MIT.nano has embarked on newly emerging endeavors that push the boundaries between artistic expression and scientific exploration. One of the outcomes of this pioneering effort resulted in an educational collaboration between MIT.nano and the ACT program. This pamphlet highlights student projects that seamlessly blended cutting-edge nanotechnology with artistic vision.
Within this framework, a new course titled “Creating Art, Thinking Science” was developed, and an existing ACT class, “Synchronization of Senses,” was adapted to leverage the unique interdepartmental opportunities available. These courses are facilitated by ACT faculty and supported by researchers, fellows, MIT. nano staff, and volunteer science graduate students from various labs associated with MIT.nano.
CLASSES
Creating Art, Thinking Science
4.322/3 Fall Semester 2021
Instructor: Tobias Putrih
TA: Ardalan SadeghiKivi
4.373/4 Fall Semester 2022
Instructor: Tobias Putrih
TA: Ardalan SadeghiKivi
Supported by The Alumni Class Funds
4.373/4 Fall Semester 2023
Instructor: Tobias Putrih
Affiliate Instructor: Ardalan SadeghiKivi
TA: Aubrie James
Supported by CAST
Synchronosation of Senses
Spring Semester 2024
Instructor: Renee Green
Affiliate Instructor: Ardalan SadeghiKivi
TA: Harris Chowdhary
“Creating Art, Thinking Science” is conducted as a relatively intimate class, accommodating up to 12 undergraduate and graduate students. It is taught by Tobias Putrih with the assistance of Ardalan SadeghiKivi. The course aims to acquaint design and art graduate and undergraduate students with the MIT. nano labs, their research, and methodologies. Concurrently, it exposes science graduate students to various artistic practices and design thinking. The class has successfully fostered collaborative projects where art students and science graduates have developed long-term relationships that extend beyond the confines of the course. “Synchronization of Senses” is a long-standing component of the ACT curriculum, developed and taught by Professor Renée Green. In the Spring semester of 2024, with the assistance of Ardalan SadeghiKivi, the course has been tailored to fit the environment and opportunities provided by the MIT.nano and Immersion Lab.
EXHIBITED STUDENT WORKS
Kwan Q Li with Whitney Hess
James Lough with Anna Osherov
Simone Lassar with Wendy Hess, Anna Romanov
Vijay Rajkumar in collaboration with Vladimir Bulovic
Ishraki Kazi in collaboration with Anna Romanov
Hyun Woo Park in collaboration with Carlos Portella Lab
Lili Sun in collaboration with James LeBeau
Arthur Boscolo in collaboration with Anna Osherov
Ardalan SadeghiKivi in collaboration with Sara Sheffels
Aubrie James in collaboration with Whitney Hess and Jorg Schlovin
Christopher Joshua Benton in collaboration with Praneeth Namburi
Alejandro Medina in collaboration with Mayuran Saravanapavanantham
The works featured in this pamphlet are selected from the ongoing exhibition, .zerozerozerozerozerozerozerozerozero, co-created by Tobias Putrih and Ardalan SadeghiKivi. These artworks represent selected output over the past three years. Accompanying the exhibition is an essay by Ardalan SadeghiKivi that provides further context on the pedagogical goals and delves into the historical significance and contemporary relevance of art-science collaborations.
Kwan Q Li in collaboration with Whitney Hess
INFINITE REPLICAS
Acrylic prints with slimline case 2021
INFINITE REPLICAS delves into the immense visibility bestowed by new scientific and technological imaging tools and asks, “what is (not) to be seen?” This project probes the dichotomy and yet resonance of visual surveying between art and science by returning to one of their earlier convergences: life drawing. A life drawing session was hosted by the artist in the machinal room of the MIT.Nano, alongside with a series of modeling portraits in the cleanroom gowns of the artist herself, which together explore evolving tension amongst body politics, art representations, and technological advancements.
James Lough in collaboration with Anna Osherov
GROWTH FACTOR
Inkjet print on textile 2021
GROWTH FACTOR questions how life and death are visually identified and understood on different scales, from the cellular to the population level. Using a superimposed microscope and satellite images, this project compares protein-induced and protein-deprived cell growth to societal inequalities amongst contrasting communities in the United States: Palo Alto, CA, and Flint, MI.
Simone Lassar in collaboration with Wendy Hess, Anna Romanov
MAY I PLEASE MAKE YOU SOME SOUP?
Booklet, Inkjet prints
2022
MAY I PLEASE MAKE YOU SOME SOUP? with the limits of performing everyday acts and bringing ordinary ingredients into a scientific setting of MIT.nano cleanroom through a cookbook that illustrates and narrates different phases of making a vegetable soup that uses pieces of equipment such as a Cryostat, Fluorescing microscope, and CT scanner.
Vijay Rajkumar in collaboration with Vladimir Bulovic
IRIDESCENT CONCRETE
Concrete tiles 2023
When daylight floods this corridor, the black concrete tiles that form this work come alive in an iridescent multi-colored glow. Like in the wings of a morpho butterfly, the eye of a peacock feather, and the back of a CD disc, iridescence in these concrete tiles results from structural coloration. The micro-geometry of the surface of these tiles, which is invisible to the human eye, causes light to diffract and split into its component colors. No films or additives are applied. This work responds to both the changing lighting conditions throughout the day and the viewer’s movement.
Ishraki Kazi in collaboration with Anna Romanov
SEARCHING FOR CONSCIOUSNESS
Photographic prints, petri dish, cast resin 2021
In his work, Ishraki Kazi explores consciousness, and agency mediated through a technological gaze. From nano to urban scale, he is looking for patterns of development and self-organization. Living bacteria were grown on top of images portraying organisms and their boundaries (human-skin/cell-plasma membrane). They were then reprinted to create the cellular building blocks of this installation. The individual image units organize and compose the walls of the Lisa T. Su building in an intuitive growth pattern, akin to microorganisms filling up an agar plate. These objects will evolve over successive iterations, repeating Ishraki’s quest to push further for real or imaginary intelligence.
Woo Park in collaboration with Carlos Portella Lab
OBSCURED INVISIBILITY reflects upon our overreaching reliance on visual sensing in producing knowledge and understanding of art and science. With the help of Portela Research Group, Hyun constructed a nanoscale sculpture with visibility further obscured and mystified by nesting a sculpture upon a divine message to prevent a sneak peek from even the most decisive microscopes. What is left to the viewer is a seemingly empty wafer, a flat pedestal for invisible sculpture, a simple object of contemplation.
Hyun
Sun in collaboration with
James LeBeau
VIBRATIONS
Risograph prints on paper 2021
To protect decisive microscopes from outside interferences, MIT.nano’s Characterization floor utilizes advanced technology to stabilize and shelter the building’s expected conditions. Most of the incoming vibrations from the neighboring subway station and the highway that reaches the facility are embodied within the lower spectrum – between 20 and 200 Hz. Lili Sun uses Chladni plate experiments to visualize this incoming energy, displaying low-frequency Chladni plate patterns printed on thin, fragile paper sheets suspended from the corridor ceiling. Scarcely noticeable vibrations are translated into subtle but visible space interventions.
Lili
Boscolo in collaboration with Anna Osherov
CHARACTERIZATION
Inkjet prints 2021
CHARACTERIZATION is a series of photographs that underscore the relationship between mechanical systems and measurement taken with nano-scale precision. The infrastructure behind scientific procedure often requires a person or set of technologies to mediate. This project aims to expose the autonomous language of these ruminative sensory landscapes that remain hidden from the public, and the role they play in shaping contemporary ways of seeing, knowing and communicating.
Arthur
Ardalan SadeghiKivi in collaboration with Sara
Sheffels
3D printed PLA object, googly eyes, inkjet print 2022
In the series Epitaxy, animal figures hidden in graphs are the pareidolic prima materia brought to life through computational transmutation. The graphs are obtained from an experimental laboratory in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT that studies spin dynamics and spin-electronics in nanoscale magnetic materials and devices.
James in collaboration with Whitney Hess and Jorg Schlovin
BIRTH OF SCIENTIFIC HYPEROBJECT
adhesive vinyl 2023
Concealed inside the cabinets of the Clean Room, BIRTH OF SCIENTIFIC HYPEROBJECT pairs poetry with scientific aesthetics and methodologies, to encourage reflection about how expansive even a simple research project can be. Applying Fourier transforms to information gathered in the activity of the initial 50 days of a scientific project, this work produces harmonic segments, each representing a particular person’s contribution to specific parts and scales of a research project, reconstituting a waveform that represents the early development of a scientific work.
Aubrie
Christopher Joshua Benton in collaboration with Praneeth Namburi
IS YOU DANCING OR IS YOU STRETCHING?
AR model with sound, inkjet print 2023
Using motion capture and photogrammetry as a point of departure, The Chocolate City Dance Map is a cartography of Black somatic choreographic movements assembled in collaboration with MIT.nano’s Immersion Lab. At the intersection of art, science, technology, and social practice, The Chocolate City Dance Map will come to life in this installation titled IS YOU DANCING OR IS YOU STRETCHING? as an immersive AR experience that captures and superimposes frames of a dancer’s movement encapsulated in a sculptural form.
Alejandro Medina in collaboration with Mayuran Saravanapavanantham
SEED (INNER LANDSCAPE)
Video on LCD monitor 2021
SEED (INNER LANDSCAPE) collects microscopic footage of various plant seeds at different optical scales, particularly food crops used for human nutrition that are currently at the risk of extinction. The video slowly pans through the outer layer of seeds, like a flight over an alien landscape, while the seed image blossoms and sheds new skin. Displayed on monitors between regular MIT.nano announcements, it reminds the viewer that standing on the frontier of knowledge is always a precarious endeavor.
Lexical Discord: Art-Science Postpositions of
by Ardalan SadeghiKivi
The border between science and art has perpetually been a hazy domain. You may describe science as a cultural practice or art as a fabric of interwoven material, intellectual, and social techniques. Of course, there are interrelations between art and science regarding method, media, and material––pinpointing the technical characteristics within texts or discerning the cultural implications of communication technologies is not a challenging endeavor. These interrelations, however, are rooted in the art-science friction, which accumulates dust along a boundary that, to the extent of our perception, is fundamental to modernity. This dust is divorced from mere objects or disciplines, untouched by established criteria or categories, and unbound by the limitations of groups or institutions. It is astute yet unstable, falling here and there between form and function, artifact and technology. It is both a terminal and a mediated matter, inactive but sometimes omnipotent; hence, it is a source of great fascination for artists, scientists, critics, and historians, a powerful quasi-object, a magic powder, and something to summon with. It was Marcel Duchamp who brought dust into the museum. He took the pane of glass on which he had begun to create The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (also known as the Large Glass) and placed it on sawhorses by an open window in his New York studio, exposing it to the grit of the street below. Yet, when working at the nanoscale, a speck of dust is a wrecking ball. Amorphous and boundless, this dust possesses the dual capacity to dissolve and reveal form, akin to snow that, in precise measure, imparts clarity to objects’ outlines, yet, when exceeding that balance, it obliterates every landmark beneath its formless expanse of drifts and dunes. The atomist mythos underlying this material imagination makes dust, a medium of transformation and exchange, a reconciliation act into a puzzling thinking subject.
The concept of knowledge production has always drawn attention and elicited criticism within the art discourse. This concept’s contentious standing is partly attributed to its association with the ideologies and practices of neoliberal educational bureaucracies. Thus, the ramifications of aligning it with art and art education can be exemplified as an escalation in standardization, measurability, and a tendency to shape artistic endeavors into conforming formats of learning and research. Conversely, scientists often harbor skepticism towards contemporary art methods, driven by their imperative to safeguard the independence and scope of their observations. But, in this vigilance, they might overlook the significance of zeitgeist––the necessity of posing questions to the past that harmonize with the present instead of generating an unwieldy expanse of facts that supplant the mediation with chronology and specialization. In response, .zerozerozerozerozerozerozerozerozero aims to reconcile culture and technology by juxtaposing antagonistic stances. On one side, there’s the pessimistic cataclysm of art in a technical world, while on the other, the excessive optimism of continuous scientific progress. This exhibition is an attempt in which thinking and creating oppose each other dialectically, and scientific discovery is of no significance––A declaration in which a physical theorem does not have an artistic equivalent, and scientists and artists initially lose touch to eventually generate a language that can be recognized in a field other than their own.
For us, the estrangement between thinking and creating originates in the asymmetry between science and art, where creating struggles to keep pace with the rapidly advancing domain of thinking. Within this ecology, scientific achievements, often perceived as emotionally neutral, succumb to the dominance of systemization. However, the artists showcased in this exhibition delved into the complexities of mechanization, transforming the tools into subjects of historical scrutiny as an observation that uses friction to turn technology into a cultural vision. This endeavor transcends mere interdisciplinary bridging or balancing; rather, it constitutes an authorization, an operation navigating a sharp frontier that transforms science into art and technical progress into a canvas of cultural historicism. This underscores the unconscious alignment of artists and scientists that traverse parallel tracks and chase akin objectives, unveiling perhaps latent parallelism in order to observe the intermingling of matter, space, and time where the influence of modern art on these topics brings us to the insight of Konrad Zuse about the universe functioning as a massive information processor and rendering the entire cosmos as the computational output of a cellular automaton. The result of these developments is the split personality of art-science, which separates thinking and creating while marking the beginning of a reunion attempt.
.zerozerozerozerozerozerozerozerozero aspires to birth cultural productions seamlessly integrated into the present pulse. It expresses that an art-science collaboration divorced from its contemporary context is a mere figment of fiction. Here, art-science unfolds as an ongoing process intertwined with life itself. Every perspective in this exhibition becomes a transformative act, reshaping MIT.nano’s building by the observer’s unique view, where the act of observation becomes a metamorphosis that turns the scene into something altogether new. Now, within the corridors of MIT.nano, the dusty friction of art-science exposes challenges mutually experienced by modern technology and culture. It symbolizes their everlasting change and the perpetual movement in the tapestry of history. Here, the dust is concentrated on the investigation of friction in all kinds of forms within the space: charcoal remnants of a life drawing session in the cleanroom, multiscalar superimposition of fertility, impossible cookbook ingredients, iridescent concrete coating, micro-organic patterns, minuscule divine messages, structural vibrations, animal figures hidden in graphs, hyper object waveforms, cartography of dance movements, and microscopic blossom of plant seeds.
Many of these projects suggest the visualization of the invisible: an empire of forms enabled by a technology that could detach movement from its subject in order to visualize it or, one could say, appropriate it while unraveling the effects of mechanization on the inner existence of practicing science. Artworks here are in constant dialogue with machines, mechanical devices, and prefabricated objects that are the state-of-the-art products of their time and represent the impulse of the universal continuum of historical change. Each artist has observed the small things, the fragments, as they best exhibited the feelings and habits of a scientific endeavor and learned to consider small things on a large scale, or, we might say, to turn unseen things into visible ones or to turn invisibility into a tradition that exposes the unifying principle that holds them together and achieve sensitivity to states of equilibrium. This process was realized as interdisciplinary signs of an evolutionary model of the existential equilibrium between technology and culture, between thinking and creating, that this exhibition sets out to restore, taking all sorts of idiosyncratic approaches towards a past that always projects into the future.
