Kimsooja - Collaboration on campus—nanotechnology & contemporary art - Art21

[STEPHANIE OWENS] There's levels of engagement between art and science that can be very artificial-- that are very awkward when you accept the kind of limitations-- or supposed limitations of either discipline. But when you approach it being committed to not knowing what you don't know-- and be responsive to that-- then a lot of generative and surprising things happen. Scientists don't know sometimes what the question is. And they have to process and go through a kind of material exploration before they know what's a good question. And that struck me as being surprisingly similar to what artists do. [Collaboration on Campus: Nanotechnology & Contemporary Art] [KIMSOOJA] This is great! It's beautiful. [Kimsooja, Artist] [ULI WIESNER] I think that this is even better... [KIMSOOJA] Yeah... [WIESNER] I mean, there are two... [KIMSOOJA] It's more sophisticated, I think. [WIESNER] This is more sophisticated. So, this is a newer polymer. So what Hiro achieved is-- you probably have seen it-- when you look like this, you see real red. [KIMSOOJA] Right. Right, right. [WIESNER] I mean, it's amazingly red. [KIMSOOJA] Yeah, this is unusual. [WIESNER] This has the entire spectrum. We never had that before. That's why this larger molecular wave is actually really cool. [MAN, OFFSCREEN] I personally like it, too... [KIMSOOJA] Yeah. [OWENS] You like it too? [KIMSOOJA] Yeah! [LAUGHS] [WIESNER] Nanotechnology is including objects that are extremely small. You know, a lot of the processes that are taking place in nature-- and in particular in biology-- [Ulrich Wiesner, Ph. D., Professor of Materials Science and Engineering] are processes that take place at the nano scale. The polymer is at the center of life. If you think about your DNA-- or of some of the fibers that you carry in your clothes-- these are natural polymers. So this is a material that is pretty much ubiquitous everywhere-- that you can't see. [OWENS] Nanotechnologists speak about the sort of inspiration [Stephanie Owens, Director of Cornell Council for the Arts] or the precursor of their work as being a work of art, in fact. The Roman Lycurgus Cup--of glass-- is something that nanotechnologists point to as the first nanotechnology. It looks jade green; but, if you shine light behind it, it's transparent pink. Nano particles of gold and silver in the glass produced that effect. This tradition of bringing art and science together precedes modernism. In the time of Galileo, his discovery of certain optics in looking at the moon and the world deeply affected painters like Caravaggio. ["The Charles Babbage Memorial Flight and Payload," Rafael Lozano-Hemmer] So Sooja and Uli working at a similar interface related to light and optics, I think was a definite continuation of this tradition. [WIESNER] The artists, I think-- maybe a little bit more than we scientists-- project their feelings into what they do. So, at first sight, in the science it seems to be a very dry thing. But, whenever we think about it, we're also compassionate about that. And I think it's this emotion that also carries us forward. [OWENS] Our immediate senses don't give access to the nano, ["Colorfolds," Jenny Sabin] and so how is it that artists can engage with this realm? ["Nanoessence," Paul Thomas and Kevin Raxworthy] [Paul Thomas, Artist] The Cornell Council For the Arts 2014 Biennial was called "Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of Scale in Age of Nanotech". I thought, with our proximity to New York, it would be great to be able to invite an artist up to work with Cornell's researchers and take advantage of this great space. [KIMSOOJA] I never had a chance to work with scientists before. So, it was really an interesting and fascinating journey, working closely with Uli's lab. [OWENS] Research universities like Cornell, there’s a lot of intellectual capital. There's a lot of conferences. But, I really wanted to see the collaboration produce an artifact. I thought two years would give us the kind of cadence and pacing to create curriculum, events, presentations, that would tie to a theme, leading up to an exhibition. [WIESNER] Kimsooja had done some beautiful exhibitions ["To Breathe / Respirar" (2006)] where she used color effects of thin films in order to provide rooms with a special aura of colors. And so you walk into these spaces and it's just really beautiful. [OWENS] This proposal, she called "A Needle Woman, Galaxy Was A Memory, Earth Is A Souvenir". She was thinking about it as a continuation of herself as a needle and a thread in space. ["A Needle Woman" (2005)] [KIMSOOJA] I'm using the pedestrians passing as if they are weaved through my body as a needle. The needle structure functions as an axis of place and also time. The nano-scale color spectrum has a lot more clarity in it than the diffraction-grating film effect that I used for Crystal Palace. [OWENS] The mirror on the floor suspends the person who experiences it-- either inside or outside-- as being between heaven and earth. And I thought that was a really beautiful way to address this idea of intimate cosmologies. [WIESNER] My group has developed nano particles that are being used to visualize cancer during surgeries. But these dyes that we are using for this work are very expensive. For a project of this scale, there was no way we could have decorated all of this surface with these particles. So then the idea emerged that we might want to use an effect that use these iridescent colors through nature. Very beautiful. Super beautiful, no? Morpho rhetenor... It's kind of interesting that nature has chosen these ways of providing color. And it's amazing to me how beautiful the effects are. [JASON J. DOMBROSKIE] With these butterflies, they're very complicated structures of a lot of struts and ridges. [Jason J. Dombroskie, Ph. D., Insect Collection Manager] The underside is all chemical pigments. So this will fade over time. The upper side is structural-- that won't fade. This will always be a nice, iridescent blue. [WIESNER] In the case of a structured color, the light just is reflected off the surface. But, because of the specific periodicity of the structure, only a certain wavelength range of the white light is being bounced off, and that then determines the color. The idea was, at the beginning, we could take pigments and generate colors that way. And then my group suggested that that might not be a good idea because, as you pointed out, pigments tend to fade, especially when they are exposed to sunlight, which has a lot of UV radiation in it. We use iridescence as a principle in order to mimic the effect of the butterfly wing on the "Needle Woman" structure. And it turns out that these are color effects that are based on structures-- and these are nano structures-- therefore, the connection to nano. A normal block of polymer, you don't see any effect. As films, they are completely transparent-- no color, nothing. So, in order to get there, what we said is we have to make these block of polymers enormously long. [KIMSOOJA] Long... [WEISNER] Then this spacing expands and once it's of order 200, 300 nanometers... [KIMSOOJA] Wow... [WEISNER] Then we get all these optical effects. [KIMSOOJA] One nano unit is like one-tenth of thickness of hair, they say. In a way, artist's gaze is working like a microscope. We always try to look at things in different scale. [WIESNER] What we showed Kimsooja originally was a vial where the polymer was dissolved in a solvent, but at relatively high concentrations. And so as you moved it around, the colors changed and she just loved that. [FERDINAND KOHLE] We had no idea that we were able [Ferdinand Kohle, Doctoral Student] to actually make films that showed those colors too. So it was all up in the air at that point. But we were all very hopeful. [WIESNER] You can tell that they have done this many, many times. [KIMSOOJA] Yes! [KOHLE] We want to try out a nine weight percent solution and see if we get an even clearer film. So it's going to be a real experiment today. [WIESNER] Once the polymer was made by Hiro, [Hiroaki Sai, Ph. D., Postdoctoral Associate] then Ferdinand would come in and would basically doctor plate them onto the substrate. [KOHLE] Now you can see how it slowly dries up. [KIMSOOJA] Oh, it dries out already. [JAEHO CHONG] We have to do this sheet by sheet, okay? [WIESNER] Yes. [Jaeho Chong, Architect] [OWENS] This for them was a huge scale. So to translate this to a 46-foot building was quite a task. [WIESNER] This is not something you take from the shelf, you just make it, and it's done. Every step is, okay, we have to try out, we have to go back to the synthesis, we reproduce. Make a new polymer, make a new film. See what happens when we change a parameter. We call that... okay, that's research! [ALL LAUGH] [KIMSOOJA] Would you still like to experiment-- the final film? Because it's a thinner one. Just to see how it works. [CHONG] The question of scale was directly integrated into the problem of fabrication and was certainly another hurdle for us. [Jaeho Chong, Architect] [WIESNER] Kimsooja said, "Uli, you know what, I really like what you do," "but I think we really have to go to curved surfaces." That basically gave us another heart attack [LAUGHS] because we had optimized this process for flat surfaces. [CHONG] Every level had to be custom molded along a mold with two different radii, top and bottom. It took a lot of trial and error to have this applied. We decided to develop it into a film rather than applying it on surface directly. It's a pre-laminate that's UV protected. We peel off one side of it to apply onto a molded acrylic panel. The fabrication took place in China. When we installed the first panel, the entire fabrication team was very excited to see the iridescent polymer come together with the gridded structure of the needle. [OWENS] The needle was shipped from Shanghai. So, when it arrived here, Jaeho had done such a good at specifying where the parts go together that it went together relatively smoothly. [WIESNER] Oh my God! This is just... This is even better than I thought! [ALL LAUGH] [KIMSOOJA] Yes! Are you surprised!? [OWENS] You gave us this beautiful work! [KIMSOOJA] Yeah! Look at that color, the blue... [OWENS] Wow! [WIESNER] Look at that! This is what iridescence does to you. This is nature's way of making color. This is exactly the same thing as a butterfly wing. To be honest, Sooja, I never thought that we could capture the beauty of this little opal in the vessel on a scale like this. [KIMSOOJA LAUGHS] [WIESNER] I never believed it myself! [KIMSOOJA] So you are opening up a new, opposite directionality of the scale. [LAUGHS] [KIMSOOJA] The greatest pleasure was their amazing enthusiasm. I think we could only do that because we believed in that spirit-- that we are all merged together doing something that has never been experimented in sculptural scale or architectural scale. [RINGING BELLS ECHO THROUGHOUT THE CAMPUS] [OWENS] The Arts Quad is vast. It's a grassy plot that has criss-crossing paths where students walk between buildings on campus. It's a little bit ironic, it's an arts quad, but there's no art there. And it's normally a kind of non-space. They're just passing through it. When the needle was installed, suddenly people were drawn to it. One of the first comments we got from students was, "Thank you! There's art!" [KIMSOOJA] We were astonished by how much this material reacts to different light situations-- sometimes more intense, sometimes a bit more translucent. [WIESNER] This basically is work that connects nanotechnology with cosmology to bridge this huge gap between what the perception is of science and what really happens in the laboratory. It's a way of communicating that nanotechnology is not something you have to be afraid of. You can enjoy it. It's actually wonderful. My students were engaging not because someone told them to engage, but because they really took ownership of the project. That was absolutely fabulous to see. [OWENS] This was nearly a two-year process. And I think given how deep some of the areas of research-- and commitment to a discipline--are here, it's the kind of playground for ideas. That's something that is unique about a university.