An Aesthetics of the Invisible: Nanotechnology and the materialisation of information

Summary: Nanotechnology - the manipulation of matter on an atomic scale - is widely believed to promise a new age of molecular manufacturing whose impact could dwarf that of the industrial revolution. Around the world, governments and private enterprise are expending huge resources in an attempt to claim a leading role in the coming ‘diamond age’, led by the United States government’s National Nanotechnology Initiative, which has already received almost US$14 billion in funding. However, nanotechnology brings together researchers from different disciplines whose understanding and expectations of this new technology sometimes differ greatly. In this paper I will argue that the pursuit and popular understanding of nanotechnology marks an endpoint in a system of thought regarding the relationship between form and matter, abstract information and physical materiality. This tradition of thought has been present since Pythagoras, but began a new and powerful phase in the 1950s when information theory provided a framework of understanding foundational to the appearance of information technology and molecular biology. The attempt to develop molecular manufacturing reflects an intellectual moment in which the division between information and physical materiality seems to be breaking down, leaving a belief that even our physical environment itself is fundamentally nothing more than information.