 |
Master of Electronic Art
Spatiality and Interaction
|
Nanotechnology Week seven
Overview Nanotechnology is a term used to describe two different things. On one hand it refers to the field of science and technology concerned with working at nanoscale (ie miniaturization of technology). The other meaning, encompasses the concept or manipulating and rearranging of atoms through employing molecular machine systems or molecular nanotechnology MNT. The term nano comes from Greek meaning dwarf. The vision of assembling matter atom by atom has been credited to the Nobel winning physicist Richard Feyman. Although many quantum physicists who were Feyman's contemporaries were arriving at similar conclusions, it was Feyman's 1959 essay There's plenty of room at the bottom that is considered seminal to the conceptualization of nanotechnology. It took twenty more years before his ideas were beginning to be realized when in 1981, Heinrich Rocher and Gerd Binning invented STM (Scanning Tunneling Microscope) & in 1984 when Sir Harry Kroto, Richard Smalley and Robert Curl discovered the molecule. While the skepticism about the possibility of creating and reconfiguring matter at an atomic level has not disappeared, the advances made in this area are increasingly shifting the emphasis to the concerns and controversies of its wide applications ranging from medicine to warfare.
Scientific research in nanotechnology has pushed the limits of objective observation and its interest in synthesized objects crosses over to the area normally of interest to sculptors. In 2003 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art held an exhibition titled NANO created by an interdisciplinary team of artists, scientists, and humanists led by Victoria Vesna, James Gimzewski, and Katherine Hayles. The exhibition negotiated the perceptual shift required to comprehend the world at nano-scale.
Victoria Vesna , Justine Cooper , Alexa Smith , Ken Goldberg & Karl Bohringer , Felice Frankel , Kurt Kohl, Charles Ostman , Laino Ranta, Primary Reading Feynman, Richard P. 1959 There's plenty of room at the bottom
Drexler K E 1996 Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology , Forth Estate, London
Merkle, R Nanotechnology website Wald, Carol Working Boundaries on the NANO exhibition & de Souza e Silva, Adriana The Invisible Spaces, Hybrid Reality and Nanotechnology in Hayles, N. Katherine (ed ) 2004 NanoCulture: The New Technoscience and its Implications for Literature, Art, and Society, Intellect Books More on nanotechnology and art Frankel, F 1991 On the Surface of Things, Images of the Extraordinary in Science , Chronicle Books Gimzewski, J & Vesna, V The Nanosyndrome: Blurring of fact & fiction in the construction of a new science Smith, A Editorial Introduction , YLEM, March/April 1997, vol 17:4
on nanotechnology
Hein, Brad Nanotechnology Site Peterson, Christine L. Nanotechnology: From Feyman to the Grand Challenge of Molecular Manufacturing Pescovitz, David 1999 Be There Now: Teleprescence Art , Flash Art Magazine, Vol. XXXII, #205, March - April 1999, pp. 51-52. Jie Han, Al Globus, Richard Jaffe & Glenn Deardorff Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Carbon Nanotube Based Gears Fullerine Gears - a nano-machine was developed with nano-technology by NASA based on this paper. links to e-books on nanotechnology on Voltaire and literary imagining of nano-space Voltaire 1739 Micromegas
|