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  • The Images and Art of Nanotechnologies
  • Kathryn D. de Ridder-Vignone

What is the history of nanotechnoscience? How do certain events, discursive moments and images come to define this history? Richard Feynman gave his speech “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” in 1959. Eric Drexler published Engines of Creation and Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer received the Nobel Prize for the invention of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope in 1986. Richard Smalley received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of Buckyballs in 1996. United States President Bill Clinton announced the funding of the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) in 2000. Michael Crichton’s book Prey was published in 2002. Prince Charles warned of the possible threat of gray goo after reading the Environment, Technology, and Concentration (ETC) Group’s report “The Big Down,” and Chemical and Engineering News published the Drexler-Smalley debate in 2003. The Nanoscale Informal Science Education (NISE) Network was funded by the National Science Foundation in 2005.

These and countless other events represent the movement of nanotechnoscience from the imaginary futures conjured by scientific experts to a present-day reality for social scientists, educators, policymakers, humanists, artists and the general public. Why have nanotechnologies captured the attention and pocketbooks of so many? It is not the first emerging technology with the promise to change our world. Biotechnology has long been redefining our assumptions about life and its meaning. Nanoculture is, however, a visual space. More so than other emerging technologies, every memorable event in the brief history of nanotechnoscience has been accompanied by memorable images: Feynman’s miniature machines, STM images such as IBM’s inscribed logo “The Beginning,” gray goo in its various forms, a microscopically produced map of the northern hemisphere, and Smalley’s Buckyballs and nanotubes. We have consumed the images, whether or not we know that we have consumed the science. Nanotechnology’s reality is not limited to its science or consumer technologies, as nano is not just represented but constituted by its images. Yet nanotechnology’s future might be largely invisible. As nanotechnologies enter our lives, we may realize their existence and limitations only when the technologies they enable go wrong.

In October 2007, the University of South Carolina sponsored a workshop titled “Images of the Nanoscale: From Creation to Consumption.” This workshop brought together researchers from a wide variety of fields, including physics, chemistry, materials science, engineering, history, media studies, art, philosophy and science studies, as well as participants from industry. We engaged in both formal and informal conversation about a variety of topics, including the epistemology of nanoscale images, the conventions that are adopted for image production, the proliferation of nanoimages into various extra-scientific realms, and the stories that such images tell, either explicitly or implicitly. The papers presented in this section are the result of those conversations.

In a field that has been touted as relying on interdisciplinarity, Chris Robinson points out the tensions that arise when “interdisciplinarity” broadens its scope beyond the sciences to the arts. Importantly, Michael Cobb & Chris Toumey, Simon Tarr & Paul Weiss, and Michael Lynch & I also examine images in context, looking beyond epistemological arguments to understand the images and art of nanotechnologies as things themselves, artifacts of material culture and practices. [End Page 431]

More than 10 years have passed since the NNI began. Since then, attention has been drawn to the need to critically examine the risks of nanotechnologies in our environment and for humans. Therefore, Robinson and I argue that, as nanotechnologies begin to enter our marketplace, no matter how visible or invisible, scientific and artistic experts as well as lay publics must play a role in determining their future. Lastly, Robinson, Toumey & Cobb, and I argue that nanotechnoscience’s still-incomplete emergence has opened up space for artists and theorists to play a visible role in producing nanoculture.

Various publics will take up these emerging technologies, defining and redefining their uses and their histories. But for now, at least, these images serve as the most public part of nanotechnologies, and as such we must recognize their power and treat them as real and significant communicative tools.

Kathryn D. de Ridder-Vignone
Cornell University
Department of Science & Technology Studies
E...

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