 Okay, my name is Frederick and I'm an artist working on the interstice of art science technology now Since so many years, I'm really focusing on developing the blackest black material in the world And I'm trying to create a void space something that you totally disappear in so But when you think about it the question is also is black a color and we know That it's quite confusing. So on the level of pigments You could say that it is a color because you can mix the pigments and of course you get black So is it a color when generated as light? Of course not because it doesn't emit photons So one of my favorite artists is if Klein 1950s 1960s and he also played with the idea of a void And in addition he collaborated with scientists to develop a synthetic resin, which is called rodo pass It's a polyvinyl acetate to preserve the luminosity of the pigment So I really thought to myself how can I go beyond pigments? How can I introduce the next level and Then I kind of focused on nanotechnology and nanoparticles And if you look at the Lysergos cup in the middle, it's a Roman cup and you eliminate it from the back It goes from green to red That's totally Harry Potter and it's due to a surface quantum mechanical effect Called plasmonic resonance where electrons and photons start to interact So nano actually means dwarf it's Latin for dwarf and is the science of being very very small So if you take an average human hair and you make it 40,000 times smaller, that's round about nano scale It's one billionth of a meter. So it's very small So in 2010 I went to Rice University in Texas, Houston, and it's the Heimat of nanotechnology So that's where it all started and in the 70s astrophysicist Harald Croto, he was looking into the interstellar medium trying to find carbon molecular change and he found him He went to Rice University in the 80s collaborated with chemist Richard Smalley and together They made the first synthetic molecule buckyball or buckminster fallorini and Professor Ligima he found a way to extrude them into a tube a carbon and a tube and you see just there It's a hollow tube and it has the diameter is just incredibly small So then I started to think if this is all possible Can I make an artwork of it? So what would it be and then I thought okay, let's take this painting of Kazimierz Malowicz It's an icon of non-objective painting and supermatism. It's made in the 1915s So let's make a super black square So how do we produce this super black material? So we started in the lab by cutting a silicon wafer Putting it into an iron sputtering machine where actually you evaporate Atomic-sized particles on top of your substrate, which is on top Then it goes into a chemical vapor deposition room where you have a flow of gas It's it's lean which has a carbon-carbon double bonding and it starts to react with the catalyst seeds Which are on the substrate and suddenly you see this forest of black Material growing and it's quite quite fascinating in fact so in the middle you see a scanning electron microscope of this super black material and So there's just one thing I have to explain here It's called the cavity principle and that's how we capture all light So I told you about this carbon nanotubes. It has a very thin diameter So now let's think about Ping-pong ball and this ping-pong ball is a photon, right? And you have a box which is totally empty and you make a little hole in there So this photon travels to the box slips into the little hole and there it gets lost and the chance that it gets out It's almost nihil that is the cavity principle that happens also with these carbon nanotubes because this photon this ping-pong ball Cannot enter this carbon nanotube. It can only go in between the vertical aligned carbon nanotubes Just in between where it will you know travel under the surface and probably never surface again But there is another thing which are the nanowires on top of the carbon nanotubes and it's almost like hair Which I don't have and it diffuses the light in all directions so from every angle you look at the black material it stays as black and Also the irregularity of the surface because if it would be in flat It would have been a mirror and I didn't want to have a mirror of course So finally I made a couple of artworks and I call them nano paintings So currently I'm collaborating with John from NASA and his team to develop The black is black but a more improved version So basically we are trying to create more adhesiveness of the carbon nanotubes on the substrate We are also trying to upscale it because it's 20 billion of carbon nanotubes per square centimeter And the third thing is we want to make three-dimensional objects so actually carbon nanotube growth on top of three-dimensional objects and why is this interesting because imagine now you have a three-dimensional sculpture, which is totally black and You see it it will just appear as a cutout as a two-dimensional thing So you're making from something from three-dimensional to dimensional which means you have to touch it to understand the complexity of its geometry and that is interesting because then the artwork really grows into the imagination of The person who is looking at it and touching it Another thing I'm interested in is the photonic qualities of the super black material So how can an artwork become also a harvester for energy and can it be used in public space? So this is a render of Three-dimensional sculpture it's currently being built in titanium by the use of digital manufacturing and This model is now being used to grow carbon nanotubes on so it's going to be super black It's a model of the coal mines under Belgium So the relation with carbon and carbon it's clear so I Hope that I made science a little bit more human and that I made art a little less ridiculous So thank you very much, but before you maybe are not applause I have also a little black hole in my pocket and this little black hole. I'm going to show you right now It's a sample of just going to put this down Of the blackest material in the world currently and here it is I mean I'm wearing black, but I hope you see the difference so