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Photo by Todd Cheney UCLA Photo
Victoria Vesna (left), chair of Design | Media Arts, and
chemist Jim Gimzewski of the California NanoSystems Institute
explain molecular models to students from Hancock Park Elementary
School during the opening of “nano” at LACMA’s
Boone Gallery.
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'cool' molecules
Art and science blend in 'nano' exhibit
BY CYNTHIA LEE
UCLA Today Staff
Nanotechnology, the stuff of scientists’ dreams and science
fiction nightmares, has entered another realm. Call it the fun zone.
That’s what Tracey Castillo, 10, found as she entered “nano,”
a new exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
created by UCLA faculty and graduate students from disciplines as
diverse as media arts, chemistry, architecture and English.
“This is sooo cool,” said Castillo as she embraced
a “molecule” the size of an exercise ball rolling around
in a darkened space while illuminated projections of buckyballs
floated on a nearby wall and graphite molecules glowed on the floor.
“I like this kind of science.”
Watching from outside, UCLA media artist and professor Victoria
Vesna beamed. “This really warms my heart,” she said
as she watched students from Hancock Park Elementary School play
in the Inner Cell, the main installation.
“Nano” was created by Vesna, chair of Design | Media
Arts, and nanoscientist James Gimzewski, professor of chemistry,
in collaboration with N. Katherine Hayles, a scholar of electronic
literature and professor of English, and their graduate students.
It is housed in futuristic structures of interlocking triangles
designed by architecture faculty Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee.
Open free in the Boone Children’s Gallery until Sept. 6,
the exhibit challenges visitors’ senses, plays with their
perceptions of scale and tantalizes their imagination about life
forms at a billionth of a meter.
The exhibition was previewed Dec. 11. “This is going to
blow your mind,” marveled Andrea Rich, president and director
of LACMA. “I’m going to have to come over here every
day until I can understand it myself.”
In the Inner Cell, visitors create “gravity waves”
as they walk over glowing molecules on the floor. There are interactive
exhibits on quantum tunneling, atom manipulation, a nano-sand mandala
and 3-D crystals that visitors can build digitally and manipulate
using special tools.
Underlying the dazzling interactive computer animation and funhouse
ambiance are some serious metaphors for complex scientific principles,
such as Heisenberg’s theory of uncertainty in quantum mechanics,
if visitors really want to delve into it.
“I don’t expect kids to understand all the science
behind it, but I think they might be inspired by it,” Gimzewski
said.
“First of all, they should just have fun with it,”
said Hayles, the Charles Hills Professor of Literature who worked
with graduate students on the text component. Around the installations
are quotations from novelists and scientists that show how nanoscience
has rocked their worlds. Hayles has also edited essays in the first
book-length critical study of the relationship of nanotechnology
to literature, art and culture. “NanoCulture: Implications
of the New Technoscience” is set to be published by Intellect
Press in April.
Quietly monitoring the computer technologies embedded in “nano”
were bleary-eyed graduate students who worked yearlong on the project
and round-the-clock before opening day.
“If we really are going to be the third culture merging
science and art, then we need to do this,” said Andrew Pelling,
a Ph.D. student in nanoscience, who converted the data he gets from
“feeling” cells with a scanning tunneling microscope
into sound that visitors hear. “There is no distinction between
scientist and artist anymore. We’re one. We are completely
intermeshed.”
Go to: http://nano.arts.ucla.edu/.
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