When Victoria Vesna and Jim Gimzewski began engineering the
interactive, all-ages exhibit “nano” at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Arts’ Boone Children’s Gallery, they
did not anticipate aggressive children breaking the cameras and
microphones or getting lodged in the tunnel-like kaleidoscope.
Gimzewski, a chemistry professor at UCLA, takes all these
technical difficulties in stride.
“I just love the sense of freedom and fun where all the
restraints (of “˜don’t touch’) you normally have
in a museum are gone,” said Gimzewski.
With all these malfunctions and children running around
screaming inside the “Quantum Tunnel,” do the little
ones or even their adult counterparts understand the connections
between nanotechnology and the exhibits?
The creators, hailing from various departments at UCLA, stressed
that their intention is to create a fun experience rather than an
instructive science exhibit, especially since there are few known
facts in the field of nanotechnology. “We wanted to provoke
imagination, visions, thinking, questioning,” said Vesna, a
UCLA Design | Media Arts professor and the department chair.
As children play with the geometric connector sets on a mirrored
table, adults are challenged on a different level, interpreting
quotes pulled from science fiction, literature and academic texts
compiled by English Professor Katherine Hayles. For those who want
to explore nanotechnology more deeply, Hayles is editing a
collection of essays discussing the cultural implications of this
new science to be released in April.
The free exhibit, ongoing until September and inspired by the
new field of science, nanotechnology, invites visitors into a
sensory experience of sound and touch. Multiple speakers emit a
symphony of melodic humming sounds from different directions as the
visitor treads through dark spaces and push buckyballs across a
projected screen with their shadows. In the “nano”
exhibit, where a nanometer is a billionth of a meter, creative
thinking becomes increasingly important in exploring this field as
Newtonian physics no longer apply on the molecular level.
Andrew Pelling, a third-year graduate student in chemistry who
contributed to the sound component of the exhibit and aids in its
maintenance, explains that as nanoscience is in an experimental
state, “(the exhibit itself) is an experiment. It is
something that changes and throwing in all these kids takes out the
theory in the process of what works best.”
“Nano” relies on computer technology that is never
100 percent efficient. Since the opening, the already-sturdy
cameras and microphones enclosed in plastic spheres and connected
to a movable tube in the “Quantum Tunnel” exhibit broke
from children banging the two spheres together, and the wires
inside the tube shredded from excessive bending.
Kids try to climb on and toss the 3-foot robotic white balls in
the “inner cell” installation, so it is difficult to
make the association that the balls are remote controlled by
trackballs on a table found on the outside of the cell.
In the same way that “Nano” connects generations of
art enthusiasts, the creators of the exhibit wanted to bridge the
gaps between north and south campus. Master of Fine Arts Design |
Media Arts student Anne Niemetz and Pelling, who met working on the
sound component of “nano” along with undergraduate
media arts student Tenzin Wanchuk, are using the ideas from
“nano” in collaborating on Niemetz’ thesis. They
will stage a concert this spring called, “The Dark Side of
the Cell.”
“Stage presentation has to change with electronic music.
Most of the time (during the concert), we’re not going to be
physically present, so it’s going to be a journey to get the
visitor to be immersed in the experience,” said Niemetz.