Looking closer, seeing less
Yesterday I had a 2 hour session with Matt Kershaw and TP with an Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM) which can enable us to view up to x5000.
ESEMs focus a beam of electrons in a scanning motion over a sample placed in a sealed chamber. A vacuum is created in the chamber and water vapour is added. The electrons penetrate the sample (a tiny amount, say 10 micrometers) and stimulate the ejection of other electrons (Secondary Electrons) from the sample, which are amplified in the water vapour environment. The secondary electrons are counted by an electron detector and this information is converted into an image viewed on a display. It's complicated and I barely understood, but that's the gist. The most important thing is that what we see on the screen is a combination of a hardware sensor and a software translation of moving electrons into a black and white image.
In preparation I made 8 cardboard slides each with pencil marks from the entire range of Faber-Castell pencils and then some. From 6H to 9B, plus charcoal and wax pencil used for writing on glass. Each slide was a different quality paper ranging from very smooth (professional tracing paper) to super rough (crepe paper). So 8 different papers, 20 different pencils, 3 different marks per pencil = 480 samples. In 2 hours. I didn't really think that through and we managed to look at about ten, plus some marks made ad hoc on a little aluminum stub (so we could tilt the sample – my slides were too big).
I was hoping that the equipment would reveal landscapes of graphite and clay, boulders of charcoal, great crevices formed torn by the hardest pencils, sprinklings of dusty rubble at the edges of lines, mountains made by single dots.
Mostly when we mark with pencil on paper it's a purposeful action, a dynamic set of movements that build a bigger picture. In using the equipment I was interested in looking closer at the pencil mark to see how complex the simplest of artistic processes is from a very close-up perspective, whether the dynamic nature of making the mark was clearly apparent in the debris left behind, and if it would even be recognisable as a pencil mark.
I hadn't considered the interaction between pencil and paper, or the elemental ingredients of the samples.
More following…
"As I prepared my samples thoughts nudged at me, what would they look like, what would we see, what if we discover, something new, something free from the norm, something quite beautifully strange? What if this pseudo-experiment is so out of the range that the magic we find is the first of it's kind? And the thoughts they went on and I let them, I let them push the excitement along. I wondered if the scientists feel this, if this is what they get, when they prep for the next most amazing experiment yet…"
