Consciousness & Connectivity
panel by Roy Ascott
director, Planetary Collegium
SIGGRAPH
August 1, 2005
THE ART & SCIENCE of
NOTHINGNESS
How does the invisible realm impact
us?
Are there ways that technology can
help us access this space?
Human Networks
Tetrahedrons & hexagons
colors, intervals and soundwaves
Can the artist engage the science of
the invisible in meaningful ways
without becoming didactic or in
service of science?
FEELING IS BELIEVING
Feeling the invisible:
The principle of the
Scanning Tunneling
Microscope STM
A billion times larger
Where the real finger
is the Eiffel tower,
the atom a golf ball
Its mainly
nothingness
The finger: a fine needle
terminated by a single atom
Feeling is seeing:
Buckminsterfullerine molecules
One nanometer across
We are looking at electron probabilities
and waves here
It’s mainly empty space!
What is the EMPTY space?
Is there NOTHINGNESS?
Meeting of media art, nanoscience
and tibetan buddhism
Monks arrive to James Gimzewski’s
Pico Lab at the chemistry and
biochemistry department, UCLA
Monks meet the nanoscientist – all
this to access nothingness?
Common goal: showing how every
thing/one is interrelated
How do we work all together towards
this common goal when we all speak
different languages, use different
methodologies?
Retreats in Malibu:
HEART TO HEART
Recreation of the mandala center
Dispersal ceremony
CELL SOUNDS
Yeast and Fibroblast Cells
make tiny Sound Waves
life is mainly nothing
Inside the atoms
is empty space
10 mm
Atoms make waves
Electron standing waves
Gold atoms
Cell Ghosts in Seodaemon prison, Seoul,
Korea
composition of tortured cells: Gimzewski
Human body as point of Light
Reducing the human body to a solid
mass of neutrons and protons would
result something that would be around
500 nm is length. i.e. around a
hundredth of the thickness of a human
hair. So one see how much space and
nothing a human body contains
Waves and Connections
• Quantum mechanics was developed using theories
applied to musical instruments to describe the electrons
as waves.
• string theory the elementary particles could be thought of
as the "musical notes" or excitation modes of elementary
strings.
• If string theory is to be a theory of quantum gravity, then
the average size of a string should be somewhere near
the length scale of quantum gravity, called the Planck
length, which is about 10-33 centimeters, or about a
millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a
centimeter. the strings are way too small to see by
current or expected particle physics
Waves and Connections
• Nanometer scale vibrations in living cells.
• Gimzewski’s group discovered this in
yeast cells which vibrate in the audible
spectrum. All cells contain molecular
motors and that the metabolism of the cell
needs there functioning so we know there
is a lot of nano-motion in cells.
The difference between waves and
matter is that
waves connect to each other,
they are the result of energy and
connection, the materialist view is
that things exist as objects.
ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS
ON OUR MENTAL HEALTH
Depression is the fastest growing
disease globally
Looking for connections to invisible
negative vibrations
in our daily environment
Ken Wells Media & Medicine group, UCLA
To see the world in a grain of
sand…
Gimzewski’s meditations /
calculations on a grain of sand
• Its about the connections not the things
themselves
• There a a billion times a billion atoms in a grain
of sand
• The are many more possibilities in the way the
atoms can be placed than there are particles in
the entire universe
• Each sand grain is unique it cannot be
reproduced exactly again
• The grain is mainly empty space
vv.arts.ucla.edu