Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of Scale in an Age of Nanotechnology was a campus-wide exhibition at Cornell University in Fall 2014 that explored the cultural and human consequences of seeing the world at the micro and macro levels through nanoscience and networked communications.
The focus of Intimate Cosmologies was the participation of artist Kimsooja who developed her Needle Woman: Galaxy was a memory, Earth is a Souvenir (2014) through a collaboration between the artist and Cornell’s Wiesner Nanomaterials Lab, headed by professor Ulrich Wiesner. The collaboration began as an investigation into how Professor Wiesner’s pioneering nano particles, called C-dots, which synthetically extend the natural wavelengths of visible light, might be used by the artist in a large scale work of art. Kimsooja’s previous installations, To Breathe (2013) at the Korean Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale and To Breathe/Respirar (2006) at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Palacio de Cristal in Madrid, Spain were large scale investigations of space filled with spectral colors of light, became the starting point for a two-year research project that included architect Jaeho Chong, graduate students in Material Science and Engineering and undergraduate students in Architecture and Art. Through an iterative process guided by the artist’s frequent visits to campus to work in the lab and studio with Professor Wiesner and others, an unique nano scale iridescent polymer film was developed to cover the surface of a 46 foot sculpture installed in the center of the university’s Arts Quad.
This inaugural Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) Biennial featured several events and principal projects by faculty and student investigators and guest artist-in-residence Kimsooja working in collaboration with Cornell scientists and researchers. Others artists examining the material and culture of nano science included in the exhibition are Paul Thomas and *particle group* collective with Ricardo Dominguez, Diane Ludin, Amy Sara Carroll (Cornell MFA ’95) and Nina Waisman.
The inaugural biennial theme was chosen to frame dynamic changes in 21st-century culture and art practice, and in nanoscale technology. The multidisciplinary initiative engaged students, faculty and the community in demonstrations of how radical shifts in scale have become commonplace, and how artists address realms of human experience lying beyond immediate sensory perception.
Artists:
Kimsooja – Artist-in-Residence
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Paul Thomas
Kevin Raxworthy
Particle Group (Ricardo Dominguez, Diane Ludin, Amy Sara Carroll Nina Waiman)
Jenny Sabin Lab
Juan Hinestroza/So-Yeon Yoon
Joseph Kennedy
Caio Barboza
Sunny Xu
Documentary by Art21
Art 21 (Art in the 21st Century) created a short documentary, “Collaboration on Campus—Nanotechnology & Contemporary Art” on Kimsooja’s project produced by Ian Forster and Eve Moros Ortega. Commissioned by the CCA in collaboration with Professor Ulrich Wiesner and his students in his nanomaterials lab at Cornell, Needle Woman marked a unique working process that united the artist with leading nano scale engineers to design a material that could capture the color effects that had previously been achieved only through superficial use of existing cinematographic films and filters.
Other exhibitions of Kimsooja’s Cornell project
Kimsooja’s project, “Needle Woman: Galaxy was a memory, Earth is a souvenir” was also included photographically in Proportio exhibition curated by Axel Vervoordt parallel to the 56th Venice Biennale at Palazzo Fortuny in 2015.
Media:
2014 Biennial to explore nanotech as artistic medium, Cornell Chronicle, 2013
Art and nanotech converge in campus biennial, Cornell Chronicle, 2014
Biennial’s art and science collaborations earn acclaim, Cornell Chronicle, 2015