‘Sci-fi Miners’ - STARTS residency at INL, published at the ACM Digital Library
Last July, João Martinho Moura and Yury Kolen’ko submitted a paper to the conference: Artech 2019 - 9th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Arts, related to the research and artistic results associated within STARTS Residency Program at INL - International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratroy, the "Sci-fi Miners". The publication was accepted as full-paper and it was published at the ACM Digital Library - a worldwide academia reference in computing, especially in areas like visualisation, HCI, human-centred computing, virtual reality, and also media arts.
Sci-fi Miners, an audio-visual and virtual reality work related to a new generation of nano-clusters replacing critical natural resources that are becoming rare on planet Earth, by improved nanoparticle control. Those natural resources, critical metals, especially rare platinum group metals (PMGs), are essential and used for heterogeneous and electrochemical catalysis. As most of the things (goods) we use in our societies involve, at some step in production, catalysis, humans depend strongly on these natural resources. Currently, many countries are dependent on the mining industry to obtain these materials, relevant for fuel cells, storage of renewable energy, and pollutant emissions control. Although this article approaches a sophisticated technology, scientific bases related to the generation of new nanoclusters is not covered, but rather the imaginative and practical approach in the creative process of producing a virtual reality artistic performance. They also covered the creative work that inspired this research and focused this publication in the development of a series of visualisations, observations, reconstructions at the nanoscale, virtual reality developments and the artistic results that emerged from the interactions between scientists’ teams and the artist in residence. They also presented an introduction to some approaches between nanotechnology and the media arts, and described the artistic residency and the developments related to the creation of a virtual reality performance at the nanoscale.