Arts practices that engage with submolecular scales encounter issues of temporality, materiality and perceptibility. Consequently, these creative practices interrogate the instrumental processes that mediate our experience of the imperceptible, at times creating hybrid ArtScience techniques and processes. Nanoscience and nanotechnology influence artists practicing across sculpture, installation, painting, animation and media arts, including panel members Andrea Rassell and Paul Thomas. Rassell’s nanoart/moving image practice explores the innate discrepancy between nanoscientific visualizations, made using instrumentation like the atomic force microscope (AFM), and optical photographic or videographic images.
The human sensory experience of submolecular phenomena is only possible through complex technological mediations that include not just magnification but also translations from one sense to another and the temporal scaling of dynamic phenomenal vibrations. The experience of technological mediation, necessary to make nanoscale phenomena perceptible to the human senses, impacts upon approaches to creative practice. What become apparent are the limits of, and...