Copyright Michael Oliveri
I wish I had a dollar for the number of times I have heard people say that were in not for religion there would be no beautiful art or music. Although I will admit that there are some beautiful songs and pictures that are related to religion, I think it is an unfair assumption that it is only because there is religion that there is artistic beauty.
A perfect example of this is in the artwork you see above and in the slideshow below. These pictures exemplify what can happen when art meets science.
The artwork, which is the brainchild of artist Michael Oliveri, is what the artist describes as “NanoArt.”
According to an article in the November 24, 2008 issue of C&EN, Oliveri says these pictures are “a new art discipline in the intersection of art, science, and technology."
So what are these amazing pictures of? Good question. They are of “Innerspace.” What? Let me explain.
According to the article, artist Oliveri works with scientist, Zhengwei Pan. In the course of his work, Pan “heat[s] metal or metal oxide powders,… in a low-pressure environment in which the powders evaporate or decompose into vapor.”
From there, the vapor components take a variety of forms. The forms they take are dependent on a number of things, including the underlying substrate used, temperature, and gas composition.
Pan uses a scanning electron microscope (SEM) to view the results of his work to “collect data and to document the nanoscale structures and textures that different materials and reactions yield.” It ws said that “these could become the stuff of next-generation transistors, sensors, or light-emitting devices.”
Oliveri does something different with what the SEM reveals. He said, “I take their samples, the stuff they are cooking and making, and I travel across it, like a tourist, like a landscape artist traveling across the Southwest.”
The report went on to say that when Oliveri finds interesting landscapes, “which might only occupy an area that is a speck to a speck,” he grabs about 40 in a sequence that he then stitches together digitally. Using this process, Oliveri creates high-resolution panoramas.
The results of the combined efforts of Oliveri and Pan can be seen in the pictures here. They are stunningly beautiful and mysterious. It is incredible how much they llok like landscapes that we observe everyday with the naked eye.
Pan and Oliveri were both pleased by how well a showing of the work went last year. Their work was well received. Perhaps the best part was that the work stimulated conversation. According to the article, Pan said of the visitors, “they would ask us many, many questions.”
It was reported that Rhona Hoffman, gallery owner, said that “she is especially fascinated by the way nanotechnology – which she describes as ‘this world we can’t see but know is there’ – is riddled with features reminiscent ‘of water, sky, and land.’”
Comments
It irks me as well when people insist that good art could never have come about without religion.
Religion has produced some amazing art but so has the Holocaust, inarguably one of the most horrible actions mankind has ever perpetrated. It has resulted in many painful but beautiful artworks. If I could prevent another Holocaust I'd do anything and the argument that it caused great artworks to exist would be completely meaningless compared to the human suffering.
Until the late nineteenth century young boys with exquisite singing voices were sometimes castrated, creating castratos. Assuredly, the music sung by the castratos was beautiful but the ends do not justify the means.
Art comes from passion and it is completely unnecessary to have religion to create passion.
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