Joel Kuennen, Object of Interest 700e (Installation View), 2023. Stoneware, Autochthonous clay from La Grammont (La Suche-Les Revers), metallic oxide glazes (copper, cobalt, zinc, aluminum, nickel, olivine (magnesium, iron, silica, boron, strontium, tin), silicon carbide, porcelain, biofilm (Acetobacter and A. oryzae), strontium aluminate europium dysprosium, neodymium magnets, levitation array, olivine+calcium carbonate composite, aluminum, olivine single crystals, insulating resin, enamel, poster appropriated from NASA/Caltech Exoplanet Travel Bureau.
Above image by the Artist. Documentation images below by Riccardo Banfi.
On February 6th, 2018, SpaceX launched Elon Musk's cherry red 2010 Tesla Roadster convertible into heliocentric orbit. The event was live streamed and 2.5 million people watched as a mannequin in a spacesuit sat in the driver's seat with one hand on the wheel. This event, lauded as genius marketing for Tesla and rationalized as a dummy payload to test SpaceX's Falcon Heavy Rocket, set a tone for how humans would interact with space at the advent of commercial and touristic excursions into the outer atmosphere and beyond. Fun, masculine, wealthy, powerful, a cherry red convertible traversing the solar system like a divorcee would, cruising through picturesque foothills and mountains, jamming out to David Bowie's "Space Oddity". The image is almost as absurd as the motivation behind it — to extend a particularly toxic strain of human culture into space.
Enter the Hyper-scientific Artist Residency Roundtable, research project presentation and slideshow
Object of Interest 700e is the culmination of my research conducted during Enter the Hyper-scientific, a residency at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Laussane (EPFL). There, I worked with the Laboratory of Statistical Biophysics to better understand the search for exoplanets, the conditions of abiogenesis (the beginning of life), and the chemical conditions that make life possible. After many discussions with Dr. Claudio Grimaldi, I began 10 months of work developing glazes for silicon carbide substrates using materials essential to abiogenesis, olivine single crystals, rare earth elements, and metals essential to the aerospace industry like cobalt, copper, and strontium. I glazed a series of six rods that are used in research furnaces with these glazes and secured them to olivine carbonate bases in the form of a wave, a technosignature emanating from the olivine oscillator installed on the wall.
Through my research, I became interested in olivine, a mineral essential to the life systems that have developed on Earth. It is also the most common mineral on Earth, thought to make up the majority of interstellar and planetary dust, and believed make up the majority of Mars and Venus' mantles. Our phones, watches, and computers use quartz ocillators to track time. These oscillators are simple piezoelectric devices. A charge comes in and the structure of the crystal changes that charge into a frequency that is highly stable. To hear the time of Earth, of Mars, of Venus, I decided to make an olivine oscillator.
With the help of Dr. Yong Liu and Dr. Arnaud Magret at the Crystal Growth Facility, we grew seven rods of olivine single crystal using natural material. We used a laser floating zone (LFZ) apparatus to create these crystals, a process which took six months. Then, used x-ray diffraction (XRD) to find the crystal growth direction and cut along that plane (histogram at right). We then embedded the crystal in an insulating resin to create a crystal oscillator and I connected it to a circuit to find its resonating frequency which turned out to be between 3.24 and 3.44 Mhz which is in the ultrasonic range. This was the first time an LFZ apparatus was used to grow an olivine single crystal and its resonating frequency measured. As a result, Dr. Magret, Liu, and myself submitted an abstract entitled Floating-zone growth of single-crystal olivine (Mg 1-x Fe x ) 2 SiO 4, to the International Conference on Crystal Growth and Epitaxy where we expect to present this work in July 2023.
The olivine oscillator is housed in a simple, malformed clay box made from the clay that caused the Tauredunum event, a landslide that produced a tsunami in Lake Geneva in 563 ACE. The tsunami hit Geneva with 52 foot waves, decimating the Roman colony. I also used this "disaster clay" to produce the bowls that support the porcelain sphere that represents the exoplanet in this work. The sphere is coated in a biofilm made from bacteria and fungus symbiotic to human digestion and strontium aluminate suspended in glycerin. I used the text-to-image AI Midjourney (at right) to help visualize what this sphere could look like as AI will now be bound to our ability to imagine the future. The sphere and bowls rest on silicon carbide rods glazed in olivine, cobalt, and copper which are seated on a stoneware frustum. The stoneware is glazed in cobalt, copper, olivine, strontium, nickel, iron, and has an olivine single crystal that was sublimated into the glaze with a boron flux, leaving behind a metallic skeleton of the crystal itself.
