cc >> I'm really grateful for this
invitation to present at this meeting, very thankful to Jill
for inviting me, and also to Amy and many other people who made
all of this possible. I hope your name was mentioned
in Jill's very nice introduction.
As Jill said, this is very much a work in progress, that I'm
going to present. But rather I'd say it's a
proposed work that hasn't yet progressed.
Earlier this month, I presented a grant proposal to start a
project on visualization of nano-scale phenomena.
I recently finished a book on a very different project that Jill
mentioned. This is about the
"Truth Machine," it's on forensic DNA profiling.
It involves a little bit about visualization, actually,
quite a lot. But it kind of went off in
a different direction. And that project that led to the
book has been going on for a better part of 20 years.
But during that time, I maintained my interest
in visualization in science. And I want to return to it more
intensively. And the nano-scale phenomena was
something that piqued my interest.
Now I suppose that it's fitting that I'll be talking about
future work that I might do on nano, because in its brief
history, nano has established itself as talk about futures.
To keep from getting carried away, I'll talk at some length
about my work on visualization, published in the 1980s and
1990s, on light and electron microscopy, and in a project I
did with art historian, science historian, Samuel Edgerton on
digital image processing in astronomy.
I'm confident that that earlier work applies to nano science and
nanotechnology, nano imaging I'll call it.
Though, of course, I want to find out what's different about
that domain as well. Part of this talk is based on
a joint paper that I have developed to some extent,
relying very heavily on a collaboration with a former
Cornell PhD student, Cyrus Mody, who's now in the history
department at Rice University. It also relies upon his
dissertation at Cornell University that was finished
some years ago. Now my interest in nano also
was inspired by attending a workshop at the University of
South Carolina, where there's both a big center of nano
science, nanotechnology research and a sizable group, I should
say, not necessarily large groups in science and technology
studies, but a sizable group of people doing ethical,
historical, philosophical and social aspects of nanotechnology
and nano science. I went there in October.
It was about images at the nano scale.
And I presented some of the material that I'll be presenting
here. I found that I was very thrilled
to find that much of what people who have been studying this for
some time were doing. It seemed to relate rather
specifically to work I had done in the past.
So I thought there might be something to do by moving into
this field about which I currently know very little.
So before going into what I want to say about nano, allow me
to review some background about the interest in visual images in
science and technology studies, and my own interests in
particular. For those of you in the
audience, of which there are a few, who know me, I apologize
that I'm going to be dragging out some fairly old pictures and
fairly old themes. But I will try to bring it to
this new topic. Okay, visualization is a term
used in science and technology studies, we call it STS, which
also covers science, technology and society.
It's a nice acronym. To describe the material
essential process of making research objects visible, and
also making them analyzable and communicable.
Bruno Latour published a seminal paper in the mid-1980s, in which
he kind of tied together some of these themes.
And visualization, after that, kind of became a term that
crossed over a number of boundaries.
The study of visualization includes the analysis of
publicly presented images and textual illustrations.
But it also includes much more, practices and instruments that
render specimens and other research material intelligible,
formally accessible, and mathematically tractable.
It involves aesthetic considerations, such as those
that -- and I explored with digital imaging in astronomy.
But it also, more importantly, I'd say involves epistemological
considerations, because of the importance of graphic and
pictorial images in the dissemination and validation of
experimental results and observations.
Visual images in science have drawn interest from scholars in
many different fields. Of course, here we are, in an
art historian's department, an art historical department.
And art historian, James Elkins had a nice phrase when he
suggested that art history should expand its coverage to
include images that are not art. And in addition, historians of
science, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and others, have
taken interest in visual construals, as David Gooding
calls them, as distinctive modes of evidence and expressions of
reasoning. Visual materials also have been
important for demonstrating and critically elucidating how
gendered assumptions have become objectified into images that are
subsequently taken as iconic representations of body and
nature. In addition to being a truly
interdisciplinary or trans-disciplinary area,
research on visualization in science and medicine has
encouraged a profound shift in assumptions about the relations
between art and science. Earlier, it was assumed by no
less than Thomas Kuhn, that art had no serious generative place
in scientific research after the 18th century.
Jill, in her introductory remarks mentioned something to
that effect, that often people think of art as after, when it
deals with science images, rather than involved in the
production. Today, it's almost commonplace
to treat a broadened conception of art as intrinsic to modern
scientific research. And scientists in some fields,
particularly astronomy, have begun to take insights from art
and art history seriously. Contemporary science studies
research has raised the epistemic status of pictorial
and graphic images so that they are increasingly viewed as
original and irreducible sites of scientific work,
communication and thinking. But particular interest for this
proposal are historical and social scientific studies of
visual images that treat them as materials that facilitate,
express, and even make possible the production and dissemination
of scientific knowledge. In the past few decades, social
and historical studies of the sciences have claimed that
visual images and the practices that compose and disseminate
them are primary sources of scientific innovation and
insight. But this contrasts with the
treatment of them as subsidiary to logical and mathematical
reasoning. It also contrasts with
treatments that limit them to textual illustrations or
naturalistic pictures. Visualization embeds
mathematics and natural order within textual and graphic form.
It is not re-presentation in the sense of reproducing what is
independently worked out through natural investigation and
mathematical analysis. It is an integral part of
investigation and analysis. Initiative for treating
visualizations as distinctive and original sites of knowledge
production, validation and communication goes back to
Martin Rudwick's 1976 historical article, an abundantly
illustrated article on the emergence on visual language in
geology. One point that I found
particularly interesting from Rudwick's work is the idea that
early geologists exploited exposures of cliff faces, such
as the image at the top there, from things like canyons and
mining activities. They presented surfaces that
could be read or transposed into graphic matrices for reading
back time. Selection of good alignments,
and then accentuating and coding the linear strata, as in the
diagram below, afforded a way of reading the earth as a
timetable. A key theme in studies of
visualization is that the things seen are mediated by technology,
including the mundane technology of paper, print and graphic
tools. Now, their properties and even
their holistic forms take novel configurations that are
unfamiliar and can not easily be mapped onto familiar things.
Consequently, there is a struggle over time, and often a
contentious one, not only to make visible, but to validate
which visible features are to be accepted.
The visualizing of what can not be seen, such as
in this slide here. That theme of visualizing
what can not be seen is somewhat misleading, however.
First, the things can be seen if you accept that you can see
things through instrumental mediation.
Moreover, the relationship is not simply to things that would
be seen if we were capable of extending our perception to
novel levels of scale. There often are indefinitely
many ways to compose what is seen through the instrumental
medium, or the graphic medium as well.
This is especially obvious in cases in which data, for
example, from X-ray telescopes or MRI scanners and probe
microscopes can be translated into graphs, tables of numbers
and pictures of various kinds. One thing that interests me is
the way that the classic Gestalt themes can be reviewed as being
performed with graphic work in these illustrations.
There's a couple of themes here. One is a caricature, actually it
was published in a French, I guess we'd call it a magazine
today, called "Caricature," in which Louis-Philippe is
progressively turned into a pear.
The story is that later Louis-Philippe was so incensed
by this that he outlawed the drawing of pears, because the
pear became iconic for him. The other things is this picture
of a very well-known Gestalt image.
There's a detailed one in the middle, there, showing that
graphically, you can shift it from the young woman to the old
woman, whereas in its psychological use as a Gestalt
image, it's used to allow you to see one way and then another
way. Here, you see it displaced to
the drawing itself. So in this case, you can see, or
perhaps get a sense of how interpretation is done with a
construction and reconstruction of visual materials, in the
sense that a philosopher once expressed, "That the painter
thinks with the end of his brush."
In these cases, the lines in the drawing skew what we see,
much in the way that verbal rhetoric can highlight and
exaggerate in a way designed to impress and persuade.
A characteristic form that much empirical visualization takes
is not simply to convey an impression or to highlight one
or another feature, but to rectify the appearance of
things, to standardize, make measurable, to encode and
record. These two images, separated by
time and space, both exhibit an obsession with transposing
bodies onto and through a grid. The woodcut, of course is the
artist's portrait of linear perspective, while the
anthropometric photos on the bottom, from Bertillon, conveyed
a discipline of Bertillon's system for encoding bodies to
control recidivism in the Paris criminal population.
Distrusting the identity that goes with a name, Bertillon
finds a series of measurements to identify individuals, and
arranges to standardize the mug shot and the taking of
measurement. So you can see that not only
rectifying the image, standardizing the image through
the kinds of linear perspective or instrumental gaze, you get a
posing of the body, a disciplining of the body, the
criminal body, even, to make it standardizable.
Bruno Letour's conception of immutable mobiles suggested that
graphic inscriptions on maps imposed a fixed textual form on
things and landscapes, enabling them to be transferred across
time and space, reproduced and subjected to graphic and
mathematical operations, thus enabling a return to the
original site with all of the armaments available to a
laboratory science, sometimes backed by --
A crucial aspect of the epistemic authority of such
inscriptions is that they appear to trace back to the hand of
nature, mediated by techniques and technologies of mechanical
reproduction, what Latour famously called inscription
devices. Conceptions of visualization
as site of fact production and communal validation were
developed by ethnographic studies of laboratory practices
beginning in the late 1970s. One aspect of these studies was
the close attention they paid to the work of making specimen
materials visually accessible and graphically analyzable.
We could call such work, pardon the pun, ethno-graphics, where
instead of being a branch of qualitative sociology or
anthropology, it would refer to the participant's work of making
graphic phenomena. Many pictorial and other
materials that go into the making of images never leave the
laboratory or field site, but are part of the material culture
of the science, along with data recordings, notes, and preserved
specimen material. Such images make up the archives
that stand behind the relatively few figures that are prepared
and selected for publication. Consequently, a methodological
requirement for studying visualization is to examine, or
at least re-trace the sequential pathways through which data, or
specimen materials are transferred into images, and
candidate images are selectively processed for specific
analytical and presentational purposes.
In a study of neuro anatomical investigations I found an analog
to Martin Rudwick's geological graphics at the level of
electron micro-graphic imagery. This schematic from an article
published by the lab I studied shows a sequence of how a
stratified region of the brain, the dentate gyrus of the
hippocampus, was exposed in a rat's brain and aligned with the
planes of thick and thin sections to investigate changes
in adjacent cell layers following a lesion to one of
those layers. The brain was selectively framed
so that comparisons could be made in a relatively
stratagraphic area. The roughly linear alignment of
the relatively homogenous cell layers was selectively aligned
with a graphic plane and a page face, so that systematic
comparisons and measurements could be made.
Graphic orderings are not simply transposed from natural
surfaces to graphic devices used for encoding and measuring
activities. They also can be impressed into
the materials or terrains analyzed.
In this iconic image, the one on the left of the lizard and the
territories. I've used this many times as a
field guide, and I was told once by my friend who used to work at
Xerox Park in California that I became known as "Lizard Toes"
because of this image. In this field guide, a lizard is
marked by clipping its toes, one of the more primitive forms of
digital representation. They say it doesn't bother them
too much. Then it's released and
recaptured, and its identity is recorded where it happens to be
located. And the terrain on which it's
captured is marked with those little X's, which are stakes
driven into the ground so that the ground itself in which the
investigation is occurring is marked like a Cartesion
coordinate. It's then transposed to the
paper surface, so that the territories can then be mapped.
The neuron in the lower part of the lower right there is
encoded. You can see how old this is,
with an old computer card. By being traced out on a grid,
the numbers are then recorded and then stored electronically
in a database. This, of course, is very
ordinary work in science. And that's the point.
It is ordinary. It's part of the routine work of
making things into data. It's commonplace for multiple
formats to be paired together and juxtaposed in images.
In this case a diagram of a mitochondrion, a cellular
organelle, in a text book is paired with an electron
micrograph. And the two of them, the pair of
them together complement each other, supplement each other and
mark different, sort of epistemic regions and the
difference between photography and drawing.
Each member of the pair thus sort of complements the other.
In the project with Samuel Edgerton in the 1980s and early
1990s, we were interested in some fairly early work for
astronomy, where they were using charged coupled devices, or
CCDs. That cartoon image at the top,
that schematic of how the CCD works.
It collects energy, electronic energy, photons, sometimes
cosmic rays. And then sort of dumps them in a
bucket brigade and tallies them up in that bottom thing.
And so what it does is it produces, sort of a volume
measure of the amounts of light hitting the different pockets.
That's the analogy. The somewhat blurry pictures at
the bottom are people working at an image processing center.
Looking on the left, at an image of a field of stars.
And then on the right, it's a table of numbers that a
sectioned field would be converted to.
And they use commands to modify the image in various ways, as
I'll show. One standard thing they did, and
this was on a touch screen, I actually have a touch screen in
front of me here. One of the functions was called
"smoothing." And so they had a smooth
function. You hit smooth and it would
average the pixels with the adjacent pixel, so you'd get a
more rounded picture. That's a very simple type of
thing. I think we can all do it on our
computers these days at home. So you can get multiple
renderings of the same data, or what would be called the same
data. In this case, a deep space
object, which is naturalized, de-pixilated, if you like.
They also use different color palettes that translate
intensity of data collected into a colored gradient.
They can also convert things to map-like contoured things, and
then more continuous gradients, such as in this image of a
supernova remnant. Note that the raw data
themselves, are worked over to remove artifacts, cosmetic
defects and other features that are deemed irrelevant or out of
place. It isn't just a matter of taking
the same intensity numbers and converting them back and forth.
It's also some work, not shown here, but where the data is
cleaned in various ways to make it analyzable and presentable.
This image here by a Boston University astronomer
synthesizes various forms of data in one frame.
So rather than juxtaposing different images, you see a kind
of a cartoon image that embeds readings produced by a probe
that went through the tail of a comet, or near the head
of a comet. And in this case, the image
processing was done to kind of juxtapose measurements,
different sorts of images together.
They used rather an interesting composition with this
cartoon-like thing. Exposures using what was
vernacularly called false color, smoothing and these other
functions, are done to bring out salient detail, especially with
data collected in non-visible spectra, such as radio infrared
or X-ray. False color is used as a way of
denoting variations in intensity.
Often, light colors were used to denote higher intensities.
But this is not a universal or necessary, and sometimes people
would depart from it. In one case, an astronomer told
me that a color break was taken by a graphic illustrator for
"Scientific American," that's the two slides on the right, the
two pictures on the right. That's from "Scientific
American." The graphic images shows a
blue and a yellow layer, and labels them as being as hot or
cool gases inside this envelope of exploding gas from a
supernova. The astronomer said that this
was kind of inaccurate in the sense that there would be a
continuous gradient in heat intensity in this object.
So the imposition of the color break on the gas cloud, if you
could call it that, creates a qualitative distinction, where
it's basically produced by breaking the colors at a certain
level of intensity in the measures that were produced.
He said this was fairly harmless and maybe even pedagogically
useful for interpreting the phenomena he was discussing in
the article. Digital image processing has
indefinite flexibility for rendering data into color,
exposing or suppressing backgrounds, drawing lines
discretely or in a continuous or hazy way.
The different renderings are often related to different
purposes of investigation. So for example, enhancing red
and blue can make red shift or energies evident.
Astronomers I spoke to back in the '80s and early '90s at
Harvard and Boston University said they try not to cheat too
far in enhancing colors when images are publicly exhibited.
With non-optical sources of radiation, however, they're less
bound by any kind of intrinsic color since there is none.
Overall, there was a tension between exploiting the
possibilities of the equipment to make things show up in novel
ways, or in Harold Garfinkel's words, "making things look like
what they are." Only in this case, there often
is no "what they are" that acts as a reference point or
standard. The term I came up with,
epistemological nostalgia, is a way to indicate efforts that are
done to make things appear familiar and sometimes in
classic sorts of ways. There's an art historian named
Elizabeth Kessler, who is actually working with material
from the NASA Space telescope related to the history of art.
You can see the kind of space telescope image at the bottom,
in addition to indicated red shift type phenomena.
And the intensities of the galaxy has kind of a composition
that might be 19th century like. In the remainder of what I'm
going to talk about today, I want to draw some of the themes
that I very quickly walked through and relate them to the
nano domain. I don't mean to suggest that
there's nothing novel about nano images, though I think people
are kind of counteracting the hype about nano by saying there
isn't much new there. But I think there might be
something interesting about it. But it is interesting in how
that it's very image led, and also the images have some
familiar features to them. Nano images and image
galleries, many of which are readily accessible on the
Internet. That's where most of this stuff
is dumped off of. They appear to have a leading
role in the promotion, and in a different way, in the production
of nanotechnology and nano science.
Nano images, as well as the futuristic writings that often
surround them, such most famously, Eric Drexler's
"Engines of Creation," have gained a reputation for being
manipulative and hyped as futuristic spectacles designed
to spark popular interest and attract public and private
sponsorship. Nano science and nanotechnology
are heavily oriented to the future, dating back to physicist
Richard Feynman's much quoted, much abused statement in 1959
about there's plenty of room at the bottom.
I think that's true for sociology as well.
Visionary writings, most notoriously by Drexler, are
accompanied by images of molecular engines.
The thing at the bottom right there is a Drexlarian
engine-like thing that would be constructed at the nano scale by
pushing atoms around. Some are depicted as sheer
fantasy, while others convey variable degrees of realism and
empirical reference. Fears notoriously of gray goo,
created uncontrollably by nanobots creating other nanobots
hitchhiked on the futuristic scenarios.
This led to kind of a reaction a few years ago.
Nano images seemed to reach backwards and forwards in time,
using familiar conventions of visual realism to materialize
the form of objects that may or may not exist, and of artifacts
that may or may not ever be possible to build.
In my own future work, which I hope will be possible, I intend
to address these complex relations between image, object
and practicality, by examining and reconstructing how nano
images are prepared for analytical presentational
purposes. The futuristic fantasy that was
so much a part of early nano has encouraged skepticism about
what, if anything, there is to the entire nano juggernaut.
Such images have been sources of consternation, as well as means
of promotion and sources of popular excitement.
The consternation came to focus in efforts by many proponents,
most famously Richard Smalley, to distance themselves from
Drexlarian writings and imagery and publications in the early
2000's. Though Drexlarian nanobots and
futuristic scenarios have been marginalized following Smalley's
call for a more realistic orientation to physical limits,
and possibilities at the nano scale.
Images of nano scale phenomena, whether real or imaginary, or
somewhat in between, remain important for ongoing efforts to
establish nano as a broad-based movement in science and
industry, analogous to molecular biology and genetic engineering.
Many nano images are presented as pictures of molecular or
atomic configurations, though the specific configurations are
inflected with a presence and force of the instrumentation.
Unlike magnetic resonance images or X-ray astronomy
images, which often are composed along lines of established
entities, like brains or known astronomical objects, in nano,
there is often no familiar anatomy or conventional atlas
with which to establish what nano scale images and landscapes
should look like. The empirical reference point is
less than obvious. The user does not simply trace a
familiar surface with a probe. Instead the probe's interaction
with the surface creates complex and noisy interference patterns.
Nevertheless, the processing of such images often makes
abundant use of conventional visual elements.
Configurations of color and shape, and entire landscapes
that make them appear to be realistic pictures, rather than
abstract renderings of complex interference patterns or nano
scale graffiti. So in this image here, it's an
atomic force microscope image of a crystalline structure.
It's in an online image gallery. It could easily be mistaken for
a Martian landscape taken from an orbiting satellite.
The most notorious nano images are freely detached from actual
material interventions and possible modes of manufacture.
Many of the most frequently exhibited nano images are drawn
images, or animations of nanobots, carbon tubes and nano
landscapes. As Scott Curtis observed in a
recent talk, in a study of fantastic voyage cartoons, used
to promote nano scale technology, showing landscapes,
such images often have an airbrushed quality.
Surfaces and edges are smoothed. They're depicted from an
impossible vantage point that zooms freely through a clear
space, unencumbered by noise. An example of a still image
that exhibits some of these properties is the nano louse
that was produced by photographer-illustrator Coneyl
Jay, which won the 2002 Visions of Science Award prize.
We discussed this in our conference at South Carolina, I
mentioned earlier, because of a number of interesting things.
The picture shows a transparent insect-like device with legs,
latching onto a blood platelet, drawn in kind of hyper realistic
fashion. It has this proboscis that
punctures the cell membrane. You couldn't tell whether it's
sucking something out or injecting something in.
If it's a machine, it's probably injecting.
The louse and the platelets are depicted in a clear,
well-lighted space, portrayed with linear perspective, from a
close-up vantage point. This image, and derivatives of
it, and there are lots of derivatives of it on the web,
have become iconic for nano, though the image is a
transparent fantasy. It has been used to illustrate
more mundane ventures into nanotechnology.
I don't know if you can read that thing at the bottom, but
it's from the Guardian Unlimited, UK, headline,
"Nanotechnology Shown to Remove Arsenic From Drinking Water."
It's about a method developed by Rice University scientists,
which I assume has very little to do with the little nanobot
creature. But that image is used to
promote this rather mundane technology.
I don't mean that it's not important, but it's certainly
not something you would necessarily illustrate with that
picture. To write off such nano art as
sheer fantasy would, however, ignore the proactive value of
images. Without necessarily buying into
the Drexler vision, one can find examples in social studies of
science of what Nigel Gilbert and Michael Mulkay once called,
"working conceptual hallucinations," referring to a
drawing of a humanoid cartoon figure superimposed on a
realistic cell membrane diagram. Unfortunately, my book has been
stolen and I couldn't find an image to scan.
While that figure was not mentioned to depict the process
it represented, other drawings are more ambiguous.
For example, the drawing I do have here from an article from
an article by Alberto Cambrosio and colleagues, on Ehrlich's
early models of antibodies. The early pictures of
antibodies, this is the turn of the 20th century, touched a
whole lot of controversy about whether antibodies would look
anything like that, or whether this was sheer fantasy.
To make a long story very short, in some respects, the pictures
did lead research into what later would be called more
accurate depictions or representations of the phenomena
involved. Though at first, they were
viewed as impossible cartoon fantasies.
Some models, such as the schematic version of Watson and
Crick's double helix-- I neglected to show it here,
because everybody knows it. That one is impressed in
everyday life. It could become iconic, even
constructive images, for things that never or very rarely look
like that. Although we think of the double
helix as a molecular model pictures, try to find DNA that
looks like that with a microscope.
( laughter ) Nano images are especially
striking cases of representations that are made
possible through technological intervention.
Images made with a scanning tunneling microscope and related
probe instruments are developed from measured fluctuations in
interference patterns, creating by the probe's interaction with
a surface. The numerical data that are
generated that way, they're measures, basically, are then
translated into visual images. But just what they are pictures
of is far from intuitive. In their recent book on
objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison suggest that it is
mistaken to think that nano images through such microscopes
are representations at all, or naturalistic pictures.
They suggest, instead, that the most novel forms of nano images
are demonstrations of technological feats,
inscriptions of the most literal type, legible patterns written
and drawn at an unprecedented scale of what they call haptic
manipulation. These include the famous 1990
IBM inscription with xenon atoms.
All of these are IBM copyrighted images.
So the IBM thing, you've probably all seen that.
It was drawn with a probe microscope of Xenon atoms on, I
think, a graphite base. I'm not sure about that.
These other things, like that little stick figure thing,
you'll see lots of those in nano galleries, little smiley face
things, and these kinds of things.
They look like kids diagrams. Plus, the corral type of thing,
which is again, produced through interference patterns.
And the little false colored Hershey Kisses things are said
to be representative of atoms in some sense.
The resultive images demonstrate what can be
engineered, rather than rendering a picture of a natural
thing or landscape. Daston and Galison recognized
that manipulation, a variant of Ian Hacking has called
intervention, has long been a property, often a tacit one of
scientific image making. However, they argue that it's
the simultaneity of making and taking images with a probe
microscope differs profoundly from the two-step process of,
for example, first preparing specimens for light and electron
microscopic analysis, and then taking images of them.
This suggestion raises intriguing questions, not only
for historical research, but also for ethnographic studies of
detailed practices of visualization.
The explicit way in which nano images demonstrate the
production of what they represent or present makes them
an especially attractive topic for close study of situated
image production and use. If, as I believe is the case,
nano images continue to be produced and used as empirical
evidence, then the question is how do researchers exploit the
novel and manipulative capacity to project their actions into
previously unexplored spaces, and collectively to elucidate
visible structures. How do they decide when the
manipulation has gone too far? And how do they fend off the
moral epistemological accusation that they've made up visual
evidence? A possible start on an answer
to this is that nano images are composed as visual
configurations of shape and color that evoke a sense of what
I earlier called epistemological nostalgia by taking the shape of
familiar landscapes and discernable patterns.
Though such nostalgic projections may seem fantastic,
they provide the iconic shape that reality may later come to
assume. One set of objects that Cyrus
Mody and I have worked on is, in some sense, nano manipulative.
But I think it's quite different from what we've seen so far.
What we're relating to is a 19th century microscopic phenomenon
that in earlier work, I discussed briefly under the
heading of "Test Objects." The analogy then, is with the
19th century objects collected by microscopicist R.C. Goring
to test the resolution and power of the instruments he had.
Dr. Goring is said to have adopted test objects from
reading Anthony von Leeuwenhock's work from two
centuries earlier. He used various objects with
regular properties, such as insect wings, arrays of rate
regular cells, and certain types of materials or diatomes.
The objects are selected for their regular geometric form,
reminiscent of constructed alignments used for surveying.
In this case, what is surveyed is the instrumental system
through which the microscopic properties are made visible.
So they are objects that test the instrument.
The microscopist uses these objects to disclose a
technically circumscribed-- I knew I shouldn't talk of that,
I get tongue twisted. A relative perfection of form
becomes a template for disclosing imperfection in the
instrumental vantage point. Later, constructed objects using
small rulers inscribed on glass were deployed.
So following Goring, F.A. Nobert developed some tests
where he could use contemporary technology to inscribe glass in
a regular way. And he would make these etchings
in glass at a measured fraction of the meter, in order to,
again, test the resolution and reliability of the instruments
he used. It can be useful to compare
test objects with other epistemic things.
These are research entities and complexes that integrate
practices and disciplines in historical trajectories.
Just to move very quickly, some of you might be familiar with
these sorts of things. You have model organisms like
the dracophylla or the Jackson lab mouse.
You also have, kind of conventional tests.
One of our former students at Cornell, John Downer, wrote a
dissertation and published a paper on social studies of
science called, "When the Chick Hits the Fan," about testing
engines with bird strikes. This one is testing a canopy.
Also, type specimens, where an individual or a collection of
specimens is taken to represent a species or kind.
Then finally, the kind of thing we're going to be talking about
here, fabricated nano test objects, which are very similar
to the inscribed glass lines we just saw.
But they have quite a different function.
Of course, manufacture has to be up to the task to produce the
appropriately scaled reliable object, such as in the
fabricated test object. However, when we think of test
objects, such as this one here on the lower right, they act as
tests of the fabrication itself, and not necessarily of the
instrument. The scale of vertical lines,
their clarity and their alignment point to a degree of
control over the scattering of the electron beam that inscribes
and visualizes them. Where Dr. Goring's test objects
presume the geometric properties in the test object in order to
check the optics of the observational instrument, this
instrument presumes the adequacy of the observation to reveal the
imperfection and the construction of the test object.
Some nano inscriptions or etchings can display technical
virtuosity with clear commercial implications.
A couple of students I'm working with, Katherine and Hannah,
pointed me to a very interesting theme from Norbert Wiener,
written obviously decades ago, in which Wiener called a certain
type of image, "Operative Images."
And what he meant, was a kind of thing like a printed circuit,
which in his day would be printed with a copper matrix and
would actually be operated as a circuit.
So the original might be a diagram, programs or encodes a
machine to print out the circuits, and then it produces
reproductions which are functional.
So an operative image is an image that actually performs a
function. And its relation to the original
is not degraded, as in the classic theme of the
reproduction of art. It can even upgrade the
diagrammatic art. Now these images are somewhat
different. These two little wedge shape
things are nano images where they're inscribed.
But they're non-functional. The matrix on which they're
inscribed and the way they're inscribed would never convey a
circuit. They wouldn't be useful as chip
technology. They're more like
demonstrations. Cyrus Mody and I, who are
interested in these things, liken them to the kind of things
that medieval craftsmen might make, where they would sculpt
objects that would have no use, but which would demonstrate
their virtuosity. These sorts of things can be
used as demonstration objects in potentially commercially viable
technologies. They have a property that we're
calling, it's an oxymoron, abstract concreteness, in a
sense that these devices are quite concrete.
They're inscribed on a material matrix, silicon or something
like it, a variant of silicon. And yet, they're abstract in the
sense they're abstracted from any useful functional property.
You can't do anything with them other than show them as a
potential, or an inkling of a potential object.
So they have both qualities. The abstract is important,
because the demonstrability of what's done is done with a
matrix that's usable and demonstrable.
These objects may not yet be functional for quite some time.
There's some more of them. Again, you can see that the game
is to inscribe these things in a fine level of detail, with great
reliability and linearity. You can see the measures in the
one at the bottom that indicate at what level of scale they're
doing it. But again, these, both the
material and the way it's inscribed, would not be used for
chip technology. I think I'm probably going to
be winding down pretty soon. I have a lot of material on a
particular test object that's very interesting.
And I'll try to briefly go through what that's about
without getting bogged down in detail.
There's a thing that has been a focus of decades of work in
what's called surface science. It's a variant of material
science. And it feeds into chip
technology and many other things.
It's very important for the development of probe microscopes
and for the field of nanotechnology.
Cyrus Mody's dissertation and some of his later work is very
much focused on this and related issues.
I don't think I want to go into what the 7x7 is about.
Maybe in the workshop, we can talk about that tomorrow.
But it's a crystalline, a silicon crystal that's exposed
of the surface of a cleaved silicon crystal.
It has distinctive properties as a cleaved surface.
And for decades, with different types of microscopes, but
particularly with the scanning tunneling microscope, it became
a kind of communal matrix for working out both the instrument
and its properties and what the instrument was investigating.
So like a model organism, like E. coli, certain strains
of it, or the fruit fly. Collective labors on this thing
sort of build up a progressive sense of what its genome looks
like or in this case, what the crystalline structure looks
like. And the instruments that are
being used to investigate it are themselves evolving over time
and being tested with respect to this thing.
So unlike the previous test objects I showed you, where
either the surface of the thing that's being investigated is
taken for granted or the operations of the instrument
that visualize it are taken for granted, both are kind of
bootstrapping themselves together in this particular
thing. Now that would be my
explanation of how the silicon 7x7 works.
It's on a Web site. It's actually probably a good
explanation on the Web site. But we'll leave that by.
It goes back to the 1950s, with Low Energy Electron Diffraction
imaging. First working on this thing and
then later in the 1970s, some big breakthroughs with the
scanning type tunneling microscope were developed.
But this crystalline structure, which is visualized in different
ways, was an object of choice for a number of reasons.
Part of which was that other people were working on it.
But it had very regular properties.
It was easily produced. It had inklings of commercially
important technology because it was about silicon.
And silicon, of course, has been the key thing for chip
manufacture. The people working on this thing
think the LEED pattern, and also the later patterns developed by
machinery was very complex, and even beautiful in the way it was
arranged. One point, I'm making this
abstractly because we don't have time to go into the details of
this thing, and I only very incompletely understand them, is
that this thing, this surface, however we visualize it--.
You see the bottom green sort of thing.
You can see kind of an inkling of a regular pattern.
It's not an atomic structure independent of the means of
producing it. Because the probe and the
slicing of this thing, the cleaving of its surface produces
a unique surface that is then laboriously related through
things like these paper models, which are actually made out of
paper, to try and reconstruct what the three-dimensional
structure might look like in a space un-interfered with by the
probing microscopy. But the surface itself, the
thing, if you like is an interface between a distinctive
type of instrument or family of instruments and the surface
being investigated. Cyrus came up with the idea that
it's sort of a whetstone for new theoretical concepts.
And one of the people he investigated or interviewed used
the term that it was a Rosetta Stone for surface science, you
know, something that could not only be useful in itself to
investigate, but which could crack the code of other objects
as well. Then once established as a work
site, it became very important for the history of this field,
developing as it developed along with it.
Various models were worked with it and theories were developed
on the models. Different measures, different
modes of visualizing it were done.
Let me get to my ending here. This thing at the top is a
business card. And non-corporate scientists use
the 7x7, and I've been using it as a background slide for many
of these slides here itself. That's 7x7 material.
It's become kind of iconic, like DNA has for molecular biology
and many other fields, as screen savers, wallpaper, and the like.
It is, as I said before, an epistemic thing.
It integrates research communities around a common
material focus and problem. In some ways, it's like a math
problem that generations of mathematicians try to crack,
because it was a surface configuration they're trying to
model. It integrated commercial labs
into a research field. And its concrete abstractness
bridged academic theory and commercial research, evoking a
sense of application while remaining purified.
I wasn't kidding when I said at the outset of my talk that my
study of nano images is not yet in progress.
It's at the stage of raising questions to explore.
So I'm going to end with questions rather than
conclusions. I do have some hints and
intuitions about how further study of this phenomenon will
go. The 7x7 test object that I
briefly glossed over gives us some appreciation of how at
least one type of nano image is both a product of manipulation
and a reference to and empirical object.
But rather an object that arises at the interface between a probe
and a largely unknown surface. It becomes simultaneously a test
of novel instruments and a model system to explore with those
very instruments. Now I want to go beyond where
I'm heading. I want to go beyond the
popularized images that I started out with that we see so
often, and in some ways are very enjoyable to examine.
But I want to pay more attention to the role of images in
work-day research. I don't intend to ignore
popularized images, since they may have a leading role, or once
have had a leading role in promoting the very idea of nano.
And it's an idea that's still rather hazy.
And while I'm intrigued by Daston and Galison's
observations about nano images being a new type of manipulated
object, what they call a presentational rather than
representational object, perhaps associated with an emerging form
of objectivity, I suspect that I'll find that much of the
manipulation is done in the service of getting access to
things that are available at the nano scale.
The things may not be so simple as rocks in the field that are
simply dug up, since their conformation is bound up with
the probe instruments used to visualize them.
And visualize may not be quite the right idea.
The probe generates interference patterns that need not be made
into visual images, but interestingly, they often are.
I also expect to find different kinds of nano images.
I don't think they're all one story.
Perhaps the haptic images are the most novel and interesting,
but I'm willing to suspend judgment on that for now.
So, again, like the field I propose to study, my talk on
nano is largely about the future.
Perhaps not a fantastic voyage, but an ethno-graphy of a
specific kind. I'm left with lots of questions
and I expect and hope that you will have some questions for me,
as well. Thank you.
( applause ) So we could probably have lights
so I can see people. ( inaudible )
I'll say I'm an engineer. The use of interference pattern,
I have a feeling that you have a different meaning that what I
would have when I say interference pattern.
Because the images that you were showing are not created from
interferometry, or any kind of interference, per se.
So what do you mean when you're saying these were interference
patterns? >> It's a way of glossing how
the tip is interacting with the surface and generating measures
through the energies that are exchanged.
Those are later converted through the programming of
instruments into these images. >> Light, also, you would say
then is creating interference, because light is interacting?
It's not projecting through the tip, though.
Is that right? >> It depends on the kind of
probe you're talking about. And one could say that the
properties of the sample are existing, as light exists in the
room, and that you're using a sensor to detect those
properties. And so that's why I'm struggling
with the term interference pattern.
Are you saying that it's interference in a sense of not
interferometric, but interference as in the sense
that you're not allowed to get an accurate image because of the
obstacle of the instrument being in your way?
I don't know. I think you're going, first of
all, you're going way more technical than I'm capable of
doing with this stuff. Where I got this idea of
interference pattern is, I mentioned a conference I went to
in October. There was a researcher who does
nanotechnology. He told the audience, you know,
that people look at these pictures and they think they're
seeing images of atoms, right? The peaks and the things around
corrals, or the whatever. And his take on that was that,
well, in some of these images at least, they resolve into shapes
that you could call them atoms, but that the shapes are created
by interference patterns in the interaction of the tip with the
surface. So that's what I was using as a
resource there. Did that make sense to you?
There are some specific cases where that's true.
But I think in the general terms, that's not necessarily.
Okay, well, I'd like to talk to you about that later.
This is something that I would like to refine.
The point is that with probe microscopy, there is this
interaction between a surface and the probe that is very
different from an optical type of interaction.
And that's basically where I'd like to make the distinction for
the purposes of my talk. But I'm sure you could instruct
me greatly on where and how that comes into play.
Yeah? >> First of all, I love your
epistemological nostalgia. It's a wonderful concept that's
new to me. My question is about your
question. How do they decide when nano
manipulation has gone too far? Are you talking about
visualizing nano scales? And then manipulating, what cues
for you would kind of evoke gone too far?
Well I don't know for nano stuff, because, as I said, and I
wasn't kidding. I'm proposing to go into an area
that I haven't gone into yet. Where I developed that theme of
epistemological nostalgia was in an investigation years ago of
digital image processing in astronomy.
I spent a lot of time with a guy who develops color-enhanced
imagery of deep space phenomena like some of those things I
showed you before. He had a conception of how much
he could tease it by adding infrared to the mix of the red,
green and blue color filters that he used.
So there was this sense of not wanting to go too far in that
direction. With nano, I don't know.
I think it's probably very different in different fields,
depending on what the preconception of the objects
being examined would be. Whether, you know, going into
freehand drawings of nanotubes would be okay, even though the
imagery you would get of such things would be not looking like
that. Or DNA for instance, we accept
the model of DNA, even though it would be really quite remarkable
to visualize DNA with any instrument that way.
So it's a question that I want to ask to ethnographic sites
where I would go visit. I don't have an answer to it,
but it's the type of question I would want to ask to see how
they resolve that question. >> We had a question about
interference, and whether the same could be said of
photography, I hope this is a fair question.
It comes from some of my own research on photography.
Chemical soaked specimens, light sensitive chemicals, and
the use of the contact prints, where in that case, the capacity
for light to alter the thing, and also alter the paper, is
part of the object that's produced for study, which one
could call an epistemological thing.
And also, an haptic process, even though we now understand
the properties in an optical sense.
So I guess I'm wondering if some of the questions you raise have
implications for rethinking the history of what we have
classified as optical. >> I think you're right about
that. The idea of the haptic and the
manipulative quality of nano images is something in the
recent book by Daston and Galison.
And when I read that, I immediately thought of examples
of things I had looked at in the past that seemed to have at
least some of that quality. Whereas they want to make, kind
of a big break through, because you can push atoms around with a
probe microscope. But that's a lot different than
using a light microscope where or a transmission electron
microscope where you prepare the stuff in advance, and it's a lot
of work doing that. But you're not actually using
the optical apparatus to manipulate the field.
But I think your point's well taken.
There's a lot of work in the real time work of using the
instruments, developing the stuff, where that kind of
working with surfaces, certainly with digital images processing.
There's lots and lots of that kind of work being done.
It's an intriguing distinction. I think that historically, I
would question it. I'm not an historian that would
be able to really refute what they say with any kind of
authority. But I think it raises intriguing
questions that would take us back to earlier types of
technologies that perhaps would allow us to see what some of us
have seen about them already. Yes?
( inaudible ) >> The second thing that
occurred to me was, I work with maps.
( inaudible ) You can utilize a representation
to actually change what people think.
That's something that I try to keep in mind.
( inaudible ) In visualizing social
networks-- ( inaudible )
To try and create some kind of graphical visualization, and
graphs of relationships. While I'm focused a lot on the
mechanics of creating those and also making them look beautiful,
I wonder about how much politically charged my message
is, as I'm thinking about it. And the last point, is sort of
based on that I'm also very much enrolled in the whole notion
copyrights, particularly copyrights which relate
specifically to protection of rights over creative expression.
The idea behind science is that science is objective.
I'm very actively involved in this whole movement of trying to
make scientific data freely accessible to everyone, all
because it's fact. It's not copyright.
As you very well said, I work with satellite imagery, the
photograph that you see is just a bunch of numbers on a disk.
You know, as soon as you make it into a photograph, it becomes
something that is copyrightable, while the numbers behind it are
not copyrightable. That tension is kind of
difficult to solve. I don't have a question, just
random thoughts. >> Again, as I predicted, the
last one would be the one I remember.
It's one that kind of piques me the most, because I actually
teach an undergraduate course on law and science.
I deal a lot with the patenting, you know the debates about
patenting of largely biotechnical stuff.
I haven't come across that issue with copyrighting.
That's a very intriguing thing that you can copyright the image
but not the numbers. That, I'd like to look into.
That would be very interesting. And of course, this whole idea
that science and art are kind of converging in a certain way does
bring in copyrights. Again, in the world of
patenting, you know, there's this distinction which has been
pretty much blown out of the water in biotechnology between a
thing of nature and an invention.
And of course, social constructionists get blamed for
getting rid of things of nature. But you know, the legal
apparatus has done a much better job.
The patent office and the patent apparatus have pretty much taken
care of nature. Everything's patentable in
invention right now. So it'd be interesting to see
where that line would be drawn. ( inaudible )
Well there are interesting case laws.
And I don't know about Dolly the sheep, but certainly about you
know, who owns the genes of genetically re-modified plants.
Interesting cases. But to have copyright in there
is very interesting. ( inaudible )
You're not really talking about what you said that he was
talking about, the phenomenon, representing what phenomenon
really? >> No, making things look like
what they are. >> Making things look like what
they are? >> Yeah, where he got that from,
he was doing, I wouldn't call it a study, but I think he was
talking to somebody who does advertising.
So one of the things the advertisers try to do is to make
the scenes look like recognizable scenes.
So their art is to present these vignettes in a way that the
things in vignette look like what they are.
And in a paper I wrote years ago, I think I distributed it
for the workshop tomorrow, I played around with the idea of
simulating things to look like what they are.
It relates to this epistemological nostalgia thing
in the sense that given certain types of, well, with the case
with the numbers, you can make the numbers look like a lot of
different things. So the question is what are you
going to make it look like? In many cases, it's made to look
like something familiar. Or, you know, the thing that I
think that's interesting for art historians, one of the things,
would be where do they draw upon familiar conventions of art, or
representation, or photography, in addition to the familiar
looks of things that we know about.
There would be familiar styles, color palettes, and things of
that sort, in which things would appear.
So it's part of that tension between the conservatism of
innovation and the exploitation of novel tools and practices.
So it's that tension. And nostalgia is to try to draw
upon familiar tropes, familiar images, familiar ways of making
things that appeal to the past in a sense.
( inaudible ) Again, I'm alert to this.
I think it's going there. I think it would have to, to
some extent. And yet, of course, a lot of
about nano that has been hyped, at least in the popular domain
is that it's completely new. This is, you know, this is
something we haven't seen before.
And even in Daston and Galison, there's a sense that there's a
new form of objectivity being created at this domain.
And yet, like the nano louse thing, I mean, there's a very
hyper-realistic look to that, even though it's a complete
fantasy, although the platelets look like hyper-real platelets.
There is this sense of photographic realism being
exploited.