FOR artist Dr Paul Thomas, combining artistic expression with nanotechnology lets his audience stand in the shoes of God.

His work in the John Curtin Gallery Art in the Age of Nanotechnology exhibition, entitled Nanoessence, saw him grow and watch a skin cell develop and eventually die, all the while scanning the process with an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM).

Nanoessence by Dr Paul Thomas allows viewers to 'play God' using nanotechnology / Image: Courtesy Dr Paul Thomas

“It considers the idea of at what point does life exist within this construct, because the whole nanotechnological rhetoric is that you can rebuild nature atom by atom so they can reconstruct life to an extent,” Dr Thomas says.

“I wanted to explore this almost biblical idea of life. When God, who was the first nanoassembler, constructed man out of dust, the figure wasn’t alive — He had to breathe life into it.

“I was interested in putting this alongside nanotechnological rhetoric.”

The experiment needed to produce the artwork required Dr Thomas to grow a synthetic skin cell in vitro. He then worked with Curtin University technician Kevin Raxworthy, who put the cell into the AFM where it was scanned repeatedly, each scan taking around 20 minutes to complete.

The final work incorporating the scans is interactive.

As the audience blows on to a prototype of the skin cell, they watch a game engine landscape in which they “fly between the layers of life and death,” according to Dr Thomas.

Based on the moisture of the audience member’s breath, the cell will grow and develop. When they stop blowing, the cell will die.

“It is you as God, blowing life into this artwork,” says Dr Thomas.

Dr Thomas, coordinator of the Studio of Electronic Arts at the Curtin School of Design, has been involved in the area of nanotechnology and art for five years and says the art world is becoming more interested in the scientific field.

“The influence of nanotechnology is starting to develop new ideas about what constitutes the material world, our understanding of scale, and what constitutes being a human,” he says.

“If we are all structured from atoms, then what does being a human mean?”

Dr Thomas’ previous work in this area includes Midas, which considered the particle transfer between humans and the materials they touch at an atomic level, using an AFM to record the traces left by man on gold and gold on man.

That exhibition was accompanied by the sound of atoms colliding — also built using information recorded by the AFM.

“You are trying to get people to have a palpable understanding of what atoms sound like and give them an idea of the effect of nanotechnology,” he says.

“When you touch something it goes beyond a simple touch – there are repercussions.”

Although Dr Thomas has had to learn a lot about the science of nanotechnology to produce his works, he puts himself firmly in the artistic camp.

“I don’t want to try to become a scientist. I try to understand the processes but to fully immerse yourself will take away from the imagining,” he says.

“I do try to get authentic data from doing the experiments and then you use that in a creative way.”

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