NANO T h A R T o m a s The Immateriality of Art Paul Thomas NANO The content for this book has been based on a self-emergent process. N It explores an art historical understanding of matter and uses various hypotheses to elucidate the effects on materiality and agency as a result of A the emergence of nanotechnology. The blurring of material boundaries are A R T reflected in the establishment of a fluid organic spatial narrative in which to N place ideas, propositions and concerns. O The focus of Nanoart in this publication will be contextualized in relation The Immateriality of Art to specific scientific instrumentation and discoveries. The publication will reflect on the practice of selected artists currently working in the area of A nanotechnology and position their works as touchstones for exploring our understanding of materiality from an atomistic viewpoint. R Dr Paul Thomas is an Associate Professor, Head of Painting at the College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales and was previously the instigator and coordinator of Collaborative Research in Art, Science and Humanity, T (CRASH) Curtin University. Thomas has exhibited both nationally and internationally as well as chairing numerous international conferences. In 2000 Thomas was the founding Director and instigator of the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth. Thomas’s intention in writing this scholarly work about Nanoart is to explore ideas, thoughts and concerns from his experience as an artist, scholar and educator. intellect | www.intellectbooks.com Paul Thomas Nanoart 0077008888__FFMM__ppii--xxiiii..iinndddd ii 22//99//1133 11::1166::1177 PPMM 0077008888__FFMM__ppii--xxiiii..iinndddd iiii 22//99//1133 11::1166::1188 PPMM Nanoart The Immateriality of Art Paul Thomas intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA 0077008888__FFMM__ppii--xxiiii..iinndddd iiiiii 22//99//1133 11::1166::1188 PPMM First published in the UK in 2013 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2013 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover designer: Ellen Thomas Copy-editor: MPS Technologies Production manager: Bethan Ball Typesetting: Planman Technologies ISBN: 978-1-84150-708-8 EBook ISBN: 978-1-78320-049-8 EPub ISBN: 978-1-78320-050-4 Printed and bound by Bell & Bain, UK 0077008888__FFMM__ppii--xxiiii..iinndddd iivv 22//2211//1133 44::3355::3311 PPMM Contents Foreword by Edward Colless vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Materiality and Immateriality of Art in the Age of Nanotechnology 9 Chapter 2: From Seeing to Touching: From the Invisible to the Visible 31 Chapter 3: Nanotechnology, Vibration and Vitalism 57 Chapter 4: Matter, Measurement and Light 85 Chapter 5: Transvitalism and Nature 105 References 113 Acknowledgements 120 Index 121 Author biography 132 0077008888__FFMM__ppii--xxiiii..iinndddd vv 22//1122//22001133 1100::4400::1166 AAMM 0077008888__FFMM__ppii--xxiiii..iinndddd vvii 22//99//1133 11::1166::1199 PPMM Foreword Although nanotechnology has been with us for several decades in hard science, it still has the aura of an alluring speculative fi ction with plenty of room for imaginative movement. History has it that Richard Feynman famously postulated the prospect of nanotechnology, although without naming it as such, during a lighthearted aft er- dinner speech to scientifi c colleagues at Caltech way back in 1959. His entertaining thought-experiment, dealing with the manipulation of individual atoms in manufacturing and with the fabrication at an atomic level of otherwise unimaginably miniaturized and complex electrical circuitry for computing, was quirkily titled ‘Th ere’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’. ‘A new fi eld of physics’, declared the journal which, within little more than a month, had published this potentially epochal – certainly visionary – talk, and a ‘fascinating fi eld’, they added, in which ‘Dr Feynman … issues an invitation to all scientists – and non-scientists – to start working’.1 A generous invitation, although the publisher’s parenthetical inclusion of ‘non-scientists’ does not suggest an ecumenical reconciliation of what C.P. Snow had momentously declared, at Cambridge earlier in the year of Feynman’s talk, as divorce between ‘the two cultures’. Th e non-scientists of the journal’s editors would probably not have been otherwise excluded envoys from the humanities, but the very much included corporate sponsors – military and industrial manufacturers – whose full pages of grandiloquent advertorial liberally interrupt Feynman’s text.2 Given the informal and somewhat conjectural incitements of this text, the role of Feynman’s talk in inaugurating the history of nanotech may be more legendary than actually catalytic.3 But precisely due to its slightly fanciful edge, Feynman’s talk can put a slightly diff erent spin on the invitation to the ‘non-scientist’, diff erent from that of his editors’ solicitation. And it happens with an unremarked minor detail in his narrative description of the technology; a little detail that has the intrigue of a symptomatic slip-up. Not an error (one would not dare charge Feynman with that), but a momentary slide or swerve on a rhetorical banana-skin that turns us in quite another direction to that of the military-industrial complex which appeared to 0077008888__FFMM__ppii--xxiiii..iinndddd vviiii 22//99//1133 11::1166::1199 PPMM Nanoart provide such solid foundations for the exploitable potential of nanotech. It turns us towards art. Picturing the process for this atomic scaled engineering, Feynman nonchalantly (and, he adds, ‘for amusement’ [Feynman 1960: 26]) introduced an analogy with a mechanical draft ing tool – one which, disarmingly, originates in the seventeenth century – called the pantograph: a device constructed from rods hinged in a parallelogram, rather like the common ‘concertina’ extension arm on adjustable wall- mounted bathroom mirrors (Feynman 1960: 30, 34). In its conventional and simplest mode, the operator would trace the outlines of a form with a stylus positioned at one of the pantograph’s hinged junctions. Th e pantograph would then automatically copy that trace through the parallel motion of a marker pencil located on another of the apparatus’s arms. Depending on the location of that marker pencil, this copy could be an equivalent size replica or – demonstrating the real ingenuity of the mechanism – it could produce an exact but either magnifi ed or reduced facsimile. Feynman evidently had in mind 3D milling machines run by pantographs on servo-motors rather than manual draft ing table ones, and so he referred to a device with more industrial than artistic guise. But it is of no less interest – in fact, it is more tantalizing as a conceit worthy of a steampunk novel – that this celebrated advent of nanotech involved a rather clunky visual simile that conjures up the artist (or at least a copyist in a monastic scriptorium) as well as the engineer. Indeed as a verbal image, Feynman’s illustration could be reminiscent of the artist El Lissitzky’s justly famous photomontage from 1924, ‘Th e Constructor’, in which a navigator’s or geometrician’s pair of compasses is deft ly poised in the artist’s open hand, which is superimposed over his eye. El Lissitzky’s iconic self-portrait as a kind of artistic pilot (naval or aeronautical, charting the conjoined directions of his society and art) is a cocktail of persuasive boast and artistic manifesto. Incorporating his own innovative stencil typography to replace Russian Cyrillic, Lissitzky’s portrait is also an advertisement for a visionary social project of expanded literacy as well a manifesto for his revolutionary applications of the photographic medium. Th e apparatus in Feynman’s talk likewise conjures up an operator working with revolutionary promise at unprecedented magnitudes: not simply with cute Lilliputian minutiae but with a vastness of possibility where ratios of labour to material, material stresses to performance, and performance to equipment bulk, blow out.4 At the atomic level, there is, for instance, much more empty volume than matter, and so there is ‘plenty of room’. Anachronistic as it may sound, there is nothing naïve about the science implied by Feynman’s pantograph analogy. Because the scope of such a pantograph would have to extend beyond mere miniaturization, Feynman acknowledges that the translation from a microscopic dimension to the nano-scale would entail a phase viii 0077008888__FFMM__ppii--xxiiii..iinndddd vviiiiii 22//99//1133 11::1166::1199 PPMM Foreword transition and require remediation through tools which were themselves nanometric; not just a continuously graduated scale of reduction from the hand or eye. Feynman’s pantograph acknowledged a gulf between the agency articulating the mechanism and the sort of tools needed to move atoms around. It also acknowledged that any industry conducted at the atomic level (specifi cally, that would mean below 100 nanometres) would involve proportions of natural forces diff erent to those at scales larger than molecular confi gurations. Gravity, weight and inertial drag for instance, would play diminished roles; but the complex of (comparatively, at macro scales) weak van der Waals forces – repulsive and attractive intermolecular and intramolecular energies – would become dominant, and consequently would expose the technological diagrams and processes of atomic level manufacture to the bizarre topography and capricious vivacity of the quantum realm. If we were to take Feynman at his word – and we would be both impertinent and unwise not to do so – how could we envisage such a simple mechanical instrument as his pantograph extended in its range enough to achieve a veritable ‘quantum leap’ into the nanosphere? If we do take this visual analogue literally, is it as foolish as imagining the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin?5 Actually, both this literalism of the imagination and this folly can precisely be claimed as the province of artists. It is a charming coincidence that at the start of Paul Th omas’s book charting his professional artistic refl ections on the nanosphere – deliberations infl ected by creative and pragmatic acquaintance with that realm’s weird physics – we fi nd a puzzle dramatically pertinent to the pantograph’s activity of draft ing. Th omas begins his book by speculating on the nanometric interactions between the graphite in a pencil and the surface of the paper on which that pencil draws. It is not the macroscopic dimension of the mark that holds his attention here (which would be the domain of artistic discipline, the connoisseurship of style, art history, studio pedagogy, perhaps of media theory), but the tangled and fl uctuating realm below the visibility of that mark and indeed beneath its disciplined signifi cance, the fl uxes of which lead him along various paths from Lucretius’s atomism to Bergsonian vitalism to the motion blur and simultaneous temporal facets of Cubo-Futurism; from a phenomenological continuum to the ever-receding discontinuous incidents of Zeno’s arrow. Diverse and incommensurate as some of these notions are, it is the ‘mark’ – the touch or facture – that initializes all these movements of enquiry in Th omas’s book. ‘Mark-making’, by the way, is jargon that has had an odd resurgence among many contemporary visual artists these days. Its older, twentieth-century usage alluded to the urgent signature-eff ect and totemic symbolization of painterly gestures in the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. More recently, ‘marking’ has had an urban and ix 0077008888__FFMM__ppii--xxiiii..iinndddd iixx 22//99//1133 11::1166::1199 PPMM