Nanovibrancy

Joel Ong
Assistant Professor, Computational Arts

Nanovibrancy (2011) was undertaken at SymbioticA, the Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts at the University of Western Australia. It was held at the John Curtin Gallery at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia in July 2011. In it, a silk eardrum is probed in real time with an atomic force microscope – its surface vibrations are recorded and amplified as a multi-channel sound installation. In so doing, the project decentralises the scientific gaze from occularcentric to somatic and multimodal; and reduces the act of listening from human-scale to the conductive resonance of atomic vibrations. Nanovibrancy features a mix of wet biological science, empirical physical data processing and the aesthetics of a site-specific sound installation.