In Alchymeia, naturally occurring steroids from athletes act as doping agents to create impossibly rare ice crystals with radically altered architecture..
Alchymeia
Alchymeia is a nanotechnology and bioengineering public artwork commissioned for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. In Alchymeia, naturally occurring metabolite steroids are harvested from the blood and urine of athletes to act as doping agents in ultra-pure, ultra-cold water, guiding the growth of impossibly rare ice crystals with radically altered architecture. The ice crystals in the installation are created using a similar principle of atomic recording utilized by snowflakes, but each crystal has a microscopic sample of human hormone introduced as a nucleating seed.
1998 Winter Olympic logo underneath the ice.
The freezing of water and the creation of snowflakes in nature is determined by physical laws combining air temperature, surface tension and heat dissipation in liquids. These laws combined with contamination in the form of very specific minerals, organic matter and other impurities in the water create a logarithmic scale of temperature and foreign substances that drives snowflakes to freeze and form in very predictable ways.
In nature no two snowflakes are alike because they are precise atomic recordings of all the histories in their lifetime, their elaborate structure mirrors the story of their life reinforcing the axiom that no two snowflakes are alike. In Alchymeia all impurities in the water have been removed, allowing the freezing temperature of water to drop to -40F. With the athletes hormones providing the only structure to freeze from, it forces the natural crystal lattice of ice to elastically deform, mimicking the rhythm of the atomic lattice from the donor sample.
The tiny ice crystals nucleated by this process act as molecular stories, or blueprints in which the larger ice crystals in the exhibition clone themselves from. The colors in the Alchymeia crystals are generated by the decreased speed of light in ice specific to the elastic stress placed on the crystal lattice by the doping agent.
The super-cooling environment used to create the crystals in Alchymeia is an upright, sealed, glass front scientific freezer, specially designed by the artist. Argon filled, triple pane, heated glass doors allow the crystals to be viewed via a high intensity, ultra low temperature back light panel. Twelve 9" x 9" x .75" crystal container cells designed for the project use a special plastic created for ultra-low temperature crystal work. Their optical design insures zero distortion of the crystals color, and there near perfect surface provides no point of contact for the water to freeze from. The cells are sterilized with ultrasound and ultraviolet light, filled with ultra-pure water, and sealed. Once the water cells are in the freezer, they are held at a precise temperature (-5C) most efficient for the seeding by the human hormone. A sterile pipette is used to inject a microscopic amount of hormone into the ultra-pure, ultra-cold water. During both research and exhibition, a control is used leaving one of the water cells un-doped (no steroids) and remains un-frozen throughout the exhibition.
Because of Alchymeia's "metagenic" status (i.e. the transfer and adoption of coded information between living and non-living things), and the novel use of bio-engineering methods at a massive public event like the Olympics, it was given the extreme requirement of being exhibited in total isolation, remote from a real physical audience, but required to be instantaneously available and to anyone in the world.
By using early telepresence, live navigation and control, streaming digital video-microscopy, time-lapse movies and electronic postcards, the installation could achieve the goal of being able to be visited globally 24 hours-a-day. Alchymeia received an average of 45,000 hits a day during the Olympics, and served over 500,000 electronic postcards from its digital video library.
Alchymeia's frozen ice crystals are not static. Ice crystal structures like these exhibit a dynamic process of boundary migration as the crystal slowly but perpetually renegotiates its internal boundaries. In a state of constant becoming, the crystals in this exhibition act as live amplified transmissions of ones physical presence expressed at a level of telematic so removed from operational awareness, it becomes a virtual space - even though it is very real.