Nano Art: Controlling or Nurturing? Technology or Growth?
Here is another perplexing potential sculpture that I must to add to my ever-expanding list of eco-art quandries and querries. It involves the development of procedures that enable people to 'sculpt' the tiniest 'flowers' in the world. This nano-technology could not only introduce a new sculptural medium, scale, and aesthetic into the history of art, it expands the domain of the exertion of artistic (and human) control. In this instance, the territory being occupied engages one of the great mysteries of the material environment - what accounts for nature's complex and ever-varied shapes?
The process has been explored on the visible and tangible level by Steiner and Lenzlinger.
The tiny flowers in these images are colorized electron microscopic views of 'nanoflowers' - shapes that self-assemble. Each flower is approximately 50 micrometers in size, smaller than the width of a human hair. The 'flowers' develop in a beaker.
While the forms resemble flowers, the project is called “Rationally Designed Complex, Hierarchical Microarchitectures.” Wim Noorduin, the author on the article on this breakthrough in this month’s journal, Science, explained that ”if you look at this in nature, you see all sorts of self-assembling complex shapes in coral reefs and microorganisms. We didn’t want to mimic so much one of these shapes in particular, but wondered if there could be simple chemical process that would give you a wide diversity of shapes.”
Noorduin said the process is so simple everyone could do it in their kitchens. Sodium silicate and barium chloride are dissolved in a beaker of water, with the resulting crystals controlled by changes in temperature, carbon dioxide, and the PH level of the solution. White barium carbonate crystals are thereby formed. Minute changes to the mixture “sculpts” the crystals into delicate little flowers.
Although self-assembly on the nano-level has long been studied, what is unique is the control. But the control resembles gardening more than engineering, because these shapes self-assemble. Thus the process through which they emerge is like ‘growth’. Growing nano scaled flowers is like gardening.
Nanoflower <http://tinyurl.com/lkfqv87>
Next Noorduin said he is working on how to manipulate the changes themselves at a microscopic level, to build even more complicated forms. With that level of complexity, the results could have important nanotechnology applications such as optics and other micro-engineering, and might even produce some really cool micro-art in the process. Here are some images of the microscopic nanoflowers <http://tinyurl.com/mqwwoqu> _Allison Meier_Hyperallergic
“sculptures” <http://tinyurl.com/m9uhvns>