cc
invitation to present at this >meeting, very thankful to Jill
for inviting me, and also to Amy
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.
"Truth Machine," it's on This is about the
It involves a little bit about forensic DNA profiling.
quite a lot. visualization, actually,
a different direction. But it kind of went off in
book has been going on for And that project that led to the
But during that time, aI maintained my interest.
in visualization in science.
intensively. And I want to return to it more
something that piqued my And the nano-scale phenomena was
Now I suppose that it's fitting that I'll be talking about
future work that I might do on
history, nano has established itself as talk about futures.
To keep from getting carried
about my work on visualization, awpublished in the 1980s andth
1990s, on light and electron
did with art historian, science historian, Samuel Edgerton onI
digital image processing in astronomy.
I'm confident that that earlier work applies to nano science and
nanotechnology, nano imaging
Though, of course, I want to I'll call it.
that domain as well. find out what's different about
a joint paper that I have Padeveloped to some extent,on
relying very heavily on a collaboration with a former
Cornell PhD student, Cyrus Mody,
department at Rice University. who's now in the history
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
say, not necessarily large and a sizable group, I should
studies, but a sizable group of grouppeople doing ethical,nology
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
some time were doing. whoIt seemed to relate ratheror
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
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
that I'm going to be dragging out some fairly old pictures and
fairly old themes.
this new topic. Okay, visualization is a term
used in science and technology
also covers science, technology studies, and society.TS, which
It's a nice acronym.
essential process of making research objects visible, and
also making them analyzable and communicable.
Bruno Latour published a seminal
he kind of tied together some of paper in the mid-1980s, in which
And visualization, after that, these themes.
crossed over a number of kind of became a term that
The study of visualization boundaries.
publicly presented images and itextual illustrations.f
But it also includes much more, practices and instruments that
render specimens and other
formally accessible, and research material intelligible,
It involves aesthetic considerations, such as those
that -- and I explored with digital imaging in astronomy.
But it also, more importantly,
considerations, because of the I'd say involves epistemological
pictorial images in the dissemination and validation of
experimental results and
Visual images in science have drawn interest from scholars in
many different fields.
art historian's department, an Of course, here we are, in an
And art historian, James Elkins had a nice phrase when he.
suggested that art history
include images that are not art. should expand its coverage to
science, philosophers, cognitive And in addition, historians of
taken interest in visual scientists, and others, have
calls them, as distinctive modes construals, as David Gooding
reasoning. of evidence and expressions of
important for demonstrating and Viscritically elucidating howen
gendered assumptions have become
subsequently taken as iconic objectified into images that are
nature. In addition to being a truly
interdisciplinary or
research on visualization in trans-disciplinary area,
encouraged a profound shift in science and medicine has
between art and science. assumptions about the relations
less than Thomas Kuhn, that art had no serious generative place
in scientific research after the
Jill, in her introductory remarks mentioned something to
that effect, that often people
deals with science images, think of art as after, when it
production. Today, it's almost commonplace
to treat a broadened conception of art as intrinsic to modern
scientific research.
particularly astronomy, have And scientists in some fields,
and art history seriously. begun to take insights from art
research has raised the epistemic status of pictorial
and graphic images so that they are increasingly viewed as
original and irreducible sites
communication and thinking. But particular interest for this
proposal are historical and social scientific studies of
visual images that treat them as
express, and even make possible the production and dissemination
of scientific knowledge.
and historical studies of the In sciences have claimed thatal
visual images and the practices that compose and disseminate
them are primary sources of scientific innovation and
insight.
treatment of them as subsidiary to logical and mathematical
reasoning.
treatments that limit them to textual illustrations or
naturalistic pictures.
mathematics and natural order within textual and graphic form.
It is not re-presentation in the
independently worked out through sense of reproducing what is
mathematical analysis. natural investigation and
investigation and analysis. IInitiative for treatingf
visualizations as distinctive and original sites of knowledge
production, validation and
Martin Rudwick's 1976 historical communication goes back to
illustrated article on the article, an abundantly
geology. emergence on visual language in
particularly interesting from Rudwick's work is the idea that
early geologists exploited
as the image at the top there, exposures of cliff faces, such
mining activities. from things like canyons and
could be read or transposed into They presented surfaces that
back time. graphic matrices for reading
and then accentuating and coding Selection of good alignments,
diagram below, afforded a way of the linear strata, as in the
timetable. reading the earth as a
visualization is that the things A key theme in studies of
including the mundane technology seen are mediated by technology,
tools. of paper, print and graphic
their holistic forms take novel Nowconfigurations that areeven
unfamiliar and can not easily be
Consequently, there is a mapped onto familiar things.
contentious one, not only to struggle over time, and often a
which visible features are to be make visible, but to validate
The visualizing of what can not be seen, such as
in this slide here. That theme of visualizing
what can not be seen
First, the things can be seen if is somewhat misleading, however.
things through instrumental you accepmediation. can see
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.
many ways to compose what is There often are indefinitely
medium, or the graphic medium as seen through the instrumental
This is especially obvious in cases in which data, for
example, from X-ray telescopes
microscopes can be translated into graphs, tables of numbers
and pictures of various kinds.
the way that the classic Gestalt One thing that interests me is
performed with graphic work in themes can be reviewed as being
There's a couple of themes here. these illustrations.
was published in a French, I One is a caricature, actually it
today, called "Caricature," in guess we'd call it a magazine
progressively turned into a which Loupear.ilippe is
The story is that later Louis-Philippe was so incensed
by this that he outlawed the
pear became iconic for him. The other things is this picture
of a very well-known Gestalt
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
way. see one way and then another
the drawing itself. So in this case, you can see, or
perhaps get a sense of how
construction and reconstruction iof visual materials, in thea
sense that a philosopher once expressed, "That the painter
thinks with the end of his
In these cases, the lines in brush."
much in the way that verbal thrhetoric 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
or another feature, but to impression or to highlight one
things, to standardize, make rectify the appearance of
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
a discipline of Bertillon's bsystem for encoding bodies toed
control recidivism in the Paris criminal population.
Distrusting the identity that goes with a name, Bertillon
finds a series of measurements
arranges to standardize the mug to shot and the taking ofand
measurement.
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
graphic inscriptions on maps immutable mobiles suggested that
things and landscapes, enabling ithem to be transferred acrossn
time and space, reproduced 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
nature, mediated by techniques to trace back to the hand of
reproduction, what Latour afamously called inscriptional
devices.
as site of fact production Conceptions of visualization
developed by ethnographic studies of laboratory practices
beginning in the late 1970s.
the close attention they paid to One aspect of these studies was
materials visually accessible and graphically analyzable.
We could call such work, pardon the pun, ethno-graphics, where
instead of being a branch of
anthropology, it would refer to the participant's work of making
graphic phenomena.
materials that go into the Many pictorial and other
laboratory or field site, but are part of the material culture
of the science, along with data recordings, notes, and preserved
specimen material.
that stand behind the relatively Such images make up the archives
and selected for publication. Consequently, a methodological
requirement for studying
at least re-trace the sequential visualization is to examine, or
specimen materials are pathways through which data, or
candidate images are selectively transferred into images, and
analytical and presentational procespurposes.pecific
In a study of neuro anatomical
to Martin Rudwick's geological investigations I found an analog
electron micro-graphic imagery. This schematic from an article
published by the lab I studied
stratified region of the brain, sthe dentate gyrus of the
hippocampus, was exposed in a rat's brain and aligned with the
planes of thick and thin
in adjacent cell layers sefollowing a lesion to one ofs
those layers. The brain was selectively framed
so that comparisons could be
stratagraphic area. The roughly linear alignment of
the relatively homogenous cell
with a graphic plane and a page layface, so that systematicned
comparisons and measurements
Graphic orderings are not simply transposed from natural
surfaces to graphic devices used
activities. They also can be impressed into
the materials or terrains analyzed.
In this iconic image, the one on
territories. the left of the lizard and the
field guide, and I was told once I've used this many times as a
Xerox Park in California that I bbecame known as "Lizard Toes"at
because of this image.
marked by clipping its toes, one In this field guide, a lizard is
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.
captured is marked with those Alittle X's, which are stakes
driven into the ground so that
investigation is occurring is themarked like a Cartesion the
coordinate. It's then transposed to the
paper surface, so that the
The neuron in the lower part of terrthe lower right there ised.
encoded.
with an old computer card. You can see how old this is,
the numbers are then recorded and then stored electronically
in a database.
ordinary work in science. TAnd that's the point.ry
It is ordinary. It's part of the routine work of
making things into data.
formats to be paired together Itand juxtaposed in images.le
In this case a diagram of a mitochondrion, a cellular
organelle, in a text book is
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
Each member of the pair thus and drawing.
In the project with Samuel sort of complements the other.
1990s, we were interested in Edgerton in the 1980s and early
astronomy, where they were using some fairly early work for
CCDs. That cartoon image at the top,
that schematic of how the CCD works.
It collects energy, electronic
cosmic rays. energy, photons, sometimes
bucket brigade and tallies them And up in that bottom thing.in a
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
Looking on the left, at an image an image processing center.
And then on the right, it's a table of numbers that a
sectioned field would be
And they use commands to modify the image in various ways, as
I'll show.
this was on a touch screen, I actually have a touch screen ind
front of me here. One of the functions was called
"smoothing."
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.
computers these days at home. I thSo you can get multiple our
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
They can also convert things to map-like contoured things, and
then more continuous gradients, such as in this image of a
supernova remnant.
themselves, are worked over to Note that the raw data
defects and other features that are deemed irrelevant or out of
place.
the same intensity numbers and It isn't just a matter of taking
It's also some work, not shown converting them back and forth.
cleaned in various ways to make it analyzable and presentable.
This image here by a Boston University astronomer
synthesizes various forms of
So rather than juxtaposing data in one frame.
of a cartoon image that embeds different images, you see a kind
that went through the tail readings produced by a probe
of a comet. And in this case, the imaged
processing was done to kind of
different sorts of images juxtapotogether.ements,
They used rather an interesting composition with this
cartoon-like thing. Exposures using what was
vernacularly called false color,
functions, are done to bring out smoothing and these other
data collected in non-visible spectra, such as radio infrared
or X-ray. False color is used as a way of
denoting variations in
Often, light colors were used to intensity.
But this is not a universal or denote higher intensities.
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.
American." That's from "Scientific
blue and a yellow layer, and The graphic images shows a
cool gases inside this envelope labof exploding gas from at or
supernova.
was kind of inaccurate in the Tsense that there would be as
continuous gradient in heat intensity in this object.
So the imposition of the color
could call it that, creates a qualitative distinction, where
it's basically produced by
level of intensity in the brmeasures that were produced.in
He said this was fairly harmless
useful for interpreting the phenomena he was discussing in
the article.
indefinite flexibility for Digital image processing has
exposing or suppressing backgrounds, drawing lines
discretely or in a continuous or
The different renderings are hazy way.
purposes of investigation. often related to different
and blue can make red shift or So for example, enhancing red
Astronomers I spoke to back in energies evident.
Harvard and Boston University said they try not to cheat too
far in enhancing colors when
With non-optical sources of radiation, however, they're less
bound by any kind of intrinsic
Overall, there was a tension color since there is none.
possibilities of the equipment between exploiting the
ways, or in Harold Garfinkel's to make things show up in novel
what they are." wOnly 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
classic sorts of ways. familiar and sometimes in
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
And the intensities of the shift type phenomena.
that might be 19th century like. galaxy has kind of a composition
going to talk about today, I In the remainder of what I'm
that I very quickly walked want to draw some of the themes
nano domain. through and relate them to the
there's nothing novel about nano I don't mean to suggest that
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.
galleries, many of which are Nano images and image
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
Nano images, as well as the futuristic writings that often
surround them, such most
"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.
are heavily oriented to the future, dating back to physicist
Richard Feynman's much quoted,
about there's plenty of room at much abusthe bottom.t in 1959
I think that's true for sociology as well.
Visionary writings, most
accompanied by images of notoriously by Drexler, are
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
empirical reference. variable degrees of realism and
created uncontrollably by nanobots creating other nanobots
hitchhiked on the futuristic
This led to kind of a reaction a scenarios.
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
to address these complex hope will be possible, I intend
and practicality, by examining relations between image, object
images are prepared for aanalytical presentationalo
purposes. The futuristic fantasy that was
so much a part of early nano has
what, if anything, there is to encouraged skepticism about
Such images have been sources of the entire nano juggernaut.
of promotion and sources of constepopular excitement. means
The consternation came to focus in efforts by many proponents,
most famously Richard Smalley,
Drexlarian writings and imagery and publications in the early
2000's. Though Drexlarian nanobots and
futuristic scenarios have been
call for a more realistic orientation to physical limits,s
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
Many nano images are presented biology and genetic engineering.
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
entities, like brains or known along lines of established
there is often no familiar astronomical objects, in nano,
with which to establish what anatomy or conventional atlas
should look like. The empirical reference point is
less than obvious.
familiar surface with a probe. The user does not simply trace a
with the surface creates complex Instead the probe's interaction
Nevertheless, the processing of and such images often makeserns.
abundant use of conventional
Configurations of color and shape, and entire landscapes
that make them appear to be realistic pictures, rather than
abstract renderings of complex
scale graffiti. So in this image here, it's an
atomic force microscope image of
It's in an online image gallery. a crystalline structure.
a Martian landscape taken from It could easily be mistaken for
The most notorious nano images an orbiting satellite.
material interventions and are freely detached from actual
Many of the most frequently exhibited nano images are drawn
images, or animations of
landscapes. nAs Scott Curtis observed in ao
recent talk, in a study of
to promote nano scale technology, showing landscapes,
such images often have an airbrushed quality.
Surfaces and edges are smoothed.
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
Jay, which won the 2002 Visions photof Science Award prize.neyl
We discussed this in our
mentioned earlier, because of a cnumber of interesting things.I
The picture shows a transparent insect-like device with legs,
latching onto a blood platelet, drawn in kind of hyper realistic
fashion.
punctures the cell membrane. It has this proboscis that
sucking something out or You couldn't tell whether it's
If it's a machine, it's probably injecting something in.
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,
transparent fantasy. though the image is a
more mundane ventures into It has been used to illustrate
I don't know if you can read nanotechnology.
it's from the Guardian that thing at the bottom, but
"Nanotechnology Shown to Remove Arsenic From Drinking Water."
It's about a method developed by Rice University scientists,
which I assume has very little
creature. toBut that image is used toot
promote this rather mundane technology.
I don't mean that it's not
not something you would necessarily illustrate with that
picture.
sheer fantasy would, however, ignore the proactive value of
images. Without necessarily buying into
the Drexler vision, one can find
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.
stolen and I couldn't find an Unfortunaimage to scan.has been
While that figure was not mentioned to depict the process
it represented, other drawings
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
anything like that, or whether whether antibodies would look
To make a long story very short, this was sheer fantasy.
did lead research into what inlater would be called morees
accurate depictions or
involved. repThough at first, they wereena
viewed as impossible cartoon
Some models, such as the fantasies.
Crick's double helix-- schematic version of Watson and
because everybody knows it. I That one is impressed ine,
everyday life.
constructive images, for things that never or very rarely look
like that.
helix as a molecular model Although we think of the double
looks like that with a pictures, try to find DNA that
( laughter ) microscope.
striking cases of representations that are made
possible through technological
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.
generated that way, they're measures, basically, are then
translated into visual images.
of is far from intuitive. But In their recent book onures
objectivity, Lorraine Daston and
mistaken to think that nano images through such microscopess
are representations at all, or
They suggest, instead, that the most novel forms of nano images
are demonstrations of technological feats,
inscriptions of the most literal
and drawn at an unprecedented scale of what they call haptic
manipulation. These include the famous 1990
IBM inscription with xenon
All of these are IBM copyrighted atoms.
So the IBM thing, you've images.
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
things, and these kinds of galleries, little smiley face
They look like kids diagrams. Plus, the corral type of thing,
which is again, produced through
And the little false colored interference patterns.
to be representative of atoms in Hershey Kisses things are said
The resultive images some sense.
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.
the simultaneity of making and However, they argue that it's
microscope differs profoundly from the two-step process of,
for example, first preparing
microscopic analysis, and then specimens for light and electron
This suggestion raises taking images of them.
for historical research, but intriguing questions, not only
detailed practices of also for visualization.tudies of
The explicit way in which nano
production of what they represent or present makes them
an especially attractive topic
image production and use. If, as I believe is the case,
nano images continue to be
evidence, then the question is produced and used as empirical
novel and manipulative capacity to project their actions intoe
previously unexplored spaces, and collectively to elucidate
visible structures. How do they decide when the
manipulation has gone too far?
moral epistemological accusation And how do they fend off the
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
familiar landscapes and nostadiscernable patterns.ape of
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
But I think it's quite different some sense, nano manipulative.
What we're relating to is a 19th from what we've seen so far.
that in earlier work, I cdiscussed briefly under theon
heading of "Test Objects."
19th century objects collected The analogy then, is with the
to test the resolution and by microscopicist R.C. Goring
Dr. Goring is said to have power of the instruments he had.
reading Anthony von Leeuwenhock's work from two
centuries earlier.
regular properties, such as insect wings, arrays of rate
regular cells, and certain types
The objects are selected for of materials or diatomes.
reminiscent of constructed their regular geometric form,
In this case, what is surveyed alignments used for surveying.
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
instrumental vantage point. Later, constructed objects using
small rulers inscribed on glass were deployed.
So following Goring,
where he could use contemporary technology to inscribe glass ins
a regular way.
in glass at a measured fraction Andof the meter, in order to,ngs
again, test the resolution and
he used. reliability of the instruments
test objects with other It caepistemic things.mpare
These are research entities and complexes that integrate
practices and disciplines in
Just to move very quickly, some of you might be familiar with
these sorts of things.
the dracophylla or the Jackson You have model organisms like
You also have, kind of lab mouse.
One of our former students at Cornell, John Downer, wrote a
dissertation and published a
science called, "When the Chick Hits the Fan," about testing
engines with bird strikes.
Also, type specimens, where an This one is testing a canopy.
specimens is taken to represent indivia species or kind.on of
Then finally, the kind of thing we're going to be talking about
here, fabricated nano test
to the inscribed glass lines we objects, whjust saw.ery similar
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
tests of the fabrication itself, on the lower right, they act as
instrument. The scale of vertical lines,
their clarity and their alignment point to a degree of
control over the scattering of
and visualizes them. the electron beam that inscribes
presume the geometric properties Where Dr. Goring's test objects
check the optics of the observational instrument, this
instrument presumes the adequacy
imperfection and the of the observation to reveal the
Some nano inscriptions or cetchings can display technical.
virtuosity with clear commercial
A couple of students I'm working implications.
pointed me to a very interesting with, Katherine and Hannah,
written obviously decades ago, theme from Norbert Wiener,
type of image, "Operative in which WieImages."ed a certain
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
machine to print out the diagram, programs or encodes a
reproductions which are circuits,functional.t produces
So an operative image is an image that actually performs a
function. And its relation to the original
is not degraded, as in the
reproduction of art. classic theme of the
diagrammatic art. Now these images are somewhat
different.
things are nano images where These two little wedge shape
But they're non-functional. The matrix on which they're
inscribed and the way they're inscribed would never convey a
circuit.
technology. They woThey're more likeas chip
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
technologies. They have a property that we're
calling, it's an oxymoron,
sense that these devices are abstract concreteness, in a
They're inscribed on a material matrix, silicon or something
like it, a variant of silicon.
sense they're abstracted from any useful functional property.e
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.
because the demonstrability of The abstract is important,
matrix that's usable and what's done is done with a
These objects may not yet be demonstrable.
There's some more of them. functional for quite some time.
is to inscribe these things in a Again, you can see that the game
reliability and linearity. fine level of detail, with great
one at the bottom that indicate Yat 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.
be winding down pretty soon. I think I'm probably going to
particular test object that's I havevery interesting.l on a
And I'll try to briefly go
without getting bogged down in through what that's about
There's a thing that has been a focus of decades of work in
what's called surface science.
science. It's a variant of material
technology and many other And it things.nto chip
It's very important for the development of probe microscopes
and for the field of
Cyrus Mody's dissertation and some of his later work is very
much focused on this and related
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
And for decades, with different types of microscopes, but
particularly with the scanning
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.
sort of build up a progressive Collective labors on this thing
like or in this case, what the sense of what its genome looks
like. And the instruments that are
being used to investigate it are
and being tested with respect to themselves evolving over time
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
that visualize it are taken for ogranted, both are kind ofnt
bootstrapping themselves
thing. together in this particular
explanation of how the silicon Now that would be my
It's on a Web site. It's actually probably a good
explanation on the Web site.
It goes back to the 1950s, with Low Energy Electron Diffraction
imaging.
then later in the 1970s, some Firbig breakthroughs with thend
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
But it had very regular people properties.g on it.
It was easily produced. It had inklings of commercially
important technology because it was about silicon.
And silicon, of course, has been
manufacture. the key thing for chip
think the LEED pattern, and also The people working on this thing
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
this thing, and I only very incompletely understand them, is
that this thing, this surface,
You see the bottom green sort of however we visualize it--.
You can see kind of an inkling thing.
It's not an atomic structure of a regular pattern.
producing it. iBecause the probe and thef
slicing of this thing, the
a unique surface that is then cllaboriously related throughces
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
probing microscopy. spBut the surface itself, thehe
thing, if you like is an
type of instrument or family of ininstruments and the surfaceve
being investigated. Cyrus came up with the idea that
it's sort of a whetstone for new
And one of the people he theoretical concepts.
the term that it was a Rosetta investigated or interviewed used
know, something that could not Stone for surface science, you
investigate, but which could only be useful in itself to
as well. crack the code of other objects
site, it became very important Then once established as a work
developing as it developed along for the history of this field,
Various models were worked with it and theories were developed
on the models.
modes of visualizing it were Different measures, different
Let me get to my ending here. This thing at the top is a
business card.
the 7x7, and I've been using it Aas a background slide for manye
of these slides here itself.
It's become kind of iconic, like That's 7x7 material.
and many other fields, as screen DNA has for molecular biology
It is, as I said before, an savers, epistemic thing.he like.
It integrates research
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
model. configuration they're trying to
into a research field. It integrated commercial labs
bridged academic theory and commercial research, evoking a
sense of application while
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
So I'm going to end with questions to explore.
conclusions. questions rather than
intuitions about how further I do have some hints and
go. stThe 7x7 test object that Il
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
But rather an object that arises object.
and a largely unknown surface. at the interface between a probe
of novel instruments and a model It becomes simultaneously a test
very instruments. Now I want to go beyond where
I'm heading.
popularized images that I started out with that we see so
often, and in some ways are very
But I want to pay more attention enjoyable to examine.
work-day research. to the role of images in
popularized images, since they I don't intend to ignore
have had a leading role in may have a leading role, or once
And it's an idea that's still promoting rather hazy.a of nano.
And while I'm intrigued by
observations about nano images Daston and Galison's
object, what they call a being a new type of manipulated
representational object, perhaps presentational rather than
of objectivity, I suspect that associated with an emerging form
manipulation is done in the service of getting access to
things that are available at the
The things may not be so simple as rocks in the field that are
simply dug up, since their
the probe instruments used to conformvisualize them.up with
And visualize may not be quite
The probe generates interference the right idea.
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
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.
and I expect and hope that you I'm left with lots of questions
as well. will have some questions for me,
( applause ) Thank you.
so I can see people. So we could probably have lights
I'll say I'm an engineer. The use of interference pattern,
I have a feeling that you have a
would have when I say diffinterference pattern.at I
Because the images that you were
interferometry, or any kind of showing are not created from
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.
then is creating interference, >> Light, also, you would say
It's not projecting through becausethe tip, though.cting?
Is that right?
probe you're talking about. >And one could say that thef
properties of the sample are
room, and that you're using a existsensor to detect thosen the
properties. And so that's why I'm struggling
with the term interference
Are you saying that it's pattern.
interferometric, but interference in a sense of not
that you're not allowed to get interference as in the sense
obstacle of the instrument being an accurate image because of the
I don't know. I think you're going, first of
all, you're going way more
doing with this stuff. technical than I'm capable of
interference pattern is, I Where I got this idea of
in October. There was a researcher who doeso
nanotechnology. He told the audience, you know,
that people look at these pictures and they think they're
seeing images of atoms, right?
corrals, or the whatever. TAnd his take on that was that,
well, in some of these images at
that you could call them atoms, but that the shapes are created
by interference patterns in the interaction of the tip with the
surface.
resource there. SoDid that make sense to you? a
There are some specific cases where that's true.
But I think in the general
Okay, well, I'd like to talk terms, that's not necessarily.
This is something that I would to you about that later.
The point is that with probe like to refine.
interaction between a surface and the probe that is very
different from an optical type
And that's basically where I'd of interaction.
the purposes of my talk. like to make the distinction for
me greatly on where and how that But I'm sure you could instruct
Yeah? >> First of all, I love your
epistemological nostalgia.
new to me. It's a wonderful concept that's
question. How do they decide when nano
manipulation has gone too far?
visualizing nano scales? Are you talking about
for you would kind of evoke gone And then manipulating, what cues
Well I don't know for nano too far?
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
digital image processing in an investiastronomy.rs ago of
I spent a lot of time with a guy
imagery of deep space phenomena like some of those things I
showed you before.
he could tease it by adding infrared to the mix of the red,
green and blue color filters
So there was this sense of not that he used.
direction. wanting to go too far in that
I think it's probably very With nano, I don't know.
depending on what the dpreconception of the objects,
being examined would be.
freehand drawings of nanotubes Whether, you know, going into
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
to visualize DNA with any would instrument that way.rkable
So it's a question that I want
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
Chemical soaked specimens, research on photography.
the use of the contact prints, light sensitive chemicals, and
for light to alter the thing, whand also alter the paper, isty
part of the object that's produced for study, which one
could call an epistemological thing.
And also, an haptic process,
the properties in an optical even though we now understand
So I guess I'm wondering if some sense.
implications for rethinking the of thistory of what we havehave
classified as optical.
that. The idea of the haptic and the
manipulative quality of nano
recent book by Daston and images isGalison.ng in the
And when I read that, I immediately thought of examples
of things I had looked at in the
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
microscope where you prepare the or a transmission electron
of work doing that. sBut you're not actually usingot
the optical apparatus to
But I think your point's well manipulataken. field.
There's a lot of work in the
instruments, developing the rstuff, where that kind ofe
working with surfaces, certainly
There's lots and lots of that withkind of work being done.ng.
It's an intriguing distinction. I think that historically, I
would question it.
be able to really refute what I'mthey say with any kind ofuld
authority.
questions that would take us But I think it raises intriguing
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
( inaudible ) You can utilize a representation
to actually change
That's something that I try wto keep in mind..
( inaudible ) In visualizing social
networks--
To try and create some kind of ( inaudible )
graphs of relationships. graphical visualization, and
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
copyrights, particularly enrolled in the whole notion
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.
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
something that is copyrightable, into a photograph, it becomes
not copyrightable. while the numbers behind it are
difficult to solve. I don't have a question, just
random thoughts.
last one would be the one I >> Again, remember.icted, the
It's one that kind of piques me the most, because I actually
teach an undergraduate course on
I deal a lot with the patenting, law and science.
patenting of largely you know the debates about
I haven't come across that issue biotechnical stuff.
That's a very intriguing thing with copyrighting.
but not the numbers. that you can copyright the image
That would be very interesting. And of course, this whole idea
that science and art are kind of
bring in copyrights. converging in a certain way does
patenting, you know, there's Again, in the world of
pretty much blown out of the this distinction which has been
thing of nature and an water in biotechnology between a
And of course, social constructionists get blamed for
getting rid of things of nature.
apparatus has done a much better But you know, the legal
The patent office and the patent job.
care of nature. appEverything's patentable inken
invention right now.
where that line would be drawn. So it( inaudible )ting to see
Well there are interesting
And I don't know about Dolly the case laws.
know, who owns the genes of genetically re-modified plants.
Interesting cases.
is very interesting. But to have copyright in there
You're not really talking about what you said that he was
talking about, the phenomenon,
really? >> No, making things look like
what they are.
they are? >> Yeah, where he got that from,
he was doing, I wouldn't call it
talking to somebody who does a study, but I think he was
So one of the things the advertising.
the scenes look like advertisers try to do is to make
So their art is to present these recognizable scenes.
things in vignette look like vignettes in a way that the
And in a paper I wrote years what they are.
for the workshop tomorrow, I ago, I think I distributed it
simulating things to look like played around with the idea of
It relates to this what they are.
in the sense that given certain etypes of, well, with the caseg
with the numbers, you can make
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.
think that's interesting for art Or, you know, the thing that I
would be where do they draw upon historians, one of the things,
representation, or photography, fain addition to the familiaror
looks of things that we know
There would be familiar styles, color palettes, and things of
that sort, in which things would
So it's part of that tension appear.
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
things that appeal to the past images, familiar ways of making
( inaudible ) Again, I'm alert to this.
I think it's going there. I think it would have to, to
some extent.
about nano that has been hyped, at least in the popular domain
is that it's completely new.
something we haven't seen This is, before.w, this is
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
hyper-realistic look to that, teven though it's a completey
fantasy, although the platelets look like hyper-real platelets.
There is this sense of
exploited.