory, wherein consequential, often traumatic events are not usually retained, while trivial ones are.

Robert Buck, The Shrine (from e to u), 2000/2012 Flowers, candles, stuffed animals, balloons, thrift store artifacts, etc. [Downloaded from http://www.renniecollection.org/exhibitions/beckbuck/index.php]

Robert Buck, The Shrine (from e to u), 2000/2012
Flowers, candles, stuffed animals, balloons, thrift store artifacts, etc. [Downloaded from http://www.renniecollection.org/exhibitions/beckbuck/index.php]

First off: I had a professor of communication who cured me (and I imagine many others) of ever using mediums as the plural form of medium. This is paraphrasing what he said, “If you want to contact your dearly departed, you may want to speak to several mediums. Otherwise, the plural of medium is media.” Thank you to Paul Heyer who now teaches at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.

Buck’s show aroused in me (for the most part) the kind of response I have to reading a literary piece, which is a little disconcerting. The distinction for me and it is a rough distinction between writers and other artists is the way in which the minutiae of our lives is conveyed or reflected back to us. Reading a book or a story is a private and solitary experience whereas viewing a visual arts exhibition or attending a dance or theatre performance are intended to be public or group experiences.

As usual with the show at the Rennie Collection, I was part of a tour; it is possible to make other arrangements but it’s easiest to sign up for a tour. This particular tour (Buck/Beck) starts twice although none of us were aware of that. My first experience of the show along with everyone else’s was the encounter with the shrine that’s outside on the street in front of the building as per the photograph in the above. It’s a bit disconcerting to realize that you started the tour before you entered the building.

The tour guide, Cemre (pronounced gem reh, I think) started us with the bathroom wall. Buck (formerly Beck) removed part of a bathroom wall with graffiti which he has overpainted and is now mounted on a wall just like any other art work. The words aren’t visible but you know what is usually scrawled bathroom walls. It almost seems as if you’re being invited to scrawl something on that wall in your imagination if nowhere else.

The other piece that caught my attention was a set of images contained within a single picture frame. The images were cropped and laid out in the style that would remind someone of an old-fashioned photo album. All of the images were parts of scenes, mostly parts of bodies that have been clothed  in white dresses and formal wear. Cemre asked us if we knew what the photographs were about. Someone identified the images as being from one or more weddings. He saw parts of white dresses and veils and didn’t notice that the bodies were those of children. The photos depicted, as any Catholic will tell you, First Holy Communion. This wasn’t the only game Buck and Gemre played with us and, while that first one was obvious to me, I missed my fair share of cues later. Before going further, I have to extend my compliments to Cemre because she was careful not to embarrass or put someone on the spot. Her decision to engage us in an interactive storytelling session with us was very helpful in this regard.

The next piece that really caught my attention was the chalkboard (30 ft [or more] x 20 ft [or more[) covered in words that had been erased but were still visible beneath the chalk dust (it’s on the 2nd floor of the Rennie Collection). Then as we proceeded further, there was an installation composed of printing plates bookended by newspaper/media images of boys on both of the far walls of the room. Buck’s (or Beck’s) 13 shooters on one side and a lone boy on the other. Seeing those images is particularly poignant in the wake of the recent Boston Marathon bombing but they function primarily as an eerie reminder of evil and violence. The images are eerie because most of the boys look like ‘regular’ kids and if we hadn’t been informed they were all shooters, we would have never guessed. As for the boy on the other side, he and his brother claimed to have killed their father—but they did not. In fact, a friend of their father’s, with whom both boys having sexual relations, had committed the murder.

In the next room, we saw representations of pictures that were in Buck’s family home along with a sculptural installation. The most interesting, for me, was the picture of Jesus, all greyed and pixellated, which came from Buck’s mother’s room. It was very fuzzy but I’m pretty sure it was the Sacred Heart, which is a very specific Jesus image and one which is charged for me personally (I went to a school called the Convent of the Sacred Heart for a few years). The Sacred Heart image, I’m most familiar with has the heart, which is  external to the chest, with a crown of thorns signifying his crucifixion and his love for humanity. As a child I took that image for granted but wandered somewhat from my Catholic roots over the years and after a break of several years saw a Sacred Heart image and realized it’s a very peculiar image.

Nearby in yet another room of the Rennie Collection’s 2nd floor is a portion of a urinal wall. Like the portion of the bathroom wall downstairs, it too has words scrawled on it. Unlike the bathroom wall, these words are not covered up. Interesting juxtaposition and that’s all I’ve got for that one.

In retrospect, I don” know how we missed it for so long but there was a hidden image within Buck’s reproduction, from a hunting book his father had given him, of an image illustrating how to skin an animal . The ‘hidden’ picture within Buck’s reproduction was a Ku Klux Klan hood (and it’s obvious once it’s been pointed out) but it took minutes before anyone ‘saw’ it. Cemre commented that the only time it has been identified within seconds was when someone from the US saw it.

At the end of the tour, it turns out there are two endings. Cemre ended the show in the basement with a huge painting featuring a huge bee (and I think flowers too). She then directed us to look at a painting that she hadn’t discussed when she was started the tour.  She didn’t discuss it any further and we were left to seek it on our own. I won’t spoil the surprise other than to say, it references aspects of  the show’s Catholicism, death, and rebirth themes.

I think what Buck makes clear in his work  is that how one sees and what one sees is very much rooted in one’s identity/ies and culture(s), which we both construct and, sometimes when we change our names, deconstruct. I think one of the reason’s I found Buck’s approach curiously literary is that he uses words differently than most artists who tend to view words and typography as objets d’art rather than meaningful cultural and personal communication.

Overtly, Buck has worked with duality. Two beginning, two endings, two names, etc.  but it’s not quite that neat and tidy, not least because I suspect Buck/Beck is an unreliable narrator. I do encourage you to visit the show if you have the time.  No. I have no relationship to the people at the Rennie Collection.

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Seeing beneath the surface; ancient Roman revealed in wall painting at the Louvre

Thursday, April 11th, 2013

Here’s a fascinating tale about art and hidden mysteries told at the 245th meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) taking place Apr. 7 – 11, 2013, from the Apr. 10, 2013 news release on EurekAlert,

J. Bianca Jackson, Ph.D., who reported on the project, explained that it involved a fresco [located at the Louvre Museum in Paris], which is a mural or painting done on a wall after application of fresh plaster. In a fresco, the artist’s paint seeps into the wet plaster and sets as the plaster dries. The painting becomes part of the wall. The earliest known frescoes date to about 1500 B.C. and were found on the island of Crete in Greece.

“No previous imaging technique, including almost half a dozen commonly used to detect hidden images below paintings, forged signatures of artists and other information not visible on the surface has revealed a lost image in this fresco,” Jackson said. “This opens to door to wider use of the technology in the world of art, and we also used the method to study a Russian religious icon and the walls of a mud hut in one of humanity’s first settlements in what was ancient Turkey.”

Here’s the technology they used to discover the figure hidden in the fresco,

… Termed terahertz spectroscopy, it uses beams of electromagnetic radiation that lie between microwaves, like those used in kitchen ovens, and the infrared rays used in TV remote controls. This radiation is relatively weak, does not damage paintings and does not involve exposure to harmful radiation.

“Terahertz technology has been in use for some time, especially in quality control in the pharmaceutical industry to assure the integrity of pills and capsules, in biomedical imaging and even in homeland security with those whole-body scanners that see beneath clothing at airport security check points,” said Jackson, who is now with the University of Rochester. “But its use in examining artifacts and artworks is relatively new.”

…

The scientists turned to terahertz technology when suspicions surfaced that a hidden image might lie beneath the brushstrokes of a precious 19th century fresco, Trois hommes armés de lances, in the Louvre’s Campana collection. …

To search for a hidden image, Jackson and colleagues, including Gerard Mourou, Ph.D., of Ècole Polytechnique, and Michel Menu, Ph.D., of the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France, and Vincent Detalle, of the Laboratoire Recherche des Monuments Historiques, probed it with terahertz technology. The process is slow, requiring a few hours to analyze a section the size of a sheet of paper.

“We were amazed, and we were delighted,” said Jackson. “We could not believe our eyes as the image materialized on the screen. Underneath the top painting of the folds of a man’s tunic, we saw an eye, a nose and then a mouth appear. We were seeing what likely was part of an ancient Roman fresco, thousands of years old.”

Who is the man in the fresco? An imperial Roman senator? A patrician? A plebian? A great orator? A ruler who changed the course of history? Or just a wealthy, egotistical landowner who wanted to admire his image on the wall?

Jackson is leaving those questions to art historians.

For anyone interested in Campana,

Giampietro Campana was an Italian art collector in the 1800s whose treasures are now on display in museums around the world. When Campana acquired a work of art, he sometimes restored damaged parts or reworked the original. Art historians believe that Campana painted Trois hommes armés de lances after the fresco was removed from its original wall in Italy and entered his collection.

Campana’s practice of restoring and reworking the original was not unusual for the time,

Artists, including some of the great masters, sometimes re-used canvases, wiping out the initial image or covered old paintings with new works. They often did this in order to avoid the expense of buying a new canvas or to enhance colors and shapes in a prior composition. Frescoes likewise got a refresh, especially when the originals faded, owners tired of the image on the wall or property changed hands.

This project was funded in part by CHARISMA [Cultural Heritage Advanced Research Infrastructure; Synergy for a Multidisciplinary Approach to Conservation/Restoration] as part of the European Union’s Framework Programme 7 (FP 7). This project called to mind the NanoForArt FP7 funded project I mentioned in the context of a Mar. 1, 2013 posting about cave art, frescos, and other examples of rock art and how nanotechnology is enabling conservation and restoration.

In any event, it’s nice to find out that those airport scanners are good for something other than delaying your trip and subjecting you and your knickers to inspection.

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Digital world and the Cleveland Museum of Art

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

If this project is as advertised, then the Cleveland Museum of Art has developed a truly exciting interactive experience. Cliff Kuang in his Mar. 6, 2013 article for Fast Company is definitely enthusiastic,

If you’re a youngster, why stare at a Greek urn when you could blow one up in a video game? One institution thinking deeply about the challenge is the Cleveland Museum of Art, which this month unveiled a series of revamped galleries, designed by Local Projects, which feature cutting-edge interactivity. But the technology isn’t the point. “We didn’t want to create a tech ghetto,” says David Franklin, the museum’s director. Adds Local Projects founder Jake Barton, “We wanted to make the tech predicated on the art itself.”

Put another way, the new galleries at CMA tackle the problem plaguing most ambitious UI projects today: How do you let the content shine, and get the tech out of the way? How do you craft an interaction between bytes and spaces that feels fun?

The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Jan. 14, 2013 news release describes the new project,

… Gallery One, a unique, interactive gallery that blends art, technology and interpretation to inspire visitors to explore the museum’s renowned collections. This revolutionary space features the largest multi-touch screen in the United States, which displays images of over 3,500 objects from the museum’s world-renowned permanent collection. This 40-foot Collection Wall allows visitors to shape their own tours of the museum and to discover the full breadth of the collections on view throughout the museum’s galleries.

Throughout the space, original works of art and digital interactives engage visitors in new ways, putting curiosity, imagination and creativity at the heart of their museum experience. Innovative user-interface design and cutting-edge hardware developed exclusively for Gallery One break new ground in art museum interpretation, design and technology.

…

“Technology is a vital tool for supporting visitor engagement with the collection,” adds C. Griffith Mann, Deputy Director and Chief Curator. “Putting the art experience first required an unprecedented partnership between the museum’s curatorial, design, education and technology staff.”

Comprised of three major areas, Gallery One offers something for visitors of all ages and levels of comfort with art. Studio Play is a bright and colorful space that offers the museum’s youngest visitors and their families a chance to play and learn about art. Highlights of this portion of Gallery One include: Line and Shape, a multi-touch, microtile wall on which visitors can draw lines that are matched to works of art in the collection; a shadow-puppet theater where silhouettes of objects can be used as “actors” in plays; mobile- and sculpture-building stations where visitors can create their own interpretations of modern sculptures by Calder [Alexander Calder] and Lipchitz [Jacques Lipchitz]; and a sorting and matching game featuring works from the permanent collection. This space is designed to encourage visitors of all ages to become active participants in their museum experience.

In the main gallery space, visitors have an opportunity to learn about the collection and to develop ways of looking at art that are both fun and educational. The gallery is comprised of fourteen themed groups of works from the museum’s collection, six of which have “lens” stations. The “lens” stations comprise 46” multi-touch screens that offer additional contextual information and dynamic, interactive activities that allow visitors to create experiences and share them with others through links to social media. Another unique feature of the space is the Beacon, an introductory, dynamic screen that displays real-time results of visitors’ activities in the space, such as favorite objects, tours and activities.

…

The largest multi-touch screen in the United States, the Collection Wall utilizes innovative technology to allow visitors to browse these works of art on the Wall, facilitating discovery and dialogue with other visitors. The Collection Wall can also serve as an orientation experience, allowing visitors to download existing tours or curate their own tours to take out into the galleries on iPads. The Collection Wall, as well as the other interactive in the gallery, illustrates the museum’s long-term investment in technology to enhance visitor access to factual and interpretative information about the permanent collection.

“The Collection Wall powerfully demonstrates how cutting-edge technology can inspire our visitors to engage with our collection in playful and original ways never before seen on this scale,” said Jane Alexander, Director of Information Management and Technology Services. “This space, unique among art museums internationally, will help make the Cleveland Museum of Art a destination museum.”

In concert with the opening of Gallery One, the museum has also created ArtLens, a multi-dimensional app for iPads. Utilizing image recognition software, visitors can scan two-dimensional objects in Gallery One and throughout the museum’s galleries to access up to 9 hours of additional multimedia content, including audio tour segments, videos and additional contextual information. Indoor triangulation-location technology also allows visitors to orient themselves in the galleries and find works of art with additional interpretive content throughout their visit.

…

“ArtLens allows the visitor to take the experience of Gallery One out in to the other areas of the museum,” said Caroline Goeser. “It brings in many voices and traditions from different cultures, as well as giving visitors a chance to see demonstrations of art making techniques by local artists. The content is layered so visitors can choose what interests them and discover new ways of looking at and interpreting the object. Their experience is guided by their own sense of curiosity and discovery.”

It’s interesting to note the companies that partnered with the museum and to note the source for the money supporting this effort (from the news release),

The museum partnered with several other companies to complete the project, including Local Projects (media design and development), Gallagher and Associates (design and development), Zenith (AV Integration), Piction (CMS/DAM development), Earprint Productions (app content development), and Navizon (way-finding).

Gallery One is generously supported by the Maltz Family Foundation, which donated $10 million to support the project. Additional support for the project comes from grants and other donations.

Kuang’s article makes the exhibits come alive,

The first gallery that many new visitors will see, Gallery One, is a signature space, meant to draw in a younger crowd. To that end, the exhibits are about fostering an intuitive understanding of the art. Which sounds like baloney, but the end results are quietly terrific. At the root, the exhibits encourage people to move, fostering a connection to the art that’s literally written on the body:

  • In one display, a computer analyzes the expression on a visitor’s face. Then, they can see work spanning thousands of years that matches their own visage.
  • Gallery One also offers a chance to directly experience the physical decisions behind how masterpieces are made. For example, in front of a Jackson Pollack painting is a virtual easel, loaded with tools that approximate Pollock’s own, so that visitors can pour their own drip painting and compare it to the real thing.

Sounds like very exciting stuff. For anyone who can’t visit the exhibit, there are videos including this one where visitors strike a pose and an image (from the collection) mimicking the pose appears {ETA Mar.6.13 4:35 pm PST: I got this the wrong way round, the museum presents you with a piece of art and you strike the same p0se),

Sculpture Lens – Strike A Pose – Cleveland Museum of Art from Local Projects on Vimeo.

Kuang covers that exhibit and much more in his article, which I strongly recommend reading, and he makes this point,

Even as the designers go wild with the technology, they never stop to consider what anyone who doesn’t care about that technology would stand to gain. It was Barton’s [Local Projects founder Jake Barton] own skepticism about technology that made the technology great. His team didn’t necessarily believe that high-tech flare would add value to the museum experience. So they strove to look past the technology.

As a technical writer, I had many, many arguments with developers about precisely that point; most of us don’t care about the technology.  So, kudos to Jake Barton and all of the teams responsible for finding a way to integrate that understanding into a series of exhibits that allow the museum to showcase its collection, engage the public, and develop new audiences.

Meanwhile, the Council of Canadian Academies is poised to embark on an assessment which examines museums and other memory institutions along with digital technology from an entirely different perspective, Memory Institutions and the Digital Revolution,

Library and Archives Canada has asked the Council of Canadian Academies to assess how memory institutions, which includes archives, libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions, can embrace the opportunities and challenges of the changing ways in which Canadians are communicating and working in the digital age.

…

These trends present both significant challenges and opportunities for traditional memory institutions as they work towards ensuring that valuable information is safeguarded and maintained for the long term and for the benefit of future generations. It requires that they keep track of new types of records that may be of future cultural significance, and of any changes in how decisions are being documented. As part of this assessment, the Council’s expert panel will examine the evidence as it relates to emerging trends, international best practices in archiving, and strengths and weaknesses in how Canada’s memory institutions are responding to these opportunities and challenges. Once complete, this assessment will provide an in-depth and balanced report that will support Library and Archives Canada and other memory institutions as it considers how best to manage and preserve the mass quantity of communications records generated as a result of new and emerging technologies.

I last mentioned the ‘memory institutions’ assessment in my Feb. 22, 2013 posting in the context of their ‘science culture in Canada’ assessment panel. I find it odd that the Canada Science and Technology Museums Corporation was one of the requestors for the ‘science culture’ assessment but it  is not involved (nor is any other museum) in the ‘memory institutions and digital revolution’ assessment.

After reading about the Cleveland Museum of Art project, something else strikes me as odd, there is no mention of analysing the role that museums, libraries, and others will play in a world which is increasingly ephemeral. After all, it’s not enough to keep and store records. There is no point  if we can’t access them or even have knowledge of their existence. As for storing and displaying objects, this traditional museum function is increasingly being made impossible as objects seemingly disappear. The vinyl record, cassette tape, and CD (compact disc) have almost disappeared to be replaced by digital files. Meanwhile, my local library has fewer and fewer books, DVDs, and other lending items. What roles will libraries, museums, and other memory institutions going to have in our lives?

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NanoForArt in Mexico

Friday, March 1st, 2013

Mexico recently hosted (Feb. 7 – 8, 2013) a pair of conferences focused on nanotechnology and art conservation. The country is part of an international consortium in the European Commision’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), NanoForArt project. Before mentioning the conference, here’s a little information about the NanoForArt project from its homepage,

The main objective of the NANOFORART proposal is the development and experimentation of new nano-materials and responsive systems for the conservation and preservation of movable and immovable artworks. [emphasis mine]

While the progress in material science has generated sophisticated nanostructured materials, conservation of cultural heritage is still mainly based on traditional methods and conventional materials that often lack the necessary  compatibility with the original artworks and a durable performance in responding to the changes of natural environment and man-made activities.

The main challenge of NANOFORART is the combination of sophisticated functional materials arising from the recent developments in nano-science/technology with innovative techniques in the restoration and preventive conservation of works of art, with unprecedented efficiency.

Immovable artworks tend to be things like cave art, frescoes, and other forms of wall and rock art. The Feb. 2013 conferences in Mexico as per a Feb. 27, 2013 Agencia EFE news item on the Global Post website featured (Note: Links have been removed),

Baglioni [Piero Baglioni, a researcher and professor at the University of Florence] and Dr. Rodorico Giorgi, also of the University of Florence, traveled to Mexico earlier this month to preside over a conference on Nanotechnology applied to cultural heritage: wall paintings/cellulose, INAH [Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia] said.

The project includes specialists from Italy, Spain, Britain, France, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Germany,  Slovenia and Mexico and is coordinated by the CSGI center [Center for Colloids and Surface Science] at the University of Florence.

NANONFORART is set to conclude in December 2014 with the “validation of the technology and the methods developed, as well as training activities,” INAH said.

Until now, preservation of cultural treasures has been carried out using conventional materials that are often incompatible with the works and can, over time, alter the appearance of the object.

Baglioni has worked with INAH personnel to clean and restore pre-Columbian murals at the Cacaxtla, Cholula, Tlatelolco, Mayapan, El Tajin, Monte Alban and Teotihuacan sites.

I have mentioned Baglioni’s work in Mexico previously in a Sept. 20, 2010 posting about  some work at La Antigua Ciudad Maya de Calakmul, an archaeological site which is located in the Campeche state.

Unfortunately, there aren’t too many details about the conferences, the Feb. 7, 2013 conference sported the previously noted title (in the Agencia EFE news item), Nanotechnology Applied to Cultural Heritage: Wall Paintings/Cellulose, and the Feb. 8, 2013 conference was titled, Nanotechnology for the Cleaning of Cultural Heritage.

There’s more information about nanotechnology aspects on the NanoForArt Overall page (Note: Links have been removed),

The work plan will start with design and formulation of nanostructured systems with special functionalities (WP1) such as deacidification of movable artworks (paper, parchment, canvas, leather), cleaning of movable artworks (paper, parchment, canvas paintings), protection of movable artworks (paper, canvas), consolidation of immovable artworks (wall-paintings, plaster and stones), and cleaning of immovable artworks (wallpaintings, plaster and stones). These systems, whose formulation will be optimized according to their functions, will include microemulsions, micellar solutions, gels and dispersions of different kinds of nanoparticles. A physico-chemical characterization of the developed materals (WP2) will constantly support the formulation activity. This will allow to understand and control the nature of interaction mechanisms between these nanostructures and the target substances/supports.

Assessment of the applicability of materials (WP3) will start in the second half of the first year. In this phase the up-scale of the technologies from the laboratory to the market level will be tackled. All the partners will interact in order to clarify and merge the priority from all the points of view. Evaluation of possible human health effects and environmental impacts of developed nanomaterials for restoration (WP7) will also start in the second half of the first year. Special emphasis will be given to potential hazardousness of nanoparticles used for design and formulation of nanostructured systems, as well as environmental impacts associated with the use of these nano-based products.

Nanotechnology developed by NANOFORART will aim also to significantly reduce the use of harmful solvents, as well as to introduce new environmentally friendly nanomaterials. Once the applicability and safety of the developed materials will be assessed, the development of industry process (WP4, WP5) will start in order to transfer technology on the market by the standardization of the applicative protocols and production of the nanomaterials on medium and large scale. Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) partners will have their main competence in this phase, that should start at the beginning of the second year. Safety and health risks of the industry processes will be also assessed. At the end of the first year, a study of the long-term behavior of the products and of the treated works of art (WP6) will be started by means of artificial ageing, in order to avoid damages due to unforeseen phenomena. The partners will have their main competence in ageing, monitoring of environmental pollution, and control of exhibitions and museums conditions.

The project is scheduled for completion in 2014.

The aspect I find most interesting is the ‘immovable art’. There was a controversy in Spain in 2011 over the prospect of opening some caves to tourists, from the Oct. 26, 2011 news item on ScienceDaily,

Plans to reopen Spain’s Altamira caves are stirring controversy over the possibility that tourists’ visits will further damage the 20,000-year old wall paintings that changed views about the intellectual ability of prehistoric people. That’s the topic of an article in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News, ACS’ weekly newsmagazine. The caves are the site of Stone Age paintings so magnificent that experts have called them the “Sistine Chapel of Paleolithic Art.”

Carmen Drahl, C&EN associate editor, points out in the article that Spanish officials closed the tourist mecca to the public in 2002 after scientists realized that visitors were fostering growth of bacteria that damage the paintings. Now, however, they plan to reopen the caves. Declared a World Heritage Site by the United Nations’ Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Altamira’s rock paintings of animals and human hands made scientists realize that Stone Age people had intellectual capabilities far greater than previously believed.

You can find an Oct. 6, 2011 piece about the Altamira rock paintings by Drahl titled, Keeping Visitors Out To Keep Cave Paintings Safe, on the Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN) blog. For anyone interested in more about rock art, there’s a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) World Rock Archives project or, as they call them, activity,

Due to their long sequence chronology, susceptibility to climate changes and vandalism, rock art sites are also among the most vulnerable on the World Heritage List.

Rock art, in the form of paintings and engravings, is a clear and lasting evidence of the transmission of human thoughts and beliefs through art and graphic representations. It functions as a repository of memory, enabling each culture to speak about themselves and their origins in all geographical settings.

I have two more items on cave art. The first is a piece I’ve been wanting to feature for almost two years. It’s an article on Slate by John Jeremiah Sullivan dated March 21, 2011 and titled, America’s Ancient Cave Art
Deep in the Cumberland Plateau, mysterious drawings, thousands of years old, offer a glimpse of lost Native American cultures and traditions. It’s an excerpt of an essay Sullivan wrote for the Paris Review. A fascinating exploration of a cave system that isn’t nearly as well known as France’s Lascaux Caves, here’s a snippet,

Over the past few decades, in Tennessee, archaeologists have unearthed an elaborate cave­-art tradition thousands of years old. The pictures are found in dark­ zone sites—places where the Native American people who made the artwork did so at personal risk, crawling meters or, in some cases, miles underground with cane torches—as opposed to sites in the “twilight zone,” speleologists’ jargon for the stretch, just beyond the entry chamber, which is exposed to diffuse sunlight. A pair of local hobby cavers, friends who worked for the U.S. Forest Service, found the first of these sites in 1979. They’d been exploring an old root cellar and wriggled up into a higher passage. The walls were covered in a thin layer of clay sediment left there during long­ ago floods and maintained by the cave’s unchanging temperature and humidity. The stuff was still soft. It looked at first as though someone had finger­-painted all over, maybe a child—the men debated even saying anything. But the older of them was a student of local history. He knew some of those images from looking at drawings of pots and shell ornaments that emerged from the fields around there: bird men, a dancing warrior figure, a snake with horns. Here were naturalistic animals, too: an owl and turtle. Some of the pictures seemed to have been first made and then ritually mutilated in some way, stabbed or beaten with a stick.

That was the discovery of Mud Glyph Cave, which was reported all over the world and spawned a book and a National Geographic article. No one knew quite what to make of it at the time. The cave’s “closest parallel,” reported the Christian Science Monitor, “may be caves in the south of France which contain Ice Age art.” A team of scholars converged on the site.

…

The sites range from Missouri to Virginia, and from Wisconsin to Florida, but the bulk lie in Middle Tennessee. Of those, the greater number are on the Cumberland Plateau, which runs at a southwest slant down the eastern part of the state, like a great wall dividing the Appalachians from the interior.

If you do decide to read the excerpt, you may want to reserve 30 to 45 minutes (at least).

For the last tidbit, here’s an introduction to TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) Fellow, Genevieve von Petzinger’s work on cave art,

Genevieve von Petzinger’s [from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada] database of prehistoric geometric shapes in cave art reveals some startling insights. More than mere doodles, the signs used across geological boundaries suggest there may have been a common iconography before people first moved out of Africa. When did people begin graphic communication, and what was its purpose? Genevieve studies these questions of our common heritage.

A very interesting interview follows that introduction.

As I more often cover movable art, I thought it was time to devote, again, at least part of a posting to immovable art.

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Picasso, paint, and the hard x-ray nanoprobe

Monday, February 11th, 2013

There’s the paint you put on your walls and there’s the paint you put on your body and there’s the paint artists use for their works of art. Well, it turns out that a very well known artist used common house paint to create some of his masterpieces,

Among the Picasso paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago collection, The Red Armchair is the most emblematic of his Ripolin usage and is the painting that was examined with APS X-rays at Argonne National Laboratory. To view a larger version of the image, click on it. Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Saidenberg (AIC 1957.72) © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York [downloaded from http://www.anl.gov/articles/high-energy-x-rays-shine-light-mystery-picasso-s-paints]

Among the Picasso paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago collection, The Red Armchair is the most emblematic of his Ripolin usage and is the painting that was examined with APS X-rays at Argonne National Laboratory. To view a larger version of the image, click on it. Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Saidenberg (AIC 1957.72) © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York [downloaded from http://www.anl.gov/articles/high-energy-x-rays-shine-light-mystery-picasso-s-paints]

The Art Institute of Chicago teamed with the US Argonne National Laboratory to solve a decades-long mystery as to what kind of paint Picasso used. From the Feb. 8, 2013 news item on Azonano,

The Art Institute of Chicago teamed up with Argonne National Laboratory to unravel a decades-long debate among art scholars about what kind of paint Picasso used to create his masterpieces.

The results published last month in the journal Applied Physics A: Materials Science & Processing adds significant weight to the widely held theory that Picasso was one of the first master painters to use common house paint rather than traditional artists’ paint. That switch in painting material gave birth to a new style of art marked by canvasses covered in glossy images with marbling, muted edges, and occasional errant paint drips but devoid of brush marks. Fast-drying enamel house paint enabled this dramatic departure from the slow-drying heavily blended oil paintings that dominated the art world up until Picasso’s time.

The key to decoding this long-standing mystery was the development of a unique high-energy X-ray instrument, called the hard X-ray nanoprobe, at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) X-ray facility and the Center for Nanoscale Materials, both housed at Argonne. The nanoprobe is designed to advance the development of high-performance materials and sustainable energies by giving scientists a close up view of the type and arraignment of chemical elements in material.

At that submicroscopic level is where science and art crossed paths.

The Argonne National Laboratory Feb. 6, 2013 news release by Tona Kunz, which originated the news item,  provides more  technical detail,

Volker Rose, a physicist at Argonne, uses the nanoprobe at the APS [Advanced Photon Source]/CNM [Center for Nanoscale Materials] to study zinc oxide, a key chemical used in wide-band-gap semiconductors. White paint contains the same chemical in varying amounts, depending on the type and brand of paint, which makes it a valuable clue for learning about Picasso’s work.

By comparing decades-old paint samples collected through e-Bay purchases with samples from Picasso paintings, scientists were able to learn that the chemical makeup of paint used by Picasso matched the chemical makeup of the first commercial house paint, Ripolin. Scientists also learned about the correlation of the spacing of impurities at the nanoscale in zinc oxide, offering important clues to how zinc oxide could be modified to improve performance in a variety of products, including sensors for radiation detection, LEDs and energy-saving windows as well as liquid-crystal displays for computers, TVs and instrument panels.

“Everything that we learn about how materials are structured and how chemicals react at the nanolevel can help us in our quest to design a better and more sustainable future,” Rose said.

Physicists weren’t the first to investigate the question,

Many art conservators and historians have tried over the years to use traditional optical and electron microscopes to determine whether Picasso or one of his contemporaries was the first to break with the cultural tradition of professional painters using expensive paints designed specifically for their craft. Those art world detectives all failed, because traditional tools wouldn’t let them see deeply enough into the layers of paint or with enough resolution to distinguish between store-bought enamel paint and techniques designed to mimic its appearance.

“Appearances can deceive, so this is where art can benefit from scientific research,” said Francesca Casadio, senior conservator scientist at the Art Institute of Chicago, and co-lead author on the result publication. “We needed to reverse-engineer the paint so that we could figure out if there was a fingerprint that we could then go look for in the pictures around the world that are suspected to be painted with Ripolin, the first commercial brand of house paint.”

Just as criminals leave a signature at a crime scene, each batch of paint has a chemical signature determined by its ingredients and impurities from the area and time period it was made. These signatures can’t be imitated and lie in the nanoscale range.

Yet until now, it was difficult to differentiate the chemical components of the paint pigments from the chemical components in the binders, fillers, other additives and contaminates that were mixed in with the pigments or layered on top of them. Only the nanoprobe at the APS /CNM can distinguish that level of detail: elemental composition and nanoscale distribution of elements within individualized submicrometeric pigment particles.

“The nanoprobe at the APS and CNM allowed unprecedented visualization of information about chemical composition within a singe grain of paint pigment, significantly reducing doubt that Picasso used common house paint in some of his most famous works,” said Rose, co-lead author on the result publication titled “High-Resolution Fluorescence Mapping of Impurities in the Historical Zinc Oxide Pigments: Hard X-ray Nanoprobe Applications to the Paints of Pablo Picasso.”

The nanoprobe’s high spatial resolution and micro-focusing abilities gave it the unique ability to identify individual chemical elements and distinguish between the size of paint particles crushed by hand in artists’ studios and those crushed even smaller by manufacturing equipment. The nanoprobe peered deeper than previous similar paint studies limited to a one-micrometer viewing resolution. The nanoprobe gave scientists an unprecedented look at 30-nanometer-wide particles of paint and impurities from the paint manufacturing process. For comparison, a typical sheet of copier paper is 100,000 nanometers thick.

Using the nanoprobe, scientists were able to determine that Picasso used enamel paint to create in 1931 The Red Armchair, on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. They were also able to determine the paint brand and from what manufacturing region the paint originated.

X-ray analysis of white paints produced under the Ripolin brand and used in artists’ traditional tube paints revealed that both contained nearly contaminate-free zinc oxide pigment. However, artists’ tube paints contained more fillers of other white-colored pigments than did the Ripolin, which was mostly pure zinc oxide.

Casaido [sic] views this type of chemical characterization of paints as a having a much wider application than just the study of Picasso’s paintings. By studying the chemical composition of art materials, she said, historians can learn about trade movements in ancient times, better determine the time period a piece was created, and even learn about the artist themselves through their choice of materials.

Perhaps not so coincidentally, the Art Institute of Chicago is celebrating the 100 year relationship between Picasso and Chicago, excerpted from their Jan. 14, 2013 news release,

THE ART INSTITUTE HONORS 100-YEAR RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PICASSO AND CHICAGO WITH LANDMARK MUSEUM–WIDE CELEBRATION

First Large-Scale Picasso Exhibition Presented by the Art Institute in 30 Years Commemorates Centennial Anniversary of the Armory Show

Picasso and Chicago on View Exclusively at the Art Institute February 20–May 12, 2013

…

This winter, the Art Institute of Chicago celebrates the unique relationship between Chicago and one of the preeminent artists of the 20th century—Pablo Picasso—with special presentations, singular paintings on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and programs throughout the museum befitting the artist’s unparalleled range and influence. The centerpiece of this celebration is the major exhibition Picasso and Chicago, on view from February 20 through May 12, 2013 in the Art Institute’s Regenstein Hall, which features more than 250 works selected from the museum’s own exceptional holdings and from private collections throughout Chicago. Representing Picasso’s innovations in nearly every media—paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, and ceramics—the works not only tell the story of Picasso’s artistic development but also the city’s great interest in and support for the artist since the Armory Show of 1913, a signal event in the history of modern art.

The Art Institute of Chicago, Francesca Casadio, and art conservation (specifically in regard to Winslow Homer) were mentioned here in an April 11, 2011 posting.

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Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals, Chaos, and the Materiality of Thinking exhibition opening in Sept. 2012 in New York

Monday, September 3rd, 2012

What a fabulous idea! The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture is holding an exhibit of Benoit Mandelbrot’s images from Sept. 21, 2012 – Jan. 27, 2013 in New York City (from the July 31, 2012 announcement)

The Exhibition

Focusing primarily on the work of Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010), one of the most notable mathematicians of the twentieth century, this exhibition explores the role of images in scientific thinking. With their capacity to generate and shape knowledge, images are at the very core of scientific investigation: charts, graphs, notebooks, instrument readings, technological representations, even mental abstractions–all make up the essential stuff of which it is made.

For thousands of years, Western thought assumed that the fundamental geometry of the world consisted of regular, ideal forms (cubes, spheres, cones, et cetera) with straight or evenly curved faces and edges. Benoît Mandelbrot, however, decided to explore the mathematics of the world not in its idealized form, but as it actually appears, in all its untidiness and irregularity, devoting himself to the study, for example, of the forms of the coastlines of real islands, with all their unpredictable inlets, creeks, and furrows.

Mandelbrot, in other words, looked at the world. In so doing, he flouted what was in effect a prohibition in much of mathematics against the use of visual representation in the discipline. To reintroduce the visual there, Mandelbrot took the step of harnessing the potential of computers, transforming mathematics into an experimental science. The result was his invention of fractal geometry, a geometry of actuality rather than of abstractions.

At his death in 2010, Mandelbrot left a mass of idiosyncratically organized drawings, computer print-outs, films, manuscript scribbles, objects, and photographs in his office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an extraordinary trove to which Mandelbrot’s wife, Aliette, generously allowed Bard Graduate Center Visiting Assistant Professor Nina Samuel access. To explore it was like wandering through the mathematician’s brain—like witnessing the ephemeral traces of his very thought processes. Selections from these materials form the core of the exhibition.

Here’s a bit more about the exhibit and its curator from the undated press release,

Focusing primarily on the work of one of the most notable mathematicians of the twentieth century, The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals, Chaos, and the Mate­riality of Thinking, on view at the Bard Graduate Center from September 21, 2012 to January 27, 2013, explores the role of images in the development of what has become known as fractal geometry and chaos theory. Nina Samuel, a visiting assistant professor at the BGC, is the curator. Samuel, who received her PhD in art history from the Humboldt University of Berlin, is also an asso­ciate member of Das Technische Bild in Germany and a former member of the Swiss national research program eikones/NCRR Iconic Criticism.

…

“To explore it was like wandering through the mathematician’s brain,” said Samuel. “It was like witnessing the ephemeral traces of his very thought processes.” Selections from these mate­rials form the core of the exhibition.

Along with this rare look into Mandelbrot’s working process, sketches from his contemporaries—the French mathematician Adrien Douady and the German bio­chemist Otto E. Rössler—will also be publicly exhibited for the first time. The work of the Massachusetts Insti­tute of Technology meteorologist Edward N. Lorenz, a pioneer of chaos theory, will be represented by loans from the Library of Congress.

The writer has made some assumptions about the audience, from the press release,

The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals, Chaos, and the Materiality of Thinking allows the viewer to question the idea that the illustration of a work must always be secondary to the work itself. On the contrary, substantive images often play generative roles in the scientific pro­cess, constituting a kind of material thinking conducted by producing and interpreting visual traces, such as computer-generated images. These images are often aes­thetically compelling even if they are initially scientifical­ly impenetrable. This constitutes another revelation of the exhibition: the beauty of material thinking that can be found in the visual detritus of scientific investigation.

I think this exhibit is very much part of a trend towards re-examining how we create and organize ideas (scientific and otherwise) and, ultimately, how we think. I’ve a number of  commentaries in the ‘visual data’ category for this blog, the most recent being Big data, data visualization, and spatial relationships with computers, which I finished with this thought,

I think the real game changer for science  (how it’s conducted, how it’s taught, and how it’s communicated) and other disciplines is data visualization.

To whet your appetite for the ‘Islands of Benoit Mandebrot’, here’s an image from the exhibit,

Benoît Mandelbrot and Alan Norton. Computer graphic on photographic paper, 1983. Collection Aliette Mandelbrot.

There’s more information about the Mandelbrot exhibition on the event page including information about a book/catalogue being published, from the press release,

The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals, Chaos, and the Materiality of Thinking is accompanied by a fully illus­trated book with essays by Professor Samuel and mem­bers of the German research group Das Technische Bild—Matthias Bruhn and Margarete Pratschke—as well as scholars Wladimir Velminski, Jan von Brevern, and Juliet Koss. Drawing new connections between the material world and that of mathematical ideas, the publication offers not only a rare glimpse at the arti­factual terrain and graphic methodologies of Benoît Mandelbrot and his contemporaries but also investigates the role of scientific imagery in visual thinking across diverse disciplines. Published with Yale University Press (October 2012, paper, 160 color and b/w illustrations, 172 pages), it will be available for $40 in the BGC gallery and through the Web site (bgc.bard.edu).

I guess those of us who can’t attend will be able to enjoy the experience vicariously through the catalogue.

ETA Sept. 18, 2012: I knew Mandelbrot’s name was wrong somewhere in here. Sadly, I didn’t double check the headline till now.

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Medicine, nanoelectronics, social implications, and figuring it all out

Monday, August 27th, 2012

Given today’s (Aug. 27, 2012) earlier posting about nanoelectronics and tissue engineering, I though it was finally time to feature Michael Berger’s Aug. 16, 2012 Nanowerk Spotlight essay, The future of nanotechnology electronics in medicine, which discusses the integration of electronics into the human body.

First, Berger offers a summary of some of the latest research (Note: I have removed  links),

In previous Nanowerk Spotlights we have already covered numerous research advances in this area: The development of a nanobioelectronic system that triggers enzyme activity and, in a similar vein, the electrically triggered drug release from smart nanomembranes; an artificial retina for color vision; nanomaterial-based breathalyzers as diagnostic tools; nanogenerators to power self-sustained biosystems and implants; future bio-nanotechnology might even use computer chips inside living cells.

A lot of nanotechnology work is going on in the area of brain research. For instance the use of a carbon nanotube rope to electrically stimlate neural stem cells; nanotechnology to repair the brain and other advances in fabricating nanomaterial-neural interfaces for signal generation.

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International cooperation in this field has also picked up. Just recently, scientists have formed a global alliance for nanobioelectronics to rapidly find solutions for neurological disorders; the EuroNanoBio project is a Support Action funded under the 7th Framework Programme of the European Union; and ENIAC, the European Technology Platform on nanoelectronics, has decided to make the development of medical applications one of its main objectives.

Berger cites a recent article in the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Nano (journal) by scientists in today’s earlier posting about tissue scaffolding and 3-D electrnonics,

In a new perspective article in the July 31, 2012, online edition of ACS Nano (“The Smartest Materials: The Future of Nanoelectronics in Medicine” [behind a paywall]), Tzahi Cohen-Karni (a researcher in Kohane’s lab), Robert Langer, and Daniel S. Kohane provide an overview of nanoelectronics’ potential in the biomedical sciences.

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They write that, as with many other areas of scientific endeavor in recent decades, continued progress will require the convergence of multiple disciplines, including chemistry, biology, electrical engineering, computer science, optics, material science, drug delivery, and numerous medical disciplines. ”

Advances in this research could lead to extremely sophisticated smart materials with multifunctional capabilities that are built in – literally hard-wired. The impact of this research could cover the spectrum of biomedical possibilities from diagnostic studies to the creation of cyborgs.”

Berger finishes with this thought,

Ultimately, and here we are getting almost into science fiction territory, nanostructures could not only incorporate sensing and stimulating capabilities but also potentially introduce computational capabilities and energy-generating elements. “In this way, one could fabricate a truly independent system that senses and analyzes signals, initiates interventions, and is self-sustained. Future developments in this direction could, for example, lead to a synthetic nanoelectronic autonomic nervous system.”

This Nanowerk Spotlight essay provides a good overview of nanoelectronics  research in medicine and lots of  links to previous related essays and other related materials.

I am intrigued that there is no mention of the social implications for this research and I find social science or humanities research on social social implications of emerging technology rarely discusses the technical aspects revealing what seems to be an insurmountable gulf. I suppose that’s why we need writers, artists, musicians, dancers, pop culture, and the like to create experiences, installations, and narratives that help us examine the technologies and their social implications, up close.

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