Black is the New Black
Perspectives from The Artist's Road
Image from Diemut Strebe video (see below)
Recent advances in materials engineering have produced the world’s blackest black, called Vantablack. Vantablack is a pigment coating developed in 2014 by Surrey NanoSystems. The name is an acronym for Vertically Aligned Nano Tube Array Black. The company says Vantablack absorbs 99.965 percent of light, which made it the blackest of all blacks at the time.
Artist Anish Kapoor infamously controls the rights to use Vantablack in art, prompting artist Stuart Semple to develop Black 3.0, an acrylic paint to rival Vantablack that Kapoor is now banned from using!
In 2016, Artist-in-Residence at M.I.T., Diemut Strebe, proposed an idea to MIT engineers to create a black coating from carbon nanotubes which could make the most brilliant material on earth disappear. Both are made of the same element, but with different atomic arrangements. She views the project as a modern take on Heraclitus’ “unity of opposites”. Three year…