Special Section
Nanotechnology, Nanoscale
Science and Art
Tami I. Spector and Tom Rockwell, Guest Editors
We are pleased to present the first in an ongoing series of special sections
exploring the intersections of nanotech/nanoscience and art.
We welcome submission of manuscripts documenting artworks related to
nanotech/nanoscience; essays from scientists, engineers and scholars exploring
the connection between nanotech/nanoscience and art; and illustrated essays
documenting the use of the arts as a pedagogical tool in nanotech/nanoscience
education.
Interested artists and authors are encouraged to send proposals, queries
and/or manuscripts on this topic to the Leonardo editorial office:
<[email protected]>.
Published in collaboration with the Exploratorium and the Nanoscale Informal Science
Education (NISE) Network. Partial support for this project provided by the National
Science Foundation under cooperative agreement #ESI-0532536. Any opinions, findings
and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these articles are those of the authors
and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.
NANO—ART, SCIENCE & TECH
Special Section Introduction
Nanotechnology,
Nanoscale Science and Art
N
anotechnology is one of the fastest-growing fields of science. Through
methods such as scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM),
scientists have gained access to a new world of atomic scale manipulation and manufacturing,
yielding materials as diverse as nanoparticle-impregnated stain-resistant clothes to quantum
dots with unique optical properties. Despite the fact that many scientists have placed their
work under the rubric of nanotechnology, the underlying conceptual basis that joins together
all of the science within this framework makes an exact definition of nanotech/science difficult. From the perspective of a synthetic scientist nanotech/science will allow us to “build in
a ‘bottom-up’ fashion” by “starting with individual molecules and bringing them together to
form product parts in which every atom is in a precise, designed location” [1], while from the
perspective of a physical scientist, nanotech/science would most likely be viewed as the study
of physical phenomena that only occur on the nanoscale. The National Science Foundation
(NSF) weaves these perspectives together loosely by defining nanotech/science as,
research and technology development at the atomic, molecular or macromolecular levels, in the length scale of
approximately 1--100 nanometer range, to provide a fundamental understanding of phenomena and materials
at the nanoscale and to create and use structures, devices and systems that have novel properties and functions
because of their small and/or intermediate size [2].
This categorization is so broad that most of the field of chemistry would readily fit within it.
If nothing else, the ambiguity of the focus and scope of nanotech/science has yielded a boon
in creativity and productivity among scientists precisely because its parameters have not (yet)
been overly narrowed.
The ambiguous focus and definitional scope of nanotech/science has also led to myriad
conflicted, and at times inflated, notions of this new science’s potential: Will nanotech/
science create better means for solving environmental problems or more environmental hazards? Will it fundamentally alter how scientists understand their sensual relationship to scale?
Will its resultant technologies have the impact that the silicon chip had in the late 20th century? And if so, what insights can art, artists, and scientists and artists together bring to bear
on this potential revolution? Like scientists, artists have yet to realize and integrate the implications and potentialities of nanotech/science.
As can be seen in the papers and artwork in this first installment of the special section
Nanotechnology, Nanoscale Science and Art, those few artists who have begun to probe the
interconnections of art and nanotechnology have primarily focused on the technologies for
“seeing” at the nanoscale and on scale itself. Some of the first works of art related to nanotechnology have come from artists and scientists working with the tools of the nano trade
(STM and AFM) to make static and animated painterly images viewable with the naked eye
[3]. In this vein the surface scientist Jane Bearinger has provided Leonardo with an abstract
“nanolithograph” made from photographing---via a reflectance microscope---an etched
silicone-silane surface that has been coated with a hydrogel and exposed to the breath. Coming in as close as possible to the bulk polymer-coated silicone makes the smallest of individual
nano-objects visible, creating an image reminiscent of those made in the heyday of op-art.
Inverting this conceptual process, the artist Filipe Rocha da Silva has used painting to explore
348 LEONARDO, Vol.41, No. 4, pp. 348–349, 2008 ©2008 ISAST
NANO—ART, SCIENCE & TECH
how macroscale structures, when viewed from a distance, expose aspects of the nanoscale. To
do so he packs his large canvases with tiny recursive units of people, buildings and consumer
goods, creating subjects that lose their individuality when viewed en masse like the atoms that
make up the nanoscientist’s objects of study.
In 2002 artist Victoria Vesna and scientist James Gimzewski presented one of the first interactive artworks related to nanotechnology that allowed the viewer/participant to virtually
“touch” and distort models of buckyballs---nanoscale molecules shaped like Buckminster Fuller’s emblematic geodesic dome; viewers thus simulated how actual molecules behave when
interacting with the probe of a scanning tunneling microscope <http://notime.arts.ucla.edu/
zerowave/zerowave.html>. Similarly, in this first special section Boo Chapple (with William
Wong) describes using art to investigate the ability of human beings to interact with and
understand aspects of the physical world normally beyond our limits of perception. Unlike
Vesna and Gimzewski’s piece, however, which models the science underlying nanoscience,
Chapple’s art is the science. The artist narrates the actual process used in an attempt to build
“bone audio speakers” that allow us to “hear” piezoelectrically generated vibrations at the
nanoscale, ultimately discovering the extent to which our perceptions of the nanoscale are
instrument-mediated artifacts.
With the publication of these three papers we hope to encourage others to join us in our
exploration of the intersections of nanotech/science and art. For future sections of this
special section, we especially seek papers in the following categories:
Visual artists’ statements explaining the relationship of their work to nanotech/science
Manuscripts or artists’ statements involving sound and tactile artworks
Manuscripts from scientists, engineers and scholars exploring the connection between
nanotech/science and art
Manuscripts and visuals aimed towards nanotech/science education that uses the arts as
a pedagogical tool.
Tami I. Spector
Special Section Editor
Department of Chemistry
University of San Francisco
E-mail: <[email protected]>
References
1. <www.foresight.org/nano/whatisnano.html>
2. <www.nsf.gov/crssprgm/nano/reports/omb_nifty50.jsp>
3. See, for example, <www.nanoart21.org/>.
This paper is presented as part of the Leonardo special section Nanotechnology, Nanoscale
Science and Art, guest edited by Tom Rockwell and Tami I. Spector. Published in collaboration with the Exploratorium and the Nanoscale Informal Science Education (NISE)
Network. Partial support for publication of this article provided by the National Science
Foundation under cooperative agreement #ESI-0532536.  Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.
Introduction: Nanotechnology, Nanoscale Science and Art 349
NANO—ART, SCIENCE & TECH
Nanoscale and Painting
Filipe Rocha da Silva
I
hesitated upon addressing the call for papers
“Nanotechnology, Nanoscale Science and Art.” Not being a scientist, I have no special relationship with high technology per
se. I did not even know that there is a contemporary shift from
thinking in terms of “molecular” structures toward “nano”; I
am naturally shy in addressing the subject.
I work as an artist and, from a technological point of view,
an archaic one. I have practiced a great deal with oil on canvas,
although during the past few years I have diversified a bit: My
work has become somewhat three-dimensional, with the addition of other materials, even occasionally including video.
However, I am quite far from being a “new media” [1] practitioner. My work finds its roots in the history of painting, and I
am an admirer and even a modest connoisseur of 16th-century
work. I respect painterly tradition and think that centuries of
practice are one of the strengths of painting. Among its distinctive characteristics there is certainly the wealth of experience
in painting, besides the fact that it must be perceived directly
(reproduction does not adequately convey the experience of
painting).
I have finally decided to write this paper because since the
beginning of the 1980s my painting has relied heavily on the
exploration of scale and maybe even, metaphorically speaking,
the nanoscale.
The theme of most of my work has been the depiction of
running crowds, large groups of people (Fig. 1). Baudelaire’s
aphorism—“multitude, solitude: convertible terms for the active and fecund poet” [2]—comes to my mind quite often.
Probably the fact that I came of adult age during Portugal’s
revolution of April 1974 was decisive in the formation of this
theme/style. The country moved from a period of dictatorship
and strict containment to a few years when anonymous crowds
flooded the streets, expressing confused feelings and necessities that were not (perhaps could not be) satisfied.
I recall the conclusion of the story by Albert Camus, “The
Artist at Work”: a view of the artist’s large white canvas in which
a word “in very small characters is written in the centre, a word
that could be deciphered, but without any certainty whether
it should be read solitary or solidarity” [3].
The crowd-image in my work was focused and reassessed
as I lived during the 1980s in New York City, where the urFilipe Rocha da Silva (artist), Universidade de Évora, Portugal. E-mail: <filipe.
[email protected]>.
This paper is presented as part of the Leonardo special section Nanotechnology, Nanoscale Science and Art, guest edited by Tom Rockwell and
Tami I. Spector. Published in collaboration with the Exploratorium and the
Nanoscale Informal Science Education (NISE) Network. Partial support
for publication of this article provided by the National Science Foundation
under cooperative agreement #ESI-0532536.  Any opinions, findings, and
conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do
not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.
Article Frontispiece. Skyscrapers, etching, 80 × 50 cm, 1983.
(© Filipe Rocha da Silva)
©2008 ISAST
ban exhibition of crowds achieved
a modern apex. Individual and collective behavior attained unprecedented degrees of magnificence,
abstract
reminding me of Hollywood movies
depicting urban life in the former
ilipe Rocha da Silva creates
capital of the Roman Empire. This
very large paintings depicting
is not to speak of the massive global
extremely small, almost invisible
sports events, such as the marathons
figures. In this text he tries to
wherein athletes and common folk
explain why he does so and considers the possible relationship
join together in the same rolling
of these works to nanoscale
wave, or crowd-staging for media
phenomena and technology,
events and advertising purposes,
which have been so influential
and also in political celebrations in
in the 21st century.
Asiatic countries and socialist dictatorships.
At the end of the Cold War, there
was also an apocalyptic feeling in the world, which might have
affected my painting. This sensation was related to the atomic
arms race; maybe the human figures should then be seen as
running away from some kind of threat. The object of fear has
since then been replaced by terrorism, and some of my etchings from the 1980s, were strangely premonitory of the events
of 9/11 [4] (Article Frontispiece).
Elias Canetti, in his Nobel Prize–winning book Crowds and
Power, included sand among what he considered “crowd symbols”:
F
Sand has various qualities relevant to this discussion, but two
of these are especially important. The first is the smallness and
sameness of its parts. This is one quality, not two, for grains of
sand are felt to be the same only because they are so small. The
second is the endlessness of sand. It is boundless; there is always
more of it than the eye can take in [5].
This description alerts us to the fact that the qualities smallness and sameness, despite bearing different names, cannot be
separated, because they are “one not two.” Grains of sand look
the same because they are small, and are small because they are
the same (being the consequence of the erosion process).
This is also an important feature in the depiction of crowds.
The only way of painting a crowd is with very small figures,
because only this way can one fit a sufficient number within
the framework of the canvas. The unlimited has to be fit within
limits, like starry skies in the paintings of Vija Celmins.
At the same time, the fact that the figures are small and
have tiny shapes and colors makes their individuality almost
invisible and introduces a collective visual logic to the whole,
overtaking and encompassing its parts and turning them into
the aleatory and unpredictable aesthetic of the crowd.
Maybe when I am drawing multiple calligraphic signs designating “people,” I am unconsciously affected by a tendency toward synchronous movement, referred to by Steven Strogatz in
LEONARDO, Vol. 41, No. 4, pp. 350–354, 2008 351
NANO—ART, SCIENCE & TECH
Fig. 1. Abstract Movements, oil on wood, painted glass and acrylics, 130 × 115 cm, 2006.
(© Filipe Rocha da Silva)
his book Sync [6]. There is no predetermined order in the position of the small
people or disposition of colors, but this
data could later be fed into a computer,
determining exactly which regular or
irregular rhythms have been used, and
interpreting a painting as a succession of
mathematical equations. This research
would then determine the shape of chaos
in my paintings and the contours of the
specific kind of complexity that arises
from the relationship between the thousands of small figure-shapes. It would
be also possible to develop statistical
research, finding out for instance what
are the more frequent colors, or those
that result from the combination of all
the others, and establishing comparisons
with other data obtained in an urban environment (Color Plate C).
The idea that the task of painting is to
bring order into chaos has been transformed. Chaos is order. . . .
The title of my first “small figure”
painting, back in the 1980s, was Patterns
of People. When it was finished I counted
352 Rocha da Silva, Nanoscale and Painting
about 10,000 carefully painted individuals.
This aesthetic was based on decisive
19th-century developments in art, mainly
the association of different points contributing to a global image that was
undertaken by the so-called pointillists—
Seurat, Signac and others. They too were
inspired by contemporary scientific discoveries related to the nature of color
and light [7].
Coincidentally (or not), at the same
time, Karl Marx (1818–1883) was developing his basic theories, which defended
a new leading role for the proletariat, a
social class supposed to act as a collective,
a consequence of the massification of the
economic means of production.
What I tried to do was “humanize”
pointillist paintings, turning them into
huge battlefields, where crowds could
move and express themselves, becoming as illegible as the word in Camus’s
story mentioned above, and achieving an
“abstract” quality when observed from a
distance (Fig. 2). This is the opposite of
pointillism—where the abstract quality
is “close up”—because visual synthesis
needs a certain distance in order to be
read.
Crowds are visual patterns with characteristics that depend on but transcend
the appearance of singular modules, the
nanoscale humanoid units.
It was also obvious to me that these
calligraphic signs looked like brain cells
or neurons, which makes sense, since together they produced complex visual and
aesthetic stimuli and emotions that could
be associated with thought (Fig. 3).
Reducing individuals to nanoscale elements is also an endeavor relating to the
lack of individuality of most urban human beings at the end of the 20th and
the beginning of the 21st century. Individuality, enhanced by romanticism and
human rights movements in the 19th
and 20th centuries, has been reduced
during the last decades by influence of
media using more and more sophisticated technological channels, as well as
other social causes.
We are now either part of a vast majority, or alternatively part of smaller but
still large and highly organized minority groups. What we think can be anticipated, manipulated and designed, using
the tools of sociological enquiries and
research studies. Even difference is no
longer different (unique).
Smallness is also a consequence of
the interconnectivity in the world. As
Strogatz [8] points out, there are only
six people between any of us and the
president of the United States. Large
and fast-moving pandemic diseases and
computer viruses show us how close we
are to one another.
My crowd paintings may also rely for
their significance on the increase of the
overall world population (mostly the augmentation of urban residents), particularly in Africa and Asia, which, by 2030,
according to the United Nations Agency
for Population, will amount to the vast
majority. So small and yet so big!
Size and scale are relative, as I have
pointed out. The idea of a scale-free
architecture, wherein structure does
not depend on the size, is also prevalent nowadays. But scale is emotionally
tainted, because it is always related to the
size of human beings (1/1). We relate
the scale of what we see to our bodies.
Only the access to virtual reproduction
and optical amplification makes it possible to consider forms independent of
their scale.
According to trends and technological tendencies, different periods of art
history successively valorize big or very
NANO—ART, SCIENCE & TECH
Fig. 2. Black Is Black,
mixed media on canvas,
210 × 190 cm, 1999.
(© Filipe Rocha
da Silva)
small art pieces. We may become speechless in front of the enormous frescoed
walls by Piero de la Francesca in Arezzo
or the magnificent historic moments reproduced by Jean Louis David, shown in
the Louvre, but the relatively small experimental paintings by Paul Klee and
the perfection of the intricate surrealist
choreographies of René Magritte or Max
Ernst were equally influential during the
20th century. The same process happens
in design: “Small is beautiful” alternates
with “big is better.”
I habitually use quite large sizes in
paintings because, according to relativity, figures look much smaller in a larger
environment. My attempt to paint figures as small as possible, sometimes using magnifying lenses or other auxiliary
tools, also responds to one of the roles
traditionally attributed to art: achieving skill, building something that the
ordinary citizen cannot envisage, the
apparently impossible, an amazing and
surprising reality. . . . Defying the limits of the eye and the possibilities of the
brushstroke is one of the aims. Also in
this sense, the long history of painting
supplies numerous predecessors [9], as
the miniature painters, such as Nicholas
Hilliard and Hans Holbein [10], who
produced small wearable portraits, almost painted jewels.
Fig. 3. Anselmo, collage
and oil on canvas,
132 × 160 cm, 2000.
(© Filipe Rocha
da Silva)
Rocha da Silva, Nanoscale and Painting 353
NANO—ART, SCIENCE & TECH
produced goods destined to satisfy unnecessary and consumer needs that
are created and manipulated by profitseeking corporations. Even the small can
be excessive.
In the past few years I have also constructed artworks including images of
small but important consumer objects,
such as cell phones and credit cards. In
this new variation, my painting tends to
consider the entire mass production and
accumulation process, instead of the individual object by itself (Fig. 4). Seen as
part of an accumulation process, things
in large numbers are abstracted from
their use value and lose their apparent
logical perfection. In this way I am also
contradicting Pop Art and the process
of elevating “smart” industrial objects to
fetishes.
References and Notes
Unedited references as provided by the author.
1. When does a medium stop being called “new”?
Fig. 4. Conflicting Objects, oil on wood, 110 × 125 cm, 2007. (© Filipe Rocha da Silva)
2. Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” quoted
in Dore Ashton’s introduction to The Writings of Robert Motherwell (UC Press, 2007) p. 17.
3. Ashton [2] p. 19.
Despite the democratization of art and
culture at the end of the 20th century,
modernism and the utopia of artists such
as Joseph Beuys (who postulated that art
as we know it would end, because everyone would be artistically educated and,
consequently, art would become natural), I still think of painting as a kind of
circus acrobatics, requiring specific and
very demanding training. Not only has
it resisted the reproducibility anticipated
by Walter Benjamin, remaining a form of
art that can only be fully appreciated live,
but the handmade (or painterly) look
has become an important issue, whether
promoted or consciously denied by artists in the 20th century.
The incredibly intricate projects
of Alighiero Boetti (1940–1995) [11]
amazed the art world in the 1990s, and
one of their features is certainly the enormous undertaking and outdated time
consumption that some of the enormous
tapestries represent, only possible as a result of the very cheap labor of patient
weaving by the women in pre-Taliban
Afghanistan. Time—we can call it ethnotime—produced here a very intricate
and specific texture.
I have always tried to draw differently
354 Rocha da Silva, Nanoscale and Painting
each one of the thousands of figures,
as variations of an irregular calligraphy,
based solely in one and the same letter.
Again referencing Canetti, we can say
that sameness can be better replaced by
the word resemblance, because a little difference will sometimes enhance similarity. The fact that figures cover the whole
area of the canvas shows that there is a
high degree of synchronization between
them. However, it is similarity that makes
these signs recognizable as one and the
same family, the so-called human race.
I believe that what I mentioned about
painting still being handicraft finds a
parallel in the music business, where the
facility in downloading from the Internet
has produced an increased demand for
live music performances.
Nanotechnology, in the sense of smallscale industrialization, can represent an
absolute form of rationalization, a sort
of ecological and minimalist radicalism,
determining that nothing should be bigger than it has to be. This sort of size
asceticism also represents a dislike for
unnecessary material and consequently
also a form of Franciscan spiritualism. However, even small nano-objects
can end up as parts of a chain of mass-
4. See Paul Virilio, for instance: Art and Fear, Julie
Rose, trans. (Continuum, 2006).
5. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (Claassen Verlag
Hamburg, 1960 [Phoenix Press, London, Carol
Stewart, trans., 2000]) p. 86.
6. Steven Strogatz, Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order (Penguin Books, 2003).
7. See M.E. Chevreul’s “La loi du contraste simultané
des couleurs,” 1839, David Sutter’s articles in 1880 and
Charles Henry’s lectures at the Sorbonne in 1884.
8. Strogatz [6] p. 237.
9. This is one of the comforting things about being
a painter: One never feels alone; art history is full
of ghosts.
10. John Murdoch, Jim Murrell, Patrick J. Noon and
Roy Strong, The English Miniature (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1981).
11. About Alighiero Boetti, see for instance the book
Alighiero Boetti—Mettere al mondo il mondo (Museum
fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, 1996).
Manuscript received 5 July 2007.
Filipe Rocha da Silva is an artist and an art
teacher, born in 1954. His artwork is in some
of the major art collections and museums in
Portugal, and a few pieces are also abroad.
He teaches at Évora University, in the south
of Portugal. In 2005 he completed a Ph.D.
in visual arts at Évora, concluding that art
in 16th and the 20th centuries was not that
different.