NanoCulture

Description

Nano denotes a billionth; a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. New instrumentation and techniques have for the first time made possible materials research and engineering at this level, the scale of individual molecules and atoms. Extraordinary visions of material abundance, unprecedented materials, and powerful engineering capabilities have marked the arrival of nanotechnology, as well as dystopian scenarios of self-replicating devices running amok and causing global catastrophe. Largely a future possibility rather than present actuality, nanotechnology has become a potent cultural signifier. NanoCulture explores the ways in which nanotechnology interacts with, and itself becomes, a cultural construction. Topics include the co-construction of nanoscience and science fiction; the influence of risk assessment and nanotechnology on the shapes of narratives; intersections between nanoscience as a writing practice and experimental literature at the limits of fabrication; the Alice-in-Wonderland metaphor for nanotechnology; and the effects of mediation on nanotechnology and electronic literature. NanoCulture is produced in collaboration with the nano art exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (December 2003-September 2004), created by an interdisciplinary team led by media artist Victoria Vesna and nanoscientist James Gimzewski. NanoCulture is richly illustrated with images from the nano exhibit, which also provides the basis for an ethnographic analysis of collaborative process and an exploration of changing concepts of museum space.

Sujets

• Essays
• General officer
• General
• Cultural Studies
• Science

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781841509006
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

nanoculture
IMPLICATIONS OF THE NEW TECNOSCIENCE
nanoculture
IMPLICATIONS OF THE NEW TECHNOSCIENCE

EDITED BY N. KATHERINE HAYLES
GRAPHIC DESIGN BY DANIELLE FOUSHEE
First Published in the UK in 2004 by Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
First Published in the USA in 2004 by Intellect Books, ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, Oregon 97213-3786, USA
Copyright 2004 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Electronic ISBN 1-84150-900-0 / ISBN 1-84150-113-1
Designer: Danielle Foush e Copy Editor: Holly Spradling
Printed and bound in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press, Wiltshire.
Contents
Preface
ROY ASCOTT
Connecting the Quantum Dots: Nanotechscience and Culture
N. KATHERINE HAYLES
art science
The Invisible Imaginar y: Museum Spaces, Hybrid Realit y and Nanotechnology
ADRIANA de SOUZA e SILVA
Working Boundaries on the NANO Exhibition
CAROL ANN WALD
science fiction
Nanotechnology in the Age of Posthuman Engineering: Science Fiction as Science
COLIN MILBURN
Less is More: Much Less is Much More: The Insistent Allure of Nanotechnology Narratives in Science Fiction
BROOKS LANDON
Atomizing the Risk Technology
KATE MARSHALL
Dust, Lust, and Other Messages from the Quantum Wonderland
BRIAN ATTEBERY
science literature
Needle on the Real: Technoscience and Poetr y at the Limits of Fabrication
NATHAN BROWN
Nano Narrative: A Parable from Electronic Literature
JESSICA PRESSMAN
What s the Buzz? Tell Me What s A-Happening: Wonder, Nanotechnology, and Alice s Adventures in Wonderland
SUSAN E. LEWAK
Acknowledgements
This book has a dual purpose: it is intended to function both as an independent work of scholarship and as a complement to the nano exhibit mounted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from December 14, 2003 to September 1, 2004. Nano is being developed under the creative leadership of Victoria Vesna, internationally recognized media artist and chair of the Department of Design/Media Arts at University of California, Los Angeles, and James Gimzewski, a nanoscientist and member of the chemistry department at UCLA whose research has been recognized, among other honors, by the Feynman Medal. The nano exhibit provided focus and inspiration for this book; in addition, I thank Victoria and Jim for their support in publicizing and disseminating it, as well as for valuable feedback in responding to cover designs and graphic layout. Like Nanoculture, the nano exhibit is a work of many hands, and the more than thirty graduate students, faculty, and staff members whose work made the exhibit possible also contributed, through their work on the nano exhibit, to the context for Nanoculture. Bob Sain, Director of the LACMALab where nano is mounted, helped to keep us all sane along the way; Carol Eliel, LACMA curator of modern and contemporary art, and Kelly Carney, also of LACMA, provided encouragement and enthusiasm.
Roy Ascott, in addition to contributing the preface, has been instrumental in providing the guidance and support that has made it possible for the book to be published, and I am delighted that it is appearing in the series he edits. May Yao of Intellect Books gave invaluable advice and administrative guidance that helped the book move smoothly toward publication. Danielle Foush e enlivened the book with her graphic design, making it as vibrant visually as I hope it is intellectually. Michael Fadden provided valuable help with preparing the manuscript for publication. I am deeply grateful to UCLA for a sabbatical that gave me the time to work on the book, and especially to Thomas Wortham, chair of the UCLA English Department, for his generous support of my research in more ways than I can enumerate here. Nicholas Gessler contributed through innumerable conversations and ideas that have so woven themselves into the fabric of my thought that I no longer know which are his and which are mine. My greatest debt, of course, is to the contributors to this volume. With unfailing courtesy and promptness, they responded gallantly to my requests for revisions, information, and more information. Their insights, talent, research, and hard work have made this book what it is.
Preface
ROY ASCOTT
In seeking to promote creativity and scholarship in the culture arising from new developments in science and technology, welcomes initiatives that employ a transdisciplinary approach to knowledge and informed speculation in pursuit of understanding. For this reason we are particularly glad that Nanoculture: implications of the new technoscience is the first book in the series to be published.
The transdisciplinary impulse exerts on its subjects both responsibilities towards specialisms as well as liberation from categorical constraints. When artists and scientists come together for more than mere dalliance, the Juissance of their union (Barthes seems an apt reference here) depends on mutual understanding of each other s practice. In the case of the courtship of the arts and nanotechnology, go-betweens can also be enlisted to ease the union, in the form of literary speculation and scientifically informed fiction.
With exemplary clarity Katherine Hayles has edited a timely and insightful book, throbbing with ideas, and critically alive to the nuances of debate that the subject generates. Important too, is the transparency offered to the reader s understanding of the complexity of collaboration and transdisciplinarity involved in the creation of nano, the ground-breaking exhibition directed by Victoria Vesna and James Gimzewski, by which the book has been inspired.
Just over fifty years ago, an understanding of the fundamentals of matter (the complexity of structure in the material world) was sought in a similar bridging of art and science, which also resulted in a book and an exhibition. In that case, Aspects of Form, edited by Lancelot Law Whyte, accompanied Growth and Form exhibited at the ICA in London (1951). D Arcy Wentworth Thompson stood then in relation to over-arching ideas of form and pattern, very much in the way that Richard Feynman is positioned, bottom-up as it were, in the debate around nanotechnology today.
The difference in editorial strategy between these two publications tells us much about the sea change in attitude that is now taking place intellectually and artistically in relation to science and technology. Where the earlier work saw the plastic arts as a complement to scientific inquiry, the present book sees the arts (now embracing fiction and literature as well as digital media) as intrinsic to the advancement of 21st century technoscience. Thus, it is a holistic attitude of mind and a transdisciplinary approach to knowledge that is seen as prerequisite to the construction of meaning, purpose and value in the emergent nanoculture.
Connecting the Quantum Dots: Nanotechscience and Culture
N. KATHERINE HAYLES, Department of English, UCLA
Imagine a world in which utility fog simulates a chair while you watch TV, mimics bathwater when you prepare for bed, and transforms itself into the bed you sleep on; a world in which micro-robots inside the body extend human life spans to centuries, manufactured bio-mechanical organisms clean the air and water, and material abundance is readily available to everyone on earth. 1 Such is the future envisioned by the proponents of nanotechnology. Poised between reality and dream, present and future, fact and fiction, nanotechnology has become a potent cultural signifier. Precisely because it is not yet clear if it will indeed be the next big thing or a blip on the screen, nanotechnology has attracted both skepticism and scientific research, along with a frenzy of entrepreneurial interest, government funding, and fictional speculation. Nanotechnology represents not so much a theoretical breakthrough as a concatenation of previously known theories, new instrumentation, discoveries of new phenomena at the nano-level, and synergistic overlaps between disciplines that appear to be converging into a new transdisciplinary research front.
Nano denotes one billionth of a meter, roughly the size of 10 hydrogen atoms; the DNA molecule, by comparison, is 2.3 nanometers in diameter. Nanotechnology is concerned with events and materials appropriate to this scale. Nanotechnology, in concert with nanoscience, for the first time in human history offers the ability to manipulate individual atoms and molecules, making possible radical new approaches to materials engineering. Consider, for example, work in 1985 by Konstantin Likhareva, a physics professor at Moscow State University, who along with his students Alexander Zorin and Dmitri Averin discovered they could control the movement of a single electron off a so-called coulomb island, (a conductor weakly connected to the rest of a nanocircuit), leading to the possibility of a single-electron transistor, realized in 1987 by Gerald Dolan and Theodore Fulton of Bell Laboratories. 2 As silicon chip technology approaches the limits beyond which miniaturization is no longer feasible, discoveries like these promise to extend the miniaturization of information indefinitely using nanotechnology.
Also relevant is the work by Christopher Murray and his team at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center using colloids for data storage (the colloids consist of magnetic nanoparticles in suspension, with each particle containing about 1,000 iron and platinum atoms). Spread on a surface, the nanoparticles crystallize into two-or three-dimensional lattice arrays. As George M. Whitesides and J. Christopher Love explain in The Art of Building Small, Initial studies indicate that these arrays can potentially store t