ArtNano

Art at the Nanoscale Boundary: Reflections on Art, Education, and Culture

For most of us, comprehending science at the nanoscale takes an extreme act of the imagination. It requires conjuring up an utterly foreign and remote world populated by atoms and molecules, a place our bodies can’t go and our minds are ill-equipped to grasp. Supporting this act of imagination is one of the goals of the National Science Foundation-supported Nanoscale Informal Science Education (NISE) Network. As director of exhibits at San Francisco’s Exploratorium and one of the Principal Investigators of the NISE Network, I spend a considerable amount of time thinking about this goal—and I believe that achieving it is a challenge requiring the imagination, skill, and active investigation of artists as well as scientists.

As museum educators, we often need to remind ourselves just how cognitively difficult it is to conjure up the nanoscale world. Astronomy is far easier on the mind, in part because travel and acceleration are everyday experiences: Just extrapolate from car travel to warp speed and you’ve begun to wrap your head around intergalactic distances. But there is no similar experiential basis for shrinking to the size of a DNA molecule. Similarly, the mental time travel of paleontology is simpler to imagine than nanoscale science, because imagining distant eras is far more natural than picturing a universe of detail inside a grain of sand. (And giant reptiles add even more to the enticement of the ancient world.)

The tales of miniature worlds found in many cultures reveal that familiarity and experience drive our hopes for shrunken realms. If the nanoscale turned out to be populated with fairies or Lilliputians, we would have a much easier time talking about it. But it is not—and we are left probing, picturing, and trying to explain a world that is hard to get to and contains little that is familiar.

All of this brings us to the need for art. Artists may be described as professional explorers of perception and imagination, people whose life’s work focuses on the edges of cognition, who strive to help others see and feel new things. Unlike scientific illustrators who tend to avoid ambiguity for the sake of educational clarity, artists revel in the murky territory where aesthetics, emotions, and cultural meaning come together. Who better, then, to explore the challenging cognitive territory of nanoscale science? Who better to make the invisible not just visible, but also compelling and meaningful?

It was with this affective and cultural content in mind that the Exploratorium began in 2006 to survey artistic investigations of nanoscale science. This effort was one of several directions pursued by the NISE Network’s Visualization Laboratory, a new virtual lab led by the Exploratorium and charged to build knowledge about visualizing the nanoscale. The Visualization Laboratory surveyed existing artworks and literature about art and nanotechnology, collaborated with Leonardo (a journal for and about artists that explore science and technology concepts in their work) to find interested artists, held exploratory residencies, and commissioned new prototypes. The results of these investigations make up the core of this website.

The primary goal of the Visualization Laboratory’s artist collaborations is to build a greater understanding of how to portray essential qualities of the nanoscale landscape. Just as painters of portraits or landscapes seek to convey fundamental aspects of their subjects (even impressionistically or abstractly), we pursued a similar, quasi-representational approach to the art of the nanoscale.

In the course of our research, we explored what scientists and engineers considered core attributes of the nanoscale world—and different ways of representing them. We came to focus on qualities such as relative size (“nano is smaller than bacteria but bigger than atoms”), atomicity (“everything is made of atoms”), the prevalence of different forces (“gravity doesn’t matter much down there”), and kinetic qualities (“everything is in motion at the nanoscale”). These simple but important ideas then became potential subjects for new artistic explorations.

Here, however, I would like to zoom out to a broader set of questions surrounding nanoscale art, questions about potential aesthetic interest and broader cultural meaning that accompany the emergence and maturation of this new knowledge and technology. Although the Exploratorium has focused on an educational use of the arts to represent core qualities of the nanoscale, we could not avoid stumbling on these larger cultural issues—issues that may ultimately have crucial implications for broader educational efforts. Some of the broader lessons gathered from our exploration of nanoscale science and art are:

• The field of nanoscale science is young and intriguing, but also challenging and confusing. It’s somewhat like a frontier town: full of exploration and start-up businesses, many of which will probably not last for long. Roles are fluid—we see scientists talking like artists about their visualizations, illustrators acting like futurists as they imagine fictional applications, and artists working as educators alongside museum professionals. What we see is typical of an early-stage intellectual/artistic development: a broad, diverse and interdisciplinary group exploring a new and well-funded topic in which content, cultural ramifications, roles, and the balance between hype and substance is still very much in flux.

• Once they are graphically manipulated and enhanced, the shapes and images of nanoscale science can have a strong abstract aesthetic appeal. Colorized micrographs, geometric arrangements of atoms, and computer simulations of electron paths are popular among scientists interested in visual aesthetics and graphic designers and art directors. It’s not difficult to envision exhibitions of the “abstract world of the nanoscale” at art museums or research centers (although, given the source material for these abstractions, they would likely require considerable interpretation for the general public). The more artistic images coming out of labs draw heavily from the conventions of abstract and landscape painting and photography, and it is not yet clear how they contribute back to those artistic traditions.

• The “multi-scale zoom” has become a new cinematic/animation form ripe for ongoing artistic development. Works like Victoria Vesna’s Nanomandala and Scott Snibbe’s Three Drops show that scale-travel is an intriguing formal and conceptual problem. This new artistic form, which connects the human-scale perceptual world with the micro- and macro- worlds surrounding us, has become an important new feature of our visual culture. Although there have been previous educational “zooms” (starting with Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten), I believe this form could benefit from having different artists explore how imagery and cultural resonances shift when the same object or situation is viewed at different scales. Grappling with the conceptual and cultural discontinuities across these multiple size-scales is a critical task for both art and science.

• Art, drama, and fiction have already significantly engaged emerging technologies sharing much with nanotechnology, such as genetic engineering. Science fiction, wheather utopian or dystopian, remains one of the most engaging entry points for nanoscale science and engineering. Fantastic “what if” scenarios about new technologies and their impacts on human life are carrying the first wave of public interest in nanotechnology. Dreams of healing, immortality, and technological solutions to our burgeoning ecological fears can be found alongside nightmares about environmental disasters and nanobots run amok. I would like to see a new generation of artists, playwrights, and writers engage this discourse and continue to explore these future scenarios for what they reveal about human values, hopes, and fears.

Finally, and most importantly,

• We are still lacking compelling answers to the relevance question, the “Big Why.” Who cares? Why should it matter to me? How many artists, educators and audiences would care about nano if it weren’t so well funded? These unanswered questions pose a significant challenge. It is not enough to simply present nanoscale science and engineering as the technological flavor of the decade. Nor have epistemological issues around “seeing the invisible,” however intriguing they may be, risen to the level of an essential cultural topic. If this work is indeed broadly relevant, I think that relevance centers on the fact that it is at the nanoscale where physics and chemistry become the material world as we know it. More importantly, it is at the nanoscale that matter becomes life. That’s why debates about genetic engineering and the nature and origin of life must take the nanoscale into account. Our emerging power to sculpt the molecular foundation of all that we know is remarkable, but it is also frightening—and it will surely change our understanding both of the world and of our place within it.

So, although it may in fact be easier to imagine faraway galaxies or the time of the dinosaurs, it is at the nanoscale that we will learn about the scientific underpinnings of the material world that surrounds us and makes us who we are. As we begin to manipulate the basic properties of all materials, the boundaries between the natural and the technological will continue to blur. With the help of artists investigating the nanoscale foundations of the material world, we may build a broader appreciation not just of new materials but also of the poetics of the science of everyday objects and materials. In parallel, we will debate and digest new nanoscale understandings of life itself. As we create nanostructures that mimic living systems, we will generate and test new theories about the origins of life and the material foundation of consciousness. All of this should stir up great intellectual and cultural debate. It is here, alongside the scientists and philosophers, that I would like to see artists: raising new questions, discovering new aesthetics, and helping us orient ourselves in a yet-to-emerge intellectual and technological landscape.

Tom Rockwell is Associate Director for Program at the Exploratorium and co-Principal Investigator for the NISE Network.