Picture: Datenflug
“Designing Nature” was the title of an exhibition project for the foundation caesar, which brought together the creative potentials of art and science. A varied, iridescent design concept was developed, employing numerous facets. The general understanding of design relates to everyday objects: as technical design and applied aesthetics, as functionality and construction, as surface, and a structural principle. The exciting question posed by this project was the extent to which the category of design has found a way into the world of the natural sciences, image-generating processes, and micro- and nanotechnology, and the consequences of this development. “Designing Nature” demonstrated the fact that design also includes the world of the very smallest particles, that the design of the invisible is always realised via visualisation, and that these ideas can look back on a long scientific tradition, which developed via the interplay of imagination and manipulation.
The exhibition compared and contrasted working methods from science and art. It visualised the way in which artists adopt methods and visual strategies that were developed in the natural sciences, but vice versa, it showed that scientists also make aesthetic decisions when they are working on simulations of nanostructures, digitally generating the processes and structures of complex molecules, or devising experiments on the basis of simulations and optical models. In a sequence of themes leading from the ideas of antiquity to atomism, and via Richard Buckminster Fuller’s architecture influenced by molecular structures to the simulation of virtual molecular processes, the exhibition illustrated the continuity of philosophical, scientific and artistic investigation into models of the micro-world.
Publishing:
Stiftung caesar (ed.): Designing Nature. Modelle Moleküle Architektur. Ein Projekt von Stefan Iglhaut, Thomas Spring und Datenflug, Bonn 2004