“The Banff New Media Institute continues to lead international art and science collaborations. Through investigating process and the languages of art and science disciplines, Carbon vs. Silicon offered a rich think tank environment whose results may be world changing.”

~ Mary Flanagan, Professor,
Film and Media Studies, Hunter College,
New York, New York

Nanotechnology researchers intervene at the level of carbon, shifting fundamental building blocks of matter at the atomic and molecular levels. Computer science and digital media intervene into the virtual, working with non-physical matter. If the digital revolution brought a new era, then the nanotechnology revolution heralds even more change. For one thing, it returns us to our bodies, to technologies that are literally below and on the skin.

Nanotechnology R&D is opening up vast new horizons in material sciences, medicine, biotechnology, genomics, and manufacturing, as well as computing, information and communications technology. Where do the fields of silicon and carbon overlap? Where do they conflict in concept and methodology? Both fields have the challenge of representing abstract concepts and processes that cannot be seen. What social and cultural tools do we need to understand these shifts? How can artists and designers from the physical and digital domain participate in the carbon revolution? How can we imagine new applications for these new materials, in wearables, architecture?

As humans, we have struggled with the limits of the speed of light, the vastness of the universe, the accelerated pace of digital technologies, and now with the expansion of the world inward, to a minuteness and complexity of scale difficult to imagine. How can we approach the responsibility to the unseen; what are the ethics of intervention? Digital media and cultural knowledge may allow us to ride the early waves of this tsunami.

This atom-breaking summit brought together nanotechnology researchers, members of the National Institute for Nanotechnology, applications designers, ICT researchers, social scientists and humanists, science fiction writers, new media artists, fashion designers, choreographers, architects, and designers to discuss these questions.

“Wonderful job – I wish more of these far-sighted, integrative workshops could be held. A great way to see how science inspires art and how art can inspire science.”

~ David Wishart, Associate Professor, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

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