LACMALab presents
nano: a Media
Arts & Science Exhibition Making Nanoscience Visible, Tangible, and
Experiential for Visitors of All Ages
December 14, 2003-September 6, 2004
|
 |
|
nano is presented free to the public in LACMA's Boone Children's Gallery |
LOS ANGELES—nano,
an exhibition that merges the arts and the atom by presenting the world of
nanoscience through a participatory aesthetic experience, opens December 14 at
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition, a collaboration between
LACMALab and a UCLA team of nanoscience, media arts, and humanities experts,
is free to the public and runs through September 6, 2004 in LACMA's Boone
Children's Gallery.
nano is presented as part of LACMA's NexGen youth membership program and is
the fourth exhibition organized by LACMALab, the museum's experimental
research and development unit, which initiates new models of presenting art
and engaging audiences of all ages through artists' projects.
This groundbreaking project provides a greater understanding of how art,
science, culture, and technology influence each other. The exhibition
addresses sophisticated subject matter that is especially relevant for the
next generation. Modular, experiential spaces using embedded computing
technologies engage all of the senses to provoke a broader understanding of
nanoscience and its cultural ramifications. The various components of
nano are
designed to immerse the visitor in the radical shifts of scale and sensory
modes that characterize nanoscience, which works on the scale of a billionth
of a meter. Participants can feel what it is like to manipulate atoms one by
one and experience nano-scale structures by engaging in art-making activities.
The project installations were conceived and designed by media artist Victoria
Vesna (Department of Design | Media Arts, UCLA) with nanoscience pioneer James
K. Gimzewski (Department of Chemistry, UCLA) and created together with a team
of their graduate students. N. Katherine Hayles (Department of English, UCLA),
also with graduate students, developed the text component within the gallery.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Hayles is editing a collection of essays
entitled NanoCulutre: Implications of the New Technoscience to be published in
2004 by Intellect Press. The exhibition's architecture was designed by Sharon
Johnston, Mark Lee, and Anne Rosenberg of Johnston Marklee & Associates.
nano
also has a strong studio component, including a virtual reality drawing tool
developed by Caltech. LACMALab's director, Robert Sain and its exhibition
coordinator Kelly Carney, worked in conjunction with Carol Eliel, curator of
Modern and Contemporary Art at LACMA to collaborate with the exhibition team
on all aspects of
nano.
Exhibition Overview
The exhibition begins in the lobby with a folded three-dimensional surface,
which introduces visitors to the environment of
nano. As visitors approach the
gallery entrance, their pictures are taken by a swarm of small surveillance
cameras. These photographs are used to form a large-scale, constantly flowing
ribbon of images, a virtual "organism" that ultimately include a daily log of
visitors to the exhibition.
The architecture of
nano actively creates synergy with the exhibition's media
installations and the visitors. Inside the 10,000 square-foot gallery, the
folded architectural surfaces create flowing layers of enclosed and
semi-enclosed spaces for the viewing of
nano's various components. These
spaces transform the visitor's experience from an anthropomorphic scale to the
nano scale.
One of the greatest advances in nanoscience was a paradigm shift in
understanding that access to and control of the nanoworld is possible through
tactile-feeling sensors as opposed to lens-based viewing microscopes. In the
Sense Space, visitors "feel" their way into and away from the Inner Cell with
subtle changes in tactile elements and pulsed soundscapes. The sensory
experience of these spaces and others are meant as a conceptual analogy to the
scanning tunneling microscope (STM), a nanoscience tool that uses touch rather
than sight as a means of understanding molecules on the nano scale.
In the central area of the exhibition, the visitors enter the large Inner
Cell, where they interact with molecular forms through their hands and feet as
well as through eyes and ears. This virtual and metaphoric cell-space provokes
visitors to discover through physical engagement, to learn by feeling. With
the use of nothing more than their shadows, visitors are able to manipulate
and reshape large-scale projected images of a particular form of the carbon
molecule, commonly known as a "buckyball." In the Inner Cell, visitors also
encounter audience controlled robotic balls, or "atoms," that roam the space
and project high-pitch sounds, emulating the physical actions of cells.
Nanoscience delves into the manipulation of life's building blocks. In the
Atomic Manipulation area, visitors see a live, bird's-eye view of the Inner
Cell space through a tabletop projection. There, they move, manipulate, and
reorient individual "atoms" (the robotic balls in the Inner Cell) in actions
that emulate the operations of the STM.
Two kaleidoscopes are embedded in the outer wall of the Inner Cell. Visitors
view the kaleidoscopes' views of the Inner Cell and its participants, while
hearing passages from science fiction narratives. These passages suggest to
visitors the influence science fiction writers have had in the development of,
and advances in, nanoscience. The fracturing of vision from multiple
perspectives, combined with oral storytelling of science fiction prompts
visitors to become immersed in the complex images or virus-like assemblages of
imagery and action created by their fellow exhibition visitors.
To reinforce the understanding of the nano scale, the exhibition includes an
installation connecting to the process of the recent creation of a
sand mandala at LACMA, from a nano-scale view of a grain of sand to the completed
eight-foot mandala (a cosmic diagram and ritualistic symbol of the universe,
used in Buddhism and Hinduism). The method monks use to create sand images,
particle by particle, bears resemblance to the purposeful arrangement of
individual molecules in nanoscience.
Quantum mechanics is one of the least understood phenomena in science, for it
focuses on shifting laws of action and reaction. Visitors can encounter
nano's
Quantum Tunnel, where images of their faces are projected on two opposing
walls. When a visitor in either of these spaces activates a camera, his or her
image is captured and projected on the nearby wall. As a visitor travels
through the connecting corridor to the opposite end, the two projected images
are juxtaposed and become distorted. When another visitor passes through the
corridor, the facial images are again disturbed and altered, fractured into
particles and waves.
The popular LACMALab art studio elicits responses from visitors using
open-ended materials and focused activities such as molecular model-making. In
addition, visitors are invited to "draw" in space, using a cutting-edge
computer design program and tool created by Steven Schkolne at Caltech that
translates physical movements into virtual, 3-D images. The natural world and
digital display merge in this exploration of crystallography, creating a
shared space where viewers experience physical properties beyond traditional
visual means.
Text passages are interwoven throughout the exhibition space in subtle but
expansive ways that broaden the ideas and implications of the installations
and the common understanding of nanoscience. Quotations from novelists,
scientists, and other critical thinkers illustrate how nanoscience has been,
and continues to be, imagined by the creative minds of so many authors and
artists.
Participants
nano is a collaborative project involving more than 30 individuals from LACMA,
UCLA's SINAPSE Group, and Johnston Marklee & Associates with an additional
contribution by Caltech.
Installations by:
Victoria Vesna, noted media and net artist and chair of the UCLA Department of
Design | Media Arts. She has exhibited internationally and lectures and
publishes widely on how perceptions of identity shift in relation to
technological and scientific innovation.
James K. Gimzewski, internationally
known nanoscience pioneer, professor in the UCLA Department of Chemistry, and
member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. He formerly led the
IBM team that constructed the world's smallest abacus using molecules one atom
high and is the recipient of numerous awards for his research.
Text component by:
N. Katherine Hayles, award-winning scholar, UCLA Associate Vice Chancellor for
Research, John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature in the Department of
English, and professor in the Department of Design | Media Arts. Her
publications are widely influential in the fields of science, technology and
literature, and electronic literature.
Architecture by:
Johnston Marklee & Associates, an award-winning architectural practice based
in Los Angeles whose projects have been exhibited and published
internationally. Principals Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee teach and conduct
design research at a host of national and international schools of
architecture and are on the faculty of the Department of Architecture and
Urban Design at UCLA.
LACMA's participation under the direction of:
Robert Sain, director of LACMALab since 1999. Over the past four years, Sain
commissioned 30 artists, 40 art students and three architecture firms to
create experimental projects serving more than 250,000 visitors of all ages.
Carol S. Eliel, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at LACMA. She joined
the museum in 1984 and has organized numerous exhibitions, including The
Apocalyptic Landscapes of Ludwig Meidner (1989), the award-winning Annette
Messager (1995), and L'Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918-1925 (2001).
California Institute of Technology's (Caltech) participation includes:
Steven Schkolne, known for inventing physical ways to interact with 3-D
digital data. He is currently writing his doctoral thesis on 3D computer
interfaces.
Peter Schröder, professor of computer science and applied and
computational mathematics at Caltech since 1995. He is recognized for his
pioneering work in Digital Geometry Processing and has received numerous
awards including a Packard Foundation Fellowship and the ACM/SIGGRAPH Computer
Graphics Achievement Award.
About LACMA
Established as an independent institution in 1965, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has assembled a permanent collection that includes approximately 100,000 works of art spanning the history of art from ancient times to the present, making it the premier encyclopedic visual arts museum in the western United States. Located in the heart of one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world, the museum uses its collection and resources to provide a variety of educational, aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural experiences for the people who live in, work in, and visit Los Angeles. LACMA offers an outstanding schedule of special exhibitions, as well as lectures, classes, family activities, film programs and world-class musical events.
# # #
Exhibition Credits
This exhibition was produced by LACMALab, a
research and development unit of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the
University of California, Los Angeles. The exhibition was made possible in
part by Union Bank of California, Bert Levy, the David Bermant Foundation, and
Veeco Instruments. In-kind support was provided by IBM, Canon U.S.A., Inc.,
and Epson.
LACMALab is supported in part by the Caryll Mudd Sprague Endowment for the
Education of Children.
UCLA units supporting this exhibition include the Department of Chemistry and
Biochemistry, the Department of Design | Media Arts, Office of Research, Pico
Lab, School of the Arts and Architecture, SINAPSE, and Technology Sandbox.
Additional support was provided by UC Digital Arts Research Network and UC
Discovery.
Exhibitions in the Boone Children's Gallery are made possible in part by the
MaryLou and George Boone Children's Gallery Endowment Fund.
*********************************
Boone Children’s Gallery Hours: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, noon–5
pm; Saturday and Sunday 11 am–5 pm; closed Wednesday. Call
(323) 857-6000, or visit our web site at
www.lacma.org.
Boone Children’s Gallery Admission: Admission to nano in
the Boone Children’s Gallery is free.
General LACMA Admission: Adults $9; students 18+ with ID and senior
citizens 62+ $5; children 17 and under are admitted free. Admission (except to
specially ticketed exhibitions) is free the second Tuesday of every month, and
evenings after 5 pm.
