Super Human. Revolution of the Species Symposium, Melbourne 23rd and 24th Nov

Super Human: Revolution of the Species Symposium
23 – 24 November 2009
BMW Edge, Federation Square
Melbourne, Australia

Due to popular demand, we are releasing single-day and half-day tickets for the Super Human symposium.

Two-day $500 / $350
Single-day $250 / $175 concession
Half-day $125 / $87.50 concession

Join artistic and scientific researchers from the fields of cognition, augmentation and nanotechnology as they consider what it means to be human, now and into the future.

For the full program visit www.superhuman.org.au or select from the following:

23 November – morning session – 9.30am – 12.30pm
Keynote: Barbara Maria Stafford (USA)
Transparency or the New Invisibility; the Business of Making Connections
Panelists: Michele Barker (AUS), Dolores Steinman (Canada), Kathryn Hoffmann (USA)

23 November – afternoon session – 1.30pm – 6.00pm
Keynote: Ju Gosling (UK)
Super Human Rights
Panelists: Kathy Cleland (AUS), Natasha Vita-More (USA), Tina Gonsalves (AUS), Mari Velonaki (AUS), Reva Stone (Canada)

24 November – morning session – 10.00am – 12.30pm
Keynote: Junichi Ushiba (Japan)
Brain-Machine Interface into Virtual Worlds
Panelists: Jonathan Duckworth (AUS), Danielle Wilde (AUS)

24 November – afternoon session – 1.30pm – 6.00pm
Keynotes: Tami Spector (USA)
Nanoaesthetics
Panelists: Leah Heiss (AUS), Svenja Kratz (AUS), Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (UK).
Closing Address: Paul Brown (AUS/UK)

Visit www.superhuman.org.au for further information and ticket sales.

Tweet This Post 

Researchers create nanotube memory that can store data for a billion years

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley have developed an ultra-dense memory chip that is capable of storing data for up to a billion years (besting silicon chips by roughly… a billion years). Consisting of a crystalline iron nanoparticle shuttle encased within a multiwalled carbon nanotube, the device can be written to and read from using conventional voltages already available in digital electronics today. The research was led by Alex Zettl, who notes that current digital storage methods are capable of storing mass amounts of data, but last just decades, while, say, some books have managed to last nearly a thousand years, though the amount of data they contain is quite small. The new method, called shuttle memory, is based on the iron nanoparticle which can move back and forth within the hollow nanotu. Zettl believes that, while shuttle memory is years away from practical application, it could have a lot of archival applications in the future.

More from Engadget and by Laura June

Tweet This Post 

NanoArt 2009 INTERNATIONAL ONLINE COMPETITION – 3rd Edition

FREE Entries – Open to All Artists and Scientists – Nanostructures Seed Images are Provided for Further Artistic Creation
Submission deadline January 15, 2009

NanoArt is a new art discipline at the art-science-technology intersections. It features nanolandscapes (molecular and atomic landscapes which are natural structures of matter at molecular and atomic scales) and nanosculptures (structures created by scientists and artists by manipulating matter at molecular and atomic scales using chemical and physical processes). These structures are visualized with powerful research tools like scanning electron microscopes and atomic force microscopes and their scientific images are captured and further processed by using different artistic techniques to convert them into artworks showcased for large audiences. To read more about NanoArt and Nanotechnology please visit www.nanoart21.org.

The worldwide competition NanoArt 2008 is open to all artists 18 years and older. The online exhibition will open for public on January 20, 2009. Judges: Jeanne Brasile, artist, director and primary curator of the Walsh Gallery at the Seton Hall University; Rocky Rawstern, artist and consultant, former editor of Nanotechnology Now, awarded with the 2005 Foresight Institute Prize in Communication. Winners will be notified and published online after March 31, 2009. The competition will be promoted on different venues online, nanoart21.org contacts, word-of-mouth. The artists could also promote the competition on their websites and other venues.

For the 2008 edition of this competition, nanoart21.org founded by artist and scientist Cris Orfescu (www.crisorfescu.com) will provide 3 high resolution monochromatic electron scans for competitors to choose from. The participating artists will have to alter the provided image(s) in any artistic way to finish the artistic-scientific process and create NanoArt work(s). The artists and scientists are strongly encouraged to participate with their own images as long as these visualize micro or nanostructures.

The artists can participate with up to 5 images (artworks). All submitted works will be exhibited on the nanoart21.org site until March 31, 2009, together with artist’s name, a short description of the artistic process, and artist’s web site and e-mail. The top 10 artists will be exhibited on nanoart21.org site for one full year and will be invited to exhibit at the 3rd edition of The International Festival of NanoArt. The previous editions of the festival were held in Finland and Germany.

For more information, please visit the competition site at http://nanoart21.org/html/nanoart_2008.html or send e-mail to 2008@nanoart21.org

Tweet This Post 

Nanoessence by Dr Paul Thomas

My current research ‘Nanoessence’ aims to examine life at a sub cellular level, re-examining space and scale within the human context. A single HaCat skin cell is analysed with an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) to explore comparisons between, life and death at a nano level. The humanistic discourse concerning life is now being challenged by nanotechnological esearch that brings into question the concepts of what constitutes living.
http://www.visiblespace.com/nanoessence

Prior to this I was working on the a project called Midas. http://vimeo.com/2240979

Another aspect of interest is the AFM used in Nanotechnological research, which uses touch rather that optics to create its images.  The idea of gathering scientific data through touch allows for a reconfiguration of a dominant ocular centric understanding of the world.

Dr Paul Thomas
Senior Lecturer
Area co-ordinator Electronic Arts
Department of Art Curtin University of Technology
Founding Director Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth
Co-chair re:live Media Art History conference 2009

GPO Box U1987 Perth,
Western Australia 6845

http://www.visiblespace.com
http://www.beap.org
http://www.studioelectronicart.net
http://www.Media-Space.org.au
http://www.i-500.org

Tweet This Post 

Swarm intelligence: a starting point for Nanotechnology

Jesper Hoffmeyer points out in his writings on swarm intelligence that

‘Biologically speaking, the body can be understood as a swarm of cells and tissues which, unlike the swarms of bees or ants, stick relatively firmly together. However, the swarm of cells constituting a human body is a very different kind of swarm from that of the social insects. The body swarm is not built on ten thousand nearly identical units such as a bee society.

Rather it should be seen as a swarm of swarms, i.e., a huge swarm of more or less overlapping swarms of very different kinds. And the minor swarms again are swarm-entities, so that we get a hierarchy of swarms. At all levels these swarms are engaged in distributed problem solving based on an infinitely complicated web of semetic interaction patterns which in the end can only be explained through reference to the actual history of the body system, evolution’.
http://www.molbio.ku.dk/MolBioPages/abk/PersonalPages/Jesper/Swarm.html

What Hoffmeyer suggests of the swarms of cells constituting the human body can be seen as now swarms of atoms that constitute the materiality of the cell.

The idea of nanotechnology ‘Shaping the world atom by atom’ http://www.wtec.org/loyola/nano/IWGN.Public.Brochure/ is one part of the discussion as to where life exists at a nano level.

Tweet This Post 

Nanoart pioneers

With atomic scale realities profoundly changing research and production methods. Nanoartists such as Gisel Trudle are among a pioneering group of artists. She notes  “working with electronic media, being engaged by this vibratory and unstable level of reality, we have since completely transformed our production focus, in a slipping from works that mostly did not require our presence to be exhibited, to a completely new performative frame where we are taking risks in real time with the viewers. This led us to the theories of transduction and metastability by the French philosopher of science, Gilbert Simondon (1928-1989) and to our present project entitled light, sweet, cold, dark, crude (2006- )”.

Gisel Trudel

<www.aelab.com>,

Tweet This Post 

Liminal:Diabetics + Arsenic

This exhibition presents a body of work that has been developed at the threshold of art and science. Leah Heiss has spent the past 10 months working with nanotechnologists to develop wearable artworks that address the emotional in therapeutic design. The outcome is a collection of jewellery scale artefacts and vessels which are both delicate yet compelling in their curative applications. Two primary collections will be exhibited during liminal: diabetes + arsenic. Diabetes is a range of jewellery which allow insulin to be administered through the skin, replacing syringes. Arsenic encompasses a series of vessels which act to remove arsenic from water and are designed for people travelling through areas where arsenic is prevalent in well water (e.g. India, Bangladesh, United States).

6 – 22 November, Monday – Friday, 11 am – 5 pm, Saturday, 2 pm – 5 pm
RMIT Gallery, 344 Swanston Street, Melbourne
For more information, contact (03) 9925 1717 or
email: rmit.gallery@rmit.edu.au
www.rmit.edu.au/rmitgallery

Tweet This Post