Imag(in)ing the Nano-scale: Introduction

Slaattelid, Rasmus T.; Wickson, Fern

doi:10.1007/s11569-011-0127-x

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…It is common to many digital, often emerging, technologies such as cloud and quantum computing. And it is a problem that also concerns non-digital technologies, such as nanotechnologies, on whose visual representation there is already a large literature (except, interestingly enough, on this third-level kind of visual representations) -see, for instance, Slaattelid and Wickson (2011). For this reason, the specific case of AI that we consider here could then be extended to other representations of science and technology.…”

Section: The Unethics Of Ai Imagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Images of Artificial Intelligence: a Blind Spot in AI Ethics

Romele

2022

Philos. Technol.

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This paper argues that the AI ethics has generally neglected the issues related to the science communication of AI. In particular, the article focuses on visual communication about AI and, more specifically, on the use of certain stock images in science communication about AI — in particular, those characterized by an excessive use of blue color and recurrent subjects, such as androgyne faces, half-flesh and half-circuit brains, and variations on Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. In the first section, the author refers to a “referentialist” ethics of science communication for an ethical assessment of these images. From this perspective, these images are unethical. While the ethics of science communication generally promotes virtues like modesty and humility, similar images are arrogant and overconfident. In the second section, the author uses French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s concepts of “distribution of the sensible,” “disagreement,” and “pensive image.” Rancière’s thought paves the way to a deeper critique of these images of AI. The problem with similar images is not their lack of reference to the “things themselves.” It rather lies in the way they stifle any possible forms of disagreement about AI. However, the author argues that stock images and other popular images of AI are not a problem per se, and they can also be a resource. This depends on the real possibility for these images to support forms of pensiveness. In the conclusion, the question is asked whether the kind of ethics or politics of AI images proposed in this article can be applied to AI ethics tout court.

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Section: The Unethics Of Ai Imagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Images of Artificial Intelligence: a Blind Spot in AI Ethics

Romele

2022

Philos. Technol.

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“…One scientist comments: "If I can do this by making a movie, and I could get a thousands kids to join science rather than going to law school, I would be super happy." 14 Many of these images have been abundantly commented (Slaattelid and Wickson 2011). In nanotech as elsewhere, science-art projects are in vogue because they are regarded as means to overcome the unfortunate divide between the "two cultures."…”

Section: Nano-tech and Nano-artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design and Aesthetics in Nanotechnology

Loeve

2018

Philosophy of Engineering and Technology

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What is the status of "design" in nanotechnology? On the one hand, scientists doing nanotechnology refer to their activity as "design." On the other, the intervention of design researchers and practitioners remains confined to "the future" (i.e. societal applications and uses of nanotechnology). How are we to understand such a division of labour? To be sure it is not specific to nanotechnology but concerns the status of design in contemporary technoscience at large. However, the problem is more acute in the case of this "invisible" technology. Nanotechnology is supposed to be cut off from all sensible experience whereas design traditionally focuses on the shaping of the user's experience. After articulating the diagnosis and its implications, I question the status of a third player: "nano-art." I then draw on some resources of French philosophy of technology and aesthetics to prompt a new alliance between "techno-logy" (the study of technics) and aesthetics (the study of sensation) resulting in a re-conceptualization of design as "techno-aesthetics." The chapter closes by highlighting the political significance of such techno-aesthetic design for nanotechnology and beyond, for our everyday live amidst technoscientific objects.

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“…Concerned with the lack of standardization in scientific imaging, scientists have drawn attention to the limitations of modeling techniques, and their critiques can apply to the microscopic representations found in scalar travel documentaries. In the field of nanotechnology, some scientists take issue with 3D computer images that pretend to reproduce the atomic structure with photographic realism (for a discussion, see Slaattelid and Wickson, 2011). To create one of the earliest examples of these 'nano-images', Donald M Eigler used the STM tip to arrange 35 xenon atoms and spell out the letters 'IBM'.…”

Section: The Limitations Of Animated Models Of Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

Scalar Travel Documentaries: Animating the Limits of the Body and Life

Bissonnette

2014

Animation

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Scalar travel documentaries and their adaptations in interactive media present animated models of the body's interior and the physical worlds at a variety of scales. Featuring increasingly comprehensive animated images at microscopic and macroscopic scales, they help scientists better understand the structure of the universe. This article examines the poetics of scale and the diverse rhetorical mechanisms used in these documentaries. In Powers of Ten and Cosmic Voyage, for instance, the metronomic overview of the underlying organization of the natural world generates ideological discourses on the position of humankind in the universe. The mechanical gaze these films produce, it is argued, reveals the instrumentality of new modes of knowledge and the posthuman nature of our perception. Finally, comparing the various ways with which scalar documentaries animate scientific models, this article suggests that the visions of the natural world these films construct should be more reflexive of the limits of representation at the edge of the knowable.

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Imag(in)ing the Nano-scale: Introduction

Cited by 3 publications

References 12 publications

Images of Artificial Intelligence: a Blind Spot in AI Ethics

Images of Artificial Intelligence: a Blind Spot in AI Ethics

Design and Aesthetics in Nanotechnology

Scalar Travel Documentaries: Animating the Limits of the Body and Life

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