nano

Category

Exhibition

Year

2003 - 2004

Institution

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles

Comment

a Media Arts & Science Exhibition Making Nanoscience Visible, Tangible, and Experiential for Visitors of All Ages nano - an exhibition that merges the arts and the atom by presenting the world of nanoscience through a participatory aesthetic experience, opens December 14 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition, a collaboration between LACMALab and a UCLA team of nanoscience, media arts, and humanities experts, is free to the public and runs through September 6, 2004 in LACMA's Boone Children's Gallery. nano is presented as part of LACMA's NexGen youth membership program and is the fourth exhibition organized by LACMALab, the museum's experimental research and development unit, which initiates new models of presenting art and engaging audiences of all ages through artists' projects. This groundbreaking project provides a greater understanding of how art, science, culture, and technology influence each other. The exhibition addresses sophisticated subject matter that is especially relevant for the next generation. Modular, experiential spaces using embedded computing technologies engage all of the senses to provoke a broader understanding of nanoscience and its cultural ramifications. The various components of nano are designed to immerse the visitor in the radical shifts of scale and sensory modes that characterize nanoscience, which works on the scale of a billionth of a meter. Participants can feel what it is like to manipulate atoms one by one and experience nano-scale structures by engaging in art-making activities. The project installations were conceived and designed by media artist Victoria Vesna (Department of Design | Media Arts, UCLA) with nanoscience pioneer James K. Gimzewski (Department of Chemistry, UCLA) and created together with a team of their graduate students. N. Katherine Hayles (Department of English, UCLA), also with graduate students, developed the text component within the gallery. In conjunction with the exhibition, Hayles is editing a collection of essays entitled NanoCulutre: Implications of the New Technoscience to be published in 2004 by Intellect Press. The exhibition's architecture was designed by Sharon Johnston, Mark Lee, and Anne Rosenberg of Johnston Marklee & Associates. nano also has a strong studio component, including a virtual reality drawing tool developed by Caltech. LACMALab's director, Robert Sain and its exhibition coordinator Kelly Carney, worked in conjunction with Carol Eliel, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at LACMA to collaborate with the exhibition team on all aspects of nano. (source: press release, Nov. 2003, www.lacma.org)