Week 8 - NanoTech + Art



    In this week's material the artwork that interests me the most is the Nano Mandala created by Professor Victoria Vesna. The artwork consists of a video projected to a disk of sand. The video depicts a recursive scale of view ranging from the nano-structure of a grain of sand to the entire graph of a mandala pattern. The video can be watched below:
    The Nano Mandala (from YouTube)
    What I would like to investigate further into the artwork is the resonance between eastern and western culture about one common philosophical idea it conveys. The images of nano-structure of a grain of sand clearly makes use of modern science, which originates from the western culture. On the other hand, the symbol of Mandala in Buddhism is a famous representation of a universe in the eastern culture.


Thangka painting of Mandala
    Also, it is apparent that the artwork aims to establish a link between things of the extremely small scale and the extremely large scale, which reminds me of two famous work of literature in both the western and the eastern culture. One of them is William Blake's Auguries of Innocence:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour

    And the other is an excerpt from the Ch. 6 of Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra, The Inconceivable Liberation:
The bodhisattva who lives in the inconceivable liberation can put the king of mountains, Sumeru, which is so high, so great, so noble, and so vast, into a mustard seed. He can perform this feat without enlarging the mustard seed and without shrinking Mount Sumeru. And the deities of the assembly of the four Maharajas and of the Trayastrimsa heavens do not even know where they are.
Painting of Mount Sumeru

     Thus one may see how clever the use of nano-technology in visualizing the nano-structure of a grain of sand and the link between such an image to the Mandala representation of the universe is!



Sources:

"Mount Meru." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 28 May 2017. Web. 28 May 2017. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Meru>.

VIMALAKIRTI NIRDESA SUTRA. The Pennsylvania State University, 1976. Web. 28 May 2017. <http://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln260/Vimalakirti.htm>.

"Art in the age of nanotechnology." Art.Base. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 May 2017. <https://art.base.co/event/2104-art-in-the-age-of-nanotechnology>.

Blake, William. "Auguries of Innocence." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 28 May 2017. <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/43650>.

"Mandala." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 25 May 2017. Web. 28 May 2017. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala>.

Vesna, Victoria. "Nano Mandala." YouTube. YouTube, 26 Sept. 2008. Web. 28 May 2017. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OerNS-Lu2Fg>.

Comments

  1. UnknownMay 31, 2017 at 9:23 PM

    I really liked the way you were comparing the Western cultures of today with the Eastern cultures of the past. It was never something I had really considered when thinking about this topic

    ReplyDelete

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