What do the Yin and Yang, goth subculture, funeral clothes and elegant gowns (like the one Penelope Cruz wore at the Oscars this year), the legendary tuxedos of James Bond, and the car that absorbs 99.965% of light have in common?
If you are an optimist, it is the combination of all colors. If you are a pessimist, it’s the lack of any at all, and if you are a skeptic – is it even a color?
The color black, or the vast concept of it, continues to bring, culminate, and express a variety of meanings in our lives. As Tokyo-born, gothic fashion artisan with an overt passion for black, Yohji Yamamoto, puts it in Fashion’s Poet of Black: YAMAMOTO, a New York Times piece by Suzy Menkes, “Black is modest and arrogant at the same time. Black is lazy and easy – but mysterious. It means that many things go together, yet it takes different aspects in many fabrics. You need black to have a silhouette. Black can swallow light, or make things look sharp. But above all black says this: ‘I don’t bother you – don’t bother me.’”
We are at a point of indispensability that has led to the personification of black; it transcends a simple noun or an adjective to embody a character. It should not come as a surprise to see the pursuit for the creation of the “blackest black” assemble voices across art and design, as well as those of experts of science and the physical world.
It is essential to understand the tremendous potential when physical and biological sciences intersect with art. Science not only serves as a great source of inspiration but dictates how different materials interact with the tools of the artist and how light interacts with artwork, such as painting and sculpture, and the shadows that are formed. The collection of sculptural models in Glass Microbiology, by Luke Jerram, is a great example of this type of interplay between light and form, and similarly chemistry, biology and the visual arts. To create his sculptures, he uses Silicon Dioxide — sand that is a major component of glass — a chemical compound composed of a bond between Silicon and Oxygen atoms, altered with chemically engineered additives to be perfectly clear and malleable. Jerram allows the glass to gain form and life, as it resembles different viruses and cells that cover the surface of the Earth. One of his sculptures folds into the spike proteins (S-Protein) of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus behind COVID-19, to bend the light, refract it and project science brilliantly to the world of art. There are many projects that are exemplary in this team effort, where chemistry especially excels as a dual-wielded asset, being both a source of inspiration and a mediator of artistic expression through a variety of natural and engineered materials.
Returning back to black, in 2019, MIT engineers developed a material that led to the accidental discovery of a black coating that was ten times blacker than what was previously said to be the darkest black. Vertically aligned, nano-sized “forests of carbon-nanotubes” absorb most of the light that is shone on it and trap it, before converting it into heat, which is minimally radiated in the infrared spectrum — part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is invisible to the human eye.
The way it looks in the nanoscale is that homogeneously sparse “antennae” of thin carbon nanotubes protrude vertically, like tall trees, at angles less than twenty degrees from the normal. These nanotubes welcome the incident light in a variety of ways: a portion of the rays are reflected, some are transmitted, and others are absorbed. When light hits a nanotube, the reflected and transmitted lights continue deeper into the forest, where they encounter other nanotubes. This cycle continues until almost all of the light has been absorbed and an insignificant amount reflects back.
As highlighted in an article by Jennifer Chu for MIT News, Diemut Strebe, an artist in residence at the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology, along with scientists from the same research group have worked together on an art piece. They covered a $2 million, natural 16.78-carat yellow diamond, mesmerizing in its shine and cuts, in the black material mentioned above. The coating they obtained was so dark that in the photos taken in front of a black background, the coated diamond, or rather the silhouette shaped by it, can be made out as a somewhat black hole floating in space.
In the same article, Brian Wardle, one of the engineers for the project, suggests that the dawn of interest in black materials dates back to long before the Renaissance. He notes the importance of researching black for the development of emerging technologies in space and in the optical sciences. Finding ways to create blacker coatings is essential for observing our universe, as they allow telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope to reduce stray light inside their optics, which hinders the quality of images captured. These newer coatings would allow for the more optimal absorption of internally reflected light. Previously, Vantablack, a commercial product formulated by Surrey NanoSystems in the United Kingdom was promoted as a coating observably much blacker than the black paint used in the Hubble telescope. When a light was shone on the Hubble paint, it was visibly reflected by a small amount, while no trace of light could be seen when it hit the Vantablack. You might also remember hearing about the “Black Beast” Vantablack BMW car, painted in the light-absorbing black. Although it is difficult to imagine, the MIT coating that was developed is much more absorbent. Wardle also adds that the “blackest black is a moving target”, highlighting in a confident manner the research-oriented approach to the question, as someone will likely find a blacker material.
As Professor Wardle reminds us, materials and techniques continually arise from scientific research and discovery. Science, as well as art, are ever evolving and changing at a rapid pace. The tools provided by this development of new ideas in a wide-range of fields work to expand our understanding of artistic possibilities and provide fresh opportunities to turn the abstract into the concrete. Science and art both inform each other symbiotically in their search to gain new insight and knowledge. New science encourages experimentation in thought, material, and technique and artistic endeavors push mediums to new limits.
