Today was a pretty relaxed day. Our lecture was given by Victoria Vesna, whose discourse on her journey as an artist was interesting to me. I understand and feel the same way about what she said regarding her inner desire to create things that haven’t been done before. Her deep connection with sound in her art related to the project that my group is developing. Our project is essentially an interactive visual representation of sound, with variously sized quantum dots (quantum dots have useful applications in biological labeling) enclosed in a thin transparent layer of hydrophobic polymer and suspended in liquid.
The dots are magnified by a optical glass touch screen, that, although these types of microscopes can’t display color yet, hopefully that technology can be developed. I think the glass screen is a possibility because high tech <a href=”http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-03/high-tech-security-glass” glass </a> that can detect movement via its coating of a material containing nanoparticals has been developed, for use as security devices. Perhaps we could create something based on a similar principle. The user will be able to “touch” the dots at different levels of magnification, exciting them through thermal energy from the body, and to move them around. They will emit different notes based on their size, and the pitch will vary as frequency varies by how fast the user moves them. I was contemplating how we could maybe incorporate yeast and fibroblast cells which make tiny sound waves that a SEM can be translated into sound. It was cool to see all the projects that she has worked on, such as the nanomandala and the blue morpho butterfly (a very cool butterfly that is not colored by pigment but is iridescent) exhibit.
It was really helpful to get feedback on project ideas from such intelligent people. I think it helped all the groups to help realize all the things that we all need to consider in our projects, and to realize how much creativity, collaboration, research, and thorough discussion scientific endeavors require. To me, discussions about our projects was really intellectually and artistically stimulating-even though I was tired. I thought that the idea for thermoelastic “nanaids” had a lot of potential.
Viewing the DESMA program’s students’ various works was enlightening. In my opinion the photography and typography book project was really cool and it was interesting to see people’s interpretations of the stories they chose and how they visually translated those interpretations. However I didn’t understand the film projects that used the same video footage edited in a different way-it was rather uninspiring. Some of the games were neat; they looked good enough to be on gaming websites.
http://www.biocompare.com/Articles/TechnologySpotlight/302/Quantum-Dots-Novel-Tools-For-Fluorescent-Analysis.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WCB-4T2M63F-7&_user=4423&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=954305621&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000059605&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=4423&md5=33cfeb5d9cab4ad7ee9b1f90ba1003d8
http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/projects/current.php
http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2004/12/17/32612.html