Quantum Foam

source: iqintel

Art is a fickle thing: when it happens, it takes place on multiple levels. Even when it doesn’t, it’s still every bit as invisible. And art that you can’t even see with the naked eye? Don’t even get me started—I’d rather let a nano-artist do the talking:

Frederik de Wilde is a creator working at the microscopic vanguard between science and art, an area he describes as “the post sublime.” His work with carbon nanotubes (CNT’s) has yielded a color known as “blacker-than-black,” an all-absorbing, nano particle-based lab creation that has simultaneously rendered our prior understanding of the color spectrum insufficient and opened massive avenues of exploration in art, science, and everywhere in between.

Featured everywhere from TED to the Belgian Art Museum, the fruits of his labor, provide the sort of shakeup at the intersection between chemistry, physics, and artistry that could change, well, everything.

Quantum Foam #3

To put it most simply, de Wilde has created a color known thus far as “blacker-than-black.” An all-absorbing, nano particle-based lab creation, from the arts to the sciences and everywhere in between, the possible applications for this revolutionary new technology are endless.

Reducing 3D objects into two visible dimensions? Check. Hyper-efficient photosynthesis by coating insects and plants in the CNTs? Check. The total and complete absorption of available light, including that of the direct sun, for hyper-efficient renewable energy? Check. But why take it from us?

We spoke to Frederik de Wilde, the artist behind the nano revolution poised to tear down the long-standing walls between science and art.
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source: frederik-de-wilde

ART is the poetics of the imagination – SCIENCE is the poetics of reality

Frederik De Wilde acts on the border area between science, technology and art. The conceptual crux of his artistic praxis are the notions of the intangible, inaudible, invisible. It is this interstitial territory that Frederik De Wilde explores in his various works. Sometimes on the side of the technological, and often in the perceptual, conceptual, social—human—register, De Wilde’s art is grounded in the interaction between complex systems, both biological and technological. Moreover, the indistinct, diffuse, ‘fuzzy’ arena where the biological and the technological overlap and commingle is a productive and favored ground for his projects/ projections.

Intentions of the artist

I Cross-examine the art[work] and its limits, the conventions of the exhibition, production, reception, distribution, interpretation, … and the various forms and combinations that may arise out of. I have set my goal to examine and question issues such as representation and new production methods in the field of visual arts, audiovisual arts, new media. I also study ways in which it is possible to develop new production methods and re-inject them back into traditional media. Nevertheless, human, social and ecological problems are often the starting point of my research and artistic products. Specifically, my coexistence with the sciences aims to explore new angles from which art can be understood. The traditional relationship between the viewer and the object is the reference from which a dialogue and / or controversy is pulled open. Researching the interaction capabilities of both agents takes a critical role in my work, bringing in new experience machines for the viewer with space for questioning and disrupting its perception. Just as one can question, and has questioned, the usefulness of religion in such a scientific-technological society, one must also ask what the role of art in this is. How do we connect the blind spots, respectively, art and science? This seems to me a crucial question.