Consciousness & Connectivitypanel by Roy Ascott

director, Planetary Collegium

SIGGRAPHAugust 1, 2005

THE ART & SCIENCE of

NOTHINGNESS

How does the invisible realm impact us?

Are there ways that technology can help us access this space?

Human Networks

Tetrahedrons & hexagonscolors, intervals and soundwaves

Can the artist engage the science of the invisible in meaningful ways without becoming didactic or in

service of science?

FEELING IS BELIEVING

Feeling the invisible:

The principle of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope STM

A billion times larger

Where the real finger is the Eiffel tower, the atom a golf ball

Its mainly nothingness

The finger: a fine needle terminated by a single atom

Feeling is seeing:

Buckminsterfullerine molecules

One nanometer across

We are looking at electron probabilities and waves here

It’s mainly empty space!

What is the EMPTY space?Is there NOTHINGNESS?

Meeting of media art, nanoscience and tibetan buddhism

Monks arrive to James Gimzewski’s Pico Lab at the chemistry and

biochemistry department, UCLA

Monks meet the nanoscientist – all this to access nothingness?

Common goal: showing how every thing/one is interrelated

How do we work all together towards this common goal when we all speak

different languages, use different methodologies?

Retreats in Malibu: HEART TO HEART

Recreation of the mandala center

Dispersal ceremony

CELL SOUNDS

10 mYeast and Fibroblast Cellsmake tiny Sound Waves

life is mainly nothingInside the atomsis empty space

Gold atoms

Electron standing wavesAtoms make waves

Cell Ghosts in Seodaemon prison, Seoul, Korea

composition of tortured cells: Gimzewski

Human body as point of Light

Reducing the human body to a solid mass of neutrons and protons would result something that would be around 500 nm is length. i.e. around a hundredth of the thickness of a human hair. So one see how much space and nothing a human body contains

Waves and Connections

• Quantum mechanics was developed using theories applied to musical instruments to describe the electrons as waves.

• string theory the elementary particles could be thought of as the "musical notes" or excitation modes of elementary strings.

• If string theory is to be a theory of quantum gravity, then the average size of a string should be somewhere near the length scale of quantum gravity, called the Planck length, which is about 10-33 centimeters, or about a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimeter. the strings are way too small to see by current or expected particle physics

Waves and Connections

• Nanometer scale vibrations in living cells.

• Gimzewski’s group discovered this in yeast cells which vibrate in the audible spectrum. All cells contain molecular motors and that the metabolism of the cell needs there functioning so we know there is a lot of nano-motion in cells.

The difference between waves and matter is that

waves connect to each other,

they are the result of energy and connection, the materialist view is

that things exist as objects.

ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS ON OUR MENTAL HEALTH

Depression is the fastest growing disease globally

Looking for connections to invisible negative vibrations

in our daily environmentKen Wells Media & Medicine group, UCLA

To see the world in a grain of sand…

Gimzewski’s meditations / calculations on a grain of sand

• Its about the connections not the things themselves

• There a a billion times a billion atoms in a grain of sand

• The are many more possibilities in the way the atoms can be placed than there are particles in the entire universe

• Each sand grain is unique it cannot be reproduced exactly again

• The grain is mainly empty space

vv.arts.ucla.edu