Natural materials that have evolved in plants and animals often display spectacular mechanical and optical properties. For example, spider silk is as strong as steel and tougher than Kevlar, which is used in bullet-proof vests. Inspired by nature, chemists are now synthesizing materials that mimic the structures and properties of shells, bones, muscle, leaves, feathers, and other natural materials. In this talk, I will discuss our recent discovery of a new type of coloured glass that is a mimic of beetle shells. [emphasis mine] These new materials have intriguing optical properties that arise from their twisted internal structure, and they may be useful for emerging applications..
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At the talk, MacLachlan mentioned that his new structurally iridescent material received great interest from the architectural community but since producing it was a painstaking process for a minute quantity, it would not be suitable as a building material.
A few years later I stumbled across some work at Cornell University where material scientists and Korean artist Kimsooja were working on what looks like an iridescent art/science piece, from a September 15, 2014 posting,
For her newest work, Korean artist Kimsooja wanted to explore a “shape and perspective that reveals the invisible as visible, physical as immaterial, and vice versa.” As artist-in-residence for the Cornell Council for the Arts’ (CCA) 2014 Biennial, she has realized that objective with “A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir,” to be installed on the Arts Quad next week [Sept. 15 – 19, 2014]. It will be one of several installations on campus for the semester-long biennial, “Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of Scale in an Age of Nanotechnology,” beginning Sept. 18 [2014] with a talk by Kimsooja.
Here’s how ‘Needle Woman’ looked after fabrication,
Jaeho Chong Pieces of Kimsooja’s “Needle Woman” artwork during fabrication in Shanghai show the polymer film developed by Cornell researchers
Creating materials that change color based on viewing angle represents a significant challenge at the intersection of art and science. Natural examples of this phenomenon, called iridescence, appear in butterfly wings, peacock feathers, and opals. Unlike traditional pigments that absorb specific wavelengths of light, these natural materials use microscopic structures to split light into different colors. This “structural color” approach creates pure, vibrant hues that don’t fade over time and require no potentially toxic pigments.
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A collaboration between Cornell University materials scientists and Korean-American artist Kimsooja has now yielded a practical solution to this challenge. The team developed a method for creating large-scale, durable iridescent coatings, demonstrated through a 46-foot-tall architectural installation titled A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir. Initially exhibited at Cornell under the auspices of the Cornell Council for the Arts, the installation now stands as part of the permanent collection at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in Wakefield, UK, where it has maintained its striking optical properties for over a decade.
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The breakthrough relies on custom-designed plastic molecules that automatically arrange themselves into regular patterns. These molecules consist of two different types of plastic chemically bonded together – polystyrene and poly(tert-butyl methacrylate). When properly designed, thousands of these dual-component molecules spontaneously stack into alternating layers, creating a natural grating that splits light into different colors.
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The key innovation came in synthesizing these molecules at unprecedented sizes – about 1000 times longer than typical plastic molecules. At this scale, the self-assembled layers naturally form patterns around 300-400 nanometers in spacing, large enough to interact with visible light. The researchers then developed a precise coating method to apply these materials while maintaining their self-organized structure.
The scale-up process presented numerous challenges. Each production batch yielded only about 35-40 grams of usable material, with half the attempts failing due to the extreme sensitivity to air and water during synthesis. The installation required roughly 500 grams of material to coat all panels. The team developed a custom two-liter reactor equipped with specialized mixing equipment to increase production scale while maintaining precise control over reaction conditions.
Color consistency posed another challenge. Different batches of the polymer produced slightly different colors due to variations in molecular size. The researchers developed two solutions: blending multiple batches to achieve consistent colors and adding precise amounts of shorter polymer chains to fine-tune the optical properties.
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The team also solved the challenge of applying these coatings to curved surfaces through a specialized lamination technique. They first created the color-shifting layer on flat, flexible plastic sheets, then sandwiched it between protective layers before carefully adhering it to curved acrylic panels. This approach preserved the optical properties while protecting the coating from environmental damage.
Molecules to Masterpieces: Bridging Materials Science and the Arts by Ferdinand F. E. Kohle, Hiroaki Sai, William R. T. Tait, Peter A. Beaucage, Ethan M. Susca, R. Paxton Thedford, Ulrich B. Wiesner. Advanced Materials DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202413939. First published online: 05 December 2024
First mentioned here in a Dec. 10, 2013 posting, Cornell University’s Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA; located in New York State) is hosting a 2014 Biennial celebrating this theme: “Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of Scale in an Age of Nanotechnology.” A Sept. 11, 2014 news item on Nanowerk describes the Biennial’s artist-in-residence Kimsooja and her work (Note: Links have been removed),
For her newest work, Korean artist Kimsooja wanted to explore a “shape and perspective that reveals the invisible as visible, physical as immaterial, and vice versa.”
As artist-in-residence for the Cornell Council for the Arts’ (CCA) 2014 Biennial, she has realized that objective with “A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir,” to be installed on the Arts Quad next week [Sept. 15 – 19, 2014]. It will be one of several installations on campus for the semester-long biennial, “Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of Scale in an Age of Nanotechnology,” beginning Sept. 18 [2014] with a talk by Kimsooja.
Here’s how ‘Needle Woman’ looked after fabrication,
Jaeho Chong Pieces of Kimsooja’s “Needle Woman” artwork during fabrication in Shanghai show the polymer film developed by Cornell researchers.
The biennial theme intends to “show how artists address realms of human experience that lie beyond our immediate sensory perception,” CCA Director Stephanie Owens said. “Working with scientists and researchers makes it possible to produce art at the edges between disciplines … generating lots of productivity and new thought.”
Kimsooja’s 46-foot-tall structure features an iridescent polymer film developed at Cornell, reflecting light with structural colors similar to those in a butterfly’s wings. Creating it involved some diligent problem-solving by materials scientists in the lab of Uli Wiesner, the Spencer T. Olin Professor of Engineering.
Owens first connected artists, musicians and scientists on campus in a series of lunchtime discussions two years ago, Wiesner said: “I thought, this is what I really wanted to have in a university, a place of knowledge – [where] you can do stuff that goes beyond borders.”
Last November, Wiesner met with Owens and Kimsooja. “My group brought a glass vial that had a block of polymer dissolved in a solvent. It had iridescent colors, like an opal,” he said. “When you turned it, it was dynamic; the solution would flow around, and the colors changed. And Kimsooja loved it and said, ‘This is what I want on my structure.’”
The group, including chemistry Ph.D. student Ferdinand Kohle and postdoctoral researcher Hiroaki Sai, worked out how to create a polymer producing the desired optical effect and how to adhere it to Plexiglas panels on Kimsooja’s structure. Architecture students assisted with materials and fabrication.
The Cornell news release describes other Biennial collaborations,
The biennial, Sept. 15-Dec. 21, is a deep survey of artistic and scientific exploration, framing changes in 21st-century culture, art practice and nanoscale technology through collaborative research-based projects by faculty and students and guest artists Rafael Lazano-Hemmer, Paul Thomas and Kevin Raxworthy, and the Particle Group artist collective.
Cornell faculty members Beth Milles, performing and media arts; Jenny Sabin, architecture; and Juan Hinestroza and Ruya Ozer, fiber science, with So Yeon-Yoon, design and environmental analysis, have all developed biennial projects on the nano theme with students.
“I really love how world-class science has been incorporated in world-class art,” Hinestroza said of the Kimsooja-Wiesner project. “The fundamental science behind the coatings developed by the Wiesner group, the chemistry developed by Hiro, as well as the methods pioneered to coat the films with such nanoscale precision by Ferdinand, are indeed revolutionary – and the use of these materials to assemble a large structure like Kimsooja’s needle is simply breathtaking.”
Architecture student Joseph Kennedy ’15 and Caio Barboza and Sunny Xu, both B.Arch. ’13, created “Paperthin,” an interactive installation in the Physical Sciences Building based on the textured landscape of a sheet of paper at nanoscale. Physics researcher Robert Hovden, Ph.D. ’14, created “When Art Exceeds Perception,” a series of imperceptible nano-scale engravings of famous works of art.
As part of the biennial, the CCA brought artists Joe Davis, Nathaniel Stern, Stephanie Rothenberg and Berndnaut Smilde to speak on campus last spring. Owens taught a related course, Micro Materialities/Macro Forms: Artistic Practice and the Culture of Nanoscience, in fall 2013.
“Artists that engage research as part of their process,” Owens said, “can find partnership and shared vision with like-minded pioneers in [other] disciplines … and in doing so, catalyze aspects of their work that can take on new and unexpected directions.”
Wish I could visit.
*’l’ added to ‘Biennial’ in head on February 4, 2025.
