© Charles Lindsay courtesy Minor Matters Books http://minormattersbooks.com/products/charles-lindsay-carbon
By Leah Crane
CARBON is the building block of __life as we know it, but this image reveals that the element is also a universe unto itself.
Artist Charles Lindsay created this magnified image by suspending carbon in water and manipulating it using electricity, vibration, temperature changes and infrared light – a process he calls “a hybrid between a kind of drawing and photography”.
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“Surface tension, microscopic dirt, ambient humidity and temperature play a role in the final results,” he says. The image appears in his book, Carbon, published last year.
Lindsay came across the intriguing patterns of carbon suspensions while experimenting with photograms, a method of producing images with light-sensitive materials instead of a camera. He placed his carbon suspensions on clear substrates and then digitised them using an image scanner.
“The images maintain this illusion of scientific photography,” he says. “Even though we know better, we read photographs as truths, and there’s a power in that.”
Lindsay, who studied exploration geology before becoming an artist, was the first artist in residence at the SETI Institute, which hunts for extraterrestrial intelligence, and is now the director of this art programme.
He wonders whether distant, alien worlds could harbour __life made of silicon or some other element – places where the carbon that is so vital on Earth would be just a footnote.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Carbon cascade”
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