Tag Archives: Blue Morph

MORPHONANO, an art/sci exhibit in California

This description of the event (MORPHONANO) which is being held at the Beall Center at the University of California (Irvine) comes from the Beall Center’s home page,

MORPHONANO explores a number of art works created by media artist Victoria Vesna and nanoscientist James Gimzewski. Their collaborative works create an intersection of space, time and embodiment by employing a very subtle and responsive energetic exchange. Participants interact with the works in mindful ways resulting in rich visual and sonic experiences within a meditative space. By reversing the scale of nanotechnology to the realm of human experience, the artist and scientist create a sublime reversal of space-time.

Here’s an image depicting one of the exhibits in the show,

ZERO@WAVEFUNCTION plays with the idea of scale and molecular manipulation from a distance with the participant changing the structures of the buckyballs with their shadows, a real time interactive metaphor of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM).

It looks to me that the idea is to ’embody’ the nanoscale as per the caption “the participants changing the structures of the buckyballs with their shadows, a real time interactive metaphor of the scanning tunneling microscope.” There’s a larger version of the image and information about this exhibit in the Feb. 14, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

BLUE MORPH is an interactive installation that uses nanoscale images combined with sounds derived from the microscopic undulations of a chrysalis during the period of its metamorphosis into a butterfly recorded using nanotechnology. The work is designed to be responsive to minute, subtle, mindful movements of the participant creating a rich visual and sonic experience of morphing. Most is revealed in complete stillness.

NANOMANDALA is a video projected onto a disk of sand, 8 feet in diameter. Visitors can touch the sand as images are projected in evolving scale from the molecular structure of a single grain of sand – achieved my means of photography, optical and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) – to the recognizable image of the complete mandala, and then back again. The original Chakrasamvara mandala was created by monks of the Ghaden Lhopa Khangsten monastery. Patience will allow experiencing the whole.

ZERO@WAVEFUNCTION plays with the idea of scale and molecular manipulation from a distance with the participant changing the structures of the buckyballs with their shadows, a real time interactive metaphor of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM). Slow motion makes change happen.

BRAIN STORMING: SOUNDS OF THINKING a premier of a work of self organization in progress focusing on scale invariant and the brain using biometric data. A number of brain storming sessions with cutting neuroscientists, nanotechnologists, philosophers and monks will take place throughout the exhibition. In many ways the works in this exhibition reverse the scale of nanotechnology to a visible realm and time in nano scale creating a sublime reversal of space-time.

The show opened Feb. 2 and closes May 6, 2012. The address is

Beall Center for Art + Technology
University of California, Irvine
Claire Trevor School of the Arts
712 Arts Plaza
Irvine, CA 92697-2775
www.beallcenter.uci.edu

Here are some details about the art/sci collaborators, Victoria Vesna and James Gimzewski, from the undated Beall Center news release,

Victoria Vesna is a media artist and Professor at the Department of Design | Media Arts at the UCLA School of the Arts and director of the UCLA Art|Sci center. Currently she is Visiting Professor at Art, Media + Technology, Parsons the New School for Design in New York and a senior researcher at IMéRA – Institut Méditerranéen de Recherches Avancées in Marseille, France. Her work can be defined as experimental creative research that resides between disciplines and technologies. She explores how communication technologies affect collective behavior and how perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. Her most recent experiential installations — Blue Morph, Water Bowls, Hox Zodiac, all aim to raise consciousness around environmental issues natural and human-animal relations. …

James Gimzewski FRS is a distinguished Professor in the Dept. of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA. He is director of Pico and Nano core laboratory at the California NanoSynstems Institute (CNSI). He is also scientific director of the Art | Sci center and a senior fellow of IMéRA. He is a satellite co-director and PI of materials nanoarchitectonics at the National Institute of Material Science in Tsukuba, Japan. Until February 2001, he was a group leader at the IBM Zurich Labs, where he was involved in Nanoscale science since 1983. He pioneered research on electrical contact with single atoms and molecules, light emission and molecular imaging using STM. His accomplishments include the first STM-manipulation of molecules at room temperature, the realization of molecular abacus using buckyballs, the discovery of single molecule rotors and the development of nanomechanical sensors based on nanotechnology, which explore the ultimate limits of sensitivity and measurement. …

I have mentioned Gimzewski previously in a post (Oct. 17, 2011) about a three-part nanotechnology series on Canadian television.