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Nanomicroscopic Image Or Modern Art?
SillyConCarbide writes "Every six months, the Materials Research Society holds a science as art competition. The winners from their most recent meeting are particularly breathtaking. Materials researchers may struggle for years with stubborn instruments, fragile crystals or difficult chemical reactions before obtaining a bit of precious data from the exotic substances they study. Now, the scrutiny of samples not only yields potentially important data, but also artistic inspiration. Polymer films, cerium oxide membranes, and tantalum oxide crystals can look beautiful in the right light — especially if that light is an electron beam."
ART?!? You call that art? My little Billy could do better than that! Jeebus!
ah.clem
"Life is not magic." Dr. Ron Weiss - "If we don't play God, who will?" Dr. James Watson
I used to work as a security guard in a modern art museum. I the gallery was a plain looking wooden bench. I got asked, "Can I sit on this bench or is it art.?"
"No its just a bench".
If nobody can tell what art is anymore then is everything art?
This is art, in the way that photography is art.
In a world where science is becoming less and less listened to, and most research is conducted by biased corporations for the purpose of supporting a product, anything that gets the public to develop a positive interest in science can't be a bad thing.
Maybe someone will see some of this art and think, wow thats really cool, I wonder why that looks that way. Maybe that will lead people to actually grab a book and learn something.
obviously it's an attempt to establish nanolinguistic spelling as an art form.
An electron beam != light. That is the primary differency between an electron microscope and a (normal) light microscope. The electron beam with its much smaller wavelength is able to better resolve the details of whatever object you happen to be looking at.
I was expecting more designed nano-scale guitars, but seeing the article was actually a very pleasant surprise. I wasn't expecting to see sunrises, flowers, or forests come out of those images, even if they were colorized.
Am I the only one who noticed that one of the images looked EXACTLY like a Honda Accord advert?!? Spooky.
"sue came in with silks arouunddddd".
well im not a grammer nazi, but you better correct that nana microscopic thing you got there in the header. or am i nanah myself and its actually nanamicroscopic ?
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I guess "nanamicrocopic" means "as small as your sweet old grandmother"...
... but that's actually redundant since "Nanoscopic" (in analogy to "microscopic") is gaining acceptance as the term to describe this size-scale.
I suppose they actually meant "Nanomicroscopic"
Only three images with scale markers, and all the EM pictures colorized. These have to be art, because they definitely are not science. Pretty sad when all the scientists feel they have to colorize their pictures to get anyone to look at them.
Some of these look great. Does anyone know where to get the high resolution version of any of the pictures from the article?
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wtf is nanamicroscopic art? very very tiny paintings of grandmothers? i think they mean "nano"?
The page for the last image is broken.
Here is a direct link to view final image.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
That just means that modern art is so meaningless and trite that no one knows what could be included as it.
Well, I take issue with the idea that labeling something as "art" immediately puts in on some pedestal of un-questionablity. If you do question it, it's some kind of reflection on your poor understanding of "art", i.e. "the emperor has no clothes".
In my view, call anything you like "art", but some art just plain sucks monkey dick. I was at a modern art museum in Munich about a month ago, and one piece of "art" was two pieces of pink yarn, strung ceiling to floor. It was titled "pink flamingo". That was easily the biggest piece of utter crap I've ever seen in a museum. (Of course, this was a rather strange museum where the alarms went off literally every 5-10 minutes because people got too close to the art). The alarms going off, and the nazi guard that yelled at people was a hell of a lot more expressive of Bavaria than anything I saw in that museum.
AccountKiller
YES! That's it exactly. If it even makes concessions to the art of creation, it's art! It doesn't matter if it's a commercial for lemon pledge or your kid's crayon pictures on your fridge. Either way, no one gives a fuck - but they're still both art.
Art is, well, it's art. Practically everything involves artistry. The notion that you can't question its value is what's retarded.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Who the hell let this guy title the article? It's "Nanoscopic." Nano is a Greek prefix meaning "one billionth," at least when it's spelled correctly. Micro is a Greek prefix meaning "one millionth." Scope is a Greek root meaning "to view."
Of course, I guess it could be about a grandmother who's a few microns tall. . .
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
They may be interesting shapes, colors, etc. but what would make them art?
Anyone else feel a little sad for the yellow-fatty-cell man committing suicide by jumping of a celery stick? Now Toribash that's a real nano-manly way to die!
Don't forget the NSF's Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge. This contest is to encourage people to communicate science using images and media. Check out the contest winners from the past few years.
We're talking about some beautiful electron microscope images.
But is everything that's beautiful art? Is a landscape art? Is a pretty woman art? Is anything that's created by nature ever art?
I think we'll agree to "no".
Can a photograph of a landscape or a beautiful woman be art?
I think it can, because the photographer has an influence on the model's pose, on the angle the picture is taken from, etc. Creativity is what matters. But even those are (IMO) marginal cases. I think Gaugin is art, Vermeer is art - but a landscape photograph never is. I know a lot of people will disagree, especially photographers.
In this case, I don't see how the photographer would have much influence on the composition, making it even less art.
Esthetically it's an entirely different matter: the images remain bautiful, in the same way a landscape can be.
Dear NIH, we would like funding because our work could lead towards a breakthrough in nanotechnology. And hey, we can take really cool pictures.
Very nice. So where can I get the original high resolution images of these?
http://www.mrs.org/s_mrs/doc.asp?CID=1803&DID=171434
(Of course, this was a rather strange museum where the alarms went off literally every 5-10 minutes because people got too close to the art). The alarms going off, and the nazi guard that yelled at people was a hell of a lot more expressive of Bavaria than anything I saw in that museum.
That act might have been a performance art?
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
The photographs may not be art in themselves but they may be inspirational to some artists for the purpose of making art much the same as a beautiful tree would be in the creation of a landscape painting. A modern artist often uses all images natural and man-made or macro and micro to conceive his art.If the resulting image has the 'artistic quality' brought in by the mind and hand of man then it is truly art. Those who can't differentiate art from image are simply not tuning in to the deeper quality of man's creations. I guess purpose comes into art as well. Art serves no real or useful purpose. It may inspire useful things in terms of design or may trigger a profound new sense of something for useful purpose like science but first up it is art for art's sake.
In the mid 1970's I took a painting class that I attended for several years. Photomicrographs became one of my favorite sources of ideas for painting.
Aviation Week had published a photomicrograph of a moon rock. Except for being in black and white, it looked like modern art, so I did a painting based on its characteristics, adding color. I later bought a book that had photomicrographs of minerals. I used some of the pictures in that book the same way.
There are other things that can be used. I once took part of an election district map and made a painting that looks somewhat like the design for a stained glass window.
You would be amazed at the number of things that can provide ideas for modern art.
That act might have been a performance art?
I thought about that possibility at the time, (mostly for fun). We even asked an employee at a different museum about it. She replied the alarm going off was common, and the existence of it involved politics, and money. She said this museum had a lot of money for an expensive alarm system. I thought that explanation kind of funny, since I've been to museums all over the world, and I've never even heard an alarm go off, much less get yelled at by a Nazi guard. I remember a guard in Chicago looking intently at me and my girlfriend while I motioned at a statue as we talked about it. He seemed more amused by our conversation than he was worried about us actually touching it though.
So no, it sadly wasn't some kind of performance art. I think it must be just a different world over their in southern Germany.
AccountKiller
Ah, well it was just a funny, and I believe you. However, were I in your stead, and this is just the way I am, but I would have started clapping as if the guard was delivering a wondrous performance, the action alone would almost certainly have enlisted the other museum-goers to recognize the absurdity in an over zealous security guard unintentionally becoming more artful and emotionally moving than the objects he was guarding.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
I don't know if you can consider something art if talent, skill, and/or hard work doesn't go into it.
I've been to the museum of modern art or whatever the hell it's called in NYC. (This was way back in elementary school.) I remember looking at an entirely black canvas with a red dot in the center and thinking, "Is this guy an artist or a house painter?"
I personally just can't imagine something that took so little effort or talent as art.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I think that these images highlight the value of aesthetics in science, especially for the purposes of communication. The scientists rendering these photos make choices of perspective and colour schemes that dramatically effect whether it communicates the message. Science, after all, is not always merely about facts, but about a message. And it is important for scientists to be able to communicate those facts.
While some may bemoan the lack of scale bars, it must be kept in mind that these images are made to communicate an idea. Rest assured that they likely have hundreds of copies of the same or similar structures with scale bars in abundance... and this too is an aesthetic choice.
I think that the greater question should lie in asking ourselves as scientists, is it the "prettiest" paper that gets published in Nature or Science? It seems that quite often there is a direct correlation between the aesthetic quality of figures and graphs and the likelihood of publication in more prestigious journals.
Interesting science with far reaching consequences can easily be passed up if not presented in an attractive manner. I think that may be the greater question - do aesthetics applied to scientific data create biases? Or is it merely a more effective means of communicating a message?
Atom Art is the new Pixel Art
You just got troll'd!
These images were not produced by the idle children of the wealthy, so it is unlikely that they will ever be considered as "art" by our society's arbiters.
Amazing how the world of the very small has so many similarities with the world of the large, or to us, the normal world. Looking at these images reminds me of fractal diagrams I played with during high school math classes. No matter how far down you zoom into the fractal, the image continues to retain it physical and topological properties down into infinitesimal levels. From TFA, the most striking image for me was the simplest. The titanium alloy stress test looks all the world like a lonesome path in the forest, quiet and serene. Simply amazing.
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
"Nanomicroscopic" is redundant. "Nano" means "nanometer", one BILLIONTH of a meter. If it's nano it's microscopic.
So mod TFA down!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
No one truly has the right to dub art as, well, art. If I had the right to define art, it would probably go something like this: Art is everything that has existed, currently exists and will continue to exist. Art is both life and death, materialization and the possibility of becoming - as well as the impossibility of ever having been. I agree with those who said blobs on a canvas is not art, at least not how "they" see it.
over their in southern Germany
"there".