In Particular

Building 52a, Zone A1, Position 068

I have just moved to a new desk space on Cranfield campus. The new building is a glass addition to an old hanger style building, which there are a few of here as there is a private airport on-site. It's very light and airy, standard grays with flashes of lime green, pink and yellow. I like it, even it's corporateness, as it's novel for me to be in a place like this. On the outside it's impressive to visitors but inside is pretty inflexible in terms of workspace – a small desk and a tiny cabinet each – but it's not to house artists, it's for academics so maybe that's all they need, and there are the labs upstairs which are ace and slightly sci-fi and smell just right. I doubt some of the format meets their needs but will have to remember to ask around. The great thing is that it is populated with people and that is what I need. People. Yip.

My old desk space was in an office halfway up the stairs. I had two desks, some shelves, a white board, lots of light, walls to put things on, spare tables BUT it was empty (and it smelled). SamNewPhD joined me in the room after a few months but the isolation was still there as we were cut off from the rest of the people in the building – we couldn't see them and they couldn't see us. I didn't spend much time there and came up with lots of reasons – TP wasn't in, I need to save fuel, I'm wasting 40 mins due to the drive, I work better at home, my dog chewed the front door handle off with me inside…

I realise now that when I was in there I felt like an item of storage stuck halfway up the stairs – like your Grandma's corner cabinet that is potentially valuable but doesn't fit anywhere.

So today I am feeling excited as I have witnesses (even though they don't know it). Does everyone need an involuntary audience for their life?

The cartoons are a-coming

I am finally getting somewhere with a set of nanoparticle cartoons.

Part of the residency is to create some form of online journal with tales from nanoparticles. Nanoparticle perspectives if you will. The idea is to communicate in a simple and humourous way about the change in a material's properties when it is reduced to the nanoscale.

Take copper, for example, a lovely soft jam pan making metal that adorns pubs and caravans, and sea-sick passengers wrists. As a nanoparticle it becomes explosive – imagine an exploding jam pan, it would be lethal and very, very sticky. (BTW: have a search for the chemical symbol of a copper nanotube, it amuses the researchers no end.)

So I've been asking the research staff and PhD students at Cranfield University some questions: "If you were a nanoparticle which one would you be?" "What is the particle's greatest strengths and weaknesses?". On the basis of this feedback I'm creating a set of characters that will feature in the comic strips. It's easier said than done. Scientists are very particular about representation of fact, and for an artist who is used to using artistic license to the full (it goes with the job) this isn't very compatible.

How accurate do I need to be to conveying scientific concepts through artwork? How much can I leave for the viewer to fill in the gaps? How can I encourage anthropomorphism of these materials when to do so would give them characteristics they actually do not have? Does this matter?

I had a breakthrough with PJ who grasped what I want to do and even wrote who his particles' nemesis would be if it had one. Great.

"I am silver, I am bismuth, I am carbon, we are sub-tiny and not to be relied on, our behaviours will baffle the brainiest Prof and as for containment -we're always wandering off. Your Newtonian principles mean nothing, nitto, nada to us, and we don't go in for this gravitational fuss. We are Brownian, we bump and we turn, we stick and we burn, we have our rule set which you want to learn. You want to control us, make us collide, make us act, make us stand in line? You'll be lucky because try as you might (and try you will) our special properties will put up a fight."

Secrets

There was a big gap between the eager start of this blog and then any further entries as I stumbled on the unexpected and the unwanted – the monsters of confidentiality and censorship. Breathe, two, three…

What happened was that it occurred to me whilst writing an entry about some VERY EXCITING and VERY EDGY and POTENTIALLY GROUNDBREAKING ideas TP (The Prof) had been discussing with me, that he may not want them published publicly, as it were, as they were so new and shiny. I was right and we agreed I should show him posts before I publish them. It seemed like a good idea at the time but I think it closed a mental door. Having my blog entries checked before publication removes the instantaneousness of the medium – the key thing about blogging – so instead I simply didn't write anything. It was a bit of a crippler. Now I am simply not including any potentially confidential info, but the experience made me wonder about protection of ideas in art and science. How limiting is it? Aren't we all about sharing, openness, swapping and inspiring? Open-source open-mind?

Well on the surface I suspect the answer for artists is yes, always, for sure, but underneath – what about those really great ideas, the ones that make you shake like a little pekingese dog? The ones that if you were driving (or operating machinery) you may cause an accident because you lapsed so deeply into your own head that you forgot you had limbs? The ones that snatch you from reality and ram you down a chute into Fantasyville where you are EL FROMAGE and creator of THE BEST ART EVER and the ideas are so amazing you can hardly think them. Should we publish and share this stuff?

When do we stop writing what we are thinking about and simply allude to it? And do you ever say upfront what you intend to do? Apparently Henry Wellcome once said "Never tell anyone what you are doing until you have done it" (check the ladies toilets at the Wellcome Collection building). But I am always telling people what I'm up to – what i want to do – what I'm thinking of doing. I can't help it, it's Artist Tourette's (or verbal diarrhoea, but I can never spell that). It's great to get feedback, but sometimes it backfires and you notice your ideas feeding others with no citation, reference or even casual acknowledgment. In art so what?

Hmmm.

Scientific Papers

I have been reading scientific papers for months. And there is no let up in sight, because once you start gaining the knowledge you want more and more and more…

Hey! "This science speak is very dense. Very tense. It's very straight. It's like a fence. We want to understand we want to try. We want our neurons to fizzle and fry, and trigger and sigh, and connect and fly. But fact figure graph and equation? Come on per-lease we need a vacation. Can you make somethings soft like honey, a scientific tale that is gooey and runny? And ideally short and incredibly funny? We'd like to see it if you do, we'd like to look, and look we would. We'll even listen watch sniff or feel. So come on 'artist' do your thing help us suck some knowledge in…"

Nano. What? Where? I think I missed it…
Really bloody small. Really. Tiny. More than tiny. Too tiny in fact. Too tiny to see or even be seen directly. A nanometer is a billionth (1,000,000,000th) of a meter, and the human eye can't see much below 10,000 nanometers. It's hard to guage something as tiny as a nanoparticle – as hard to comprehend as the (possibly infinite) enormity of the universe. "To put things in perspective, if the world were scaled down so that people averaged 100 nanometers tall, the Earth would be about 76 cm in diameter" (from http://www.nanotechproject.org/topics/nano101/intr…).

So from an artist perspective I'm wondering how I'm going to get to grips with something that can't be gripped unless you own some nano-tweezers, had nano fingers to squeeze them and special nano eyes that could see things that can be smaller than a lightwave. The technologies the scientists use to 'see' the work they are doing with nanoparticles are advanced precision hardware and software systems that 'feel' the particles and show either a digitised representation of them, or simply a screed of numbers to be deciphered. More computers than chemicals.

It also raises the question of how much scientists trust the equipment they use; how far could a minor software bug derail research findings? One small error in anyone of the thousands (probably more) of functions called in one of the software applications would be pretty hard to notice. In the normal scale world a real bug in the lab would completely mess up results, but they are easy to spot (they are ones that don't bother with lab coats and plastic overshoes).

While I'm browsing around peeking in the clean rooms and looking at the labs, I'm wondering how much job satisfaction you would get from working with such non-physical things, things that are on the edge of theory and reality. But also how exciting each step would be when you validate a paper-based assumption with a real world experiment. It must be addictive to push it to the next level, is this why many scientists are so dedicated and immersed in their work – the 'it-must-be-just-around-the-corner' carrot?

"I looked around but couldn't see. My eyes said no, they said to me "We will not zoom we will not phroooom we cannot nanoooom inside this room, from this perspective it will not be, those particles will never be clear to me (or me – for there are two of these eyes you see). There is no way we will, by looking or cooking or crooking or hooking be able to focus on those tiny things. Bring me some tech and then we'll begin."