Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe

Fine Art as a Force for Innovation in Greek Lifting Technologies

Introduction

“Hundreds of small new technologies and technological refinements occurred in the 800 years of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman periods, but overall the technological bases of production did not change fundamentally during the period.” McClellan and Dorn Science and Technology in World History 2nd Ed., p88.

“In art, [it is easy] to amass a glittering array of lasting classical discoveries” Stewart Classical Greece and the Birth of Western Art 1 Ed., p7.

These quotes, taken from standard textbooks on the history of technology and art, illustrate a divide in the treatment of innovation in classical Greece. While these are oversimplified assessments of the scholarship in these subjects, they nonetheless capture the presiding view of Greece’s role in world history from two disparate perspectives. To the technologist, Greece was a place of dull cunning, whereas in art, it was a place of constant creative revolution. In this paper, I seek an avenue toward mending this discrepancy in the historiography of ancient Greece by examining the intersection of Greek art and technology in one device: the crane. Previous scholarship by Smith and others suggests that artistic innovation can lead to improvements in utilitarian techniques as well.1 If this holds true in ancient Greece, then we can begin to question how and why Greek improvements in the fine arts had a more lasting impact on the western world.

This study focuses on the invention of the crane in the Archaic period, which provides a convenient place to explore art and technology intersections due to its general applicability and the relatively large amount of physical and textual evidence. Archaeological remains suggest that the crane was invented as a way to more efficiently construct monumental architecture, particularly temples.

1 Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure (Mit Pr, 1981). Smith’s work primarily focuses on metalworking technologies, but the theories he developed can equally well be applied to other systems, although little work has been done in this area.

Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe

These temples played a key role in Greek society as unifiers of secular and religious realms, which drove the creation of temples at a scale entirely unlike previous construction projects. Since this boom period for temple building in the archaic and classical era coincided with the appearance of cranes, it seems likely that the crane was invented to enable these grandiose visions. After being developed for monumental architecture, cranes found wide use throughout Greek society. In that way, the drive to build on a grand scale drove technical innovations that aided society in general. This path from art to technology, as Smith argues, is often overlooked in the modern world, to the detriment of technical progress. A deeper appreciation for the technological influence of art may provide new avenues for creative innovation, even for practical problems.

Differentiating Art and Technology in the Ancient World

Before discussing the historical record for lifting technologies, it is important to develop a litmus for differentiating art and technology in the ancient world. To modern readers, it may be surprising that art and technology should be at all difficult to separate—one brings connotations of creativity, beauty, and class, and the other industry, war, and rigor. Ancient Greeks, however, had no such distinction.

Instead, the much broader concept of techne encompassed modern notions of both art and technology, along with other ideas like craft, method and skill. Although it is essentially untranslatable, techne is perhaps nearest in sense to its English derivative “technique,” a larger idea than technology.

Rhetoric, sculpting, painting, metalworking, medicine, cooking, farming, and many other skills all fell within this blanket term2. In the word techne, we see art and technology living so close together in the ancient Greek mind that we must be careful in how we separate the two in hindsight.3 Our modern western categories – art, technology, science, craft, and others – have grown from this all-encompassing

2 See, for example, the use of techne in Thucydides, The Pelopennesian War, 1.71.3. 3 Chapter 1 of S.Cuomo, Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007) gives a good broad analysis of the concept of techne in the ancient world.

Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe whole over the past two millennia4. From the medieval split of liberal and mechanical arts5, to the invention of high art as a distinct category in the 18th century6 and the redefinition of technology from an obscure study of practical arts7 to a major facet of modern life, techne has slowly been dissected into finer categories.

Despite this greater specificity, art can still take on many meanings – including creativity, craft or skill. To prevent confusion, when discussing art alone, I am referring to the modern usage more specifically known as fine art. This includes subjects like painting, sculpture, and architecture, where the aesthetic values take precedence over practical ones. This modern category of fine art can be traced back to d’Alembert’s Enlightenment manifesto, the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, where fine arts are placed with the poetic arts, defined with “pleasure for their principal object.” 8 This definition, despite its age, cuts to the center of our modern definition of fine art.

However, since Greek art often served a primarily cultural role, fitting into a tapestry of social values and traditions, applying modern definitions that emphasize aesthetics may be anachronistic. Even the famous Venus de Milo seems to have served an educational purpose in the gymnasium of Melos9.

Shirer argues that, in these roles, modern aesthetic sensibilities would be almost wholly absent from the value of an object. 10 However, it is important not to take this argument too far. If the value of artistic objects in ancient Greece was completely independent of the aesthetic pleasure it induced, we would

4 See Eric Schatzberg, “From Art to Applied Science,” Isis 103, no. 3 (September 2012): 555–63 for a broad and valuable history of this speciation. 5 Elspeth Whitney, “Paradise Restored. The Mechanical Arts from Antiquity through the Thirteenth Century,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, 80, no. 1 (January 1, 1990): 1–169, doi:10.2307/1006521. 6 This point is strongly argued in Larry Shirer, The Invention of Art (University of Chicago press, 2001). 7 See, for example George Crabb, Universal Technological Dictionary (London: Printed for Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, by CBaldwin, 1823), where ‘technological’ is meant as the study of technical fields. 8 Jean Le Rond d’ Alembert, “Preliminary Discourse,” trans. Richard N Schwab and Walter Rex, Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert - Collaborative Translation Project, May 15, 2009, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0001.083. 9 Rachel Kousser, “The Venus de Milo and the Hellenistic Reception of Classical Greece.pdf,” American Journal of Archaeology 109, no. 2 (April 2005): 227–50. 10 Shirer, The Invention of Art.

Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe not see the continuous progress in techniques that enabled more pleasing forms. The invention of red figure pottery or large scale casting processes required resources and experimentation that would have been pointless if aesthetics did not enter into the value somewhere. Nevertheless, we should relax our definition of fine art to account for the fact that pleasure may have been a secondary quality for many of the artefacts we will study. Fine art, then, should be relaxed to have pleasure as just one of the principle objectives.

Technology, since it is such a modern concept, is in many ways easier to describe. I will take

Bain’s 1937 sociological definition: “technology includes all tools, machines, utensils, weapons, instruments, housing, clothing, communicating and transporting devices and the skills by which we produce and use them.”11 The breadth of this view is necessary in order to apply this modern concept to the classical world. The tools of technology can be derived and applied in a variety of contexts, from the fine arts (sculpting) to the pragmatic tasks of daily life (carrying water).

The Utility of Monumental Construction in the Archaic and Classical Eras

The cultural system of monumental architecture created a strong incentive for the creation of awe inspiring architectures at a vast scale, which provided the impetus for the crane and other technologies. Greek temples of the Archaic and Classical eras were honorable outlets for the wealth that cities and individuals might gain through trade or war. Whereas early (before the 8th century) temples were simple wood and clay structures similar to common houses, they quickly blossomed with the economic and martial growth of Greece in the Archaic period12. This is likely because temples allowed a way for Greek city states and individuals to display megalopsychia, or magnanimity, a term that

11 Read Bain, “Technology and State Government,” American Sociological Review 2, no. 6 (December 1, 1937): 860–74, doi:10.2307/2084365.

12 Tomlinson R. A, Greek Sanctuaries (Book Club, 1976).

Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe frequently appears on dedicatory inscriptions.13 Aristotle defines this word in part by the grandness of the dedications a person makes, “The man who in small or middling things spends according to the merits of the case is not called magnificent (e.g. the man who can say 'many a gift I gave the wanderer'), but only the man who does so in great things.”14 This type of virtue, unlike the virtue of liberality described earlier in the Nichomacean Ethics, is fundamentally not egalitarian: it requires significant capital, applied properly. Megalopsychia demonstrates the close link the Greek mind between monumental giving and ethical virtue, which suggests that one of the main forces driving the temple growth in the Archaic period was the desire to display greatness by religious dedication. Temples, since they were not necessary for Greek religious practice,15 should be seen as the ultimate form of offering.

These forces are particularly clear at Olympia. The large and famous temple of Zeus was paid for by Elis with the spoils of war from their defeat of Pisa, according to Pausanias writing in the Roman era.16 These two city states had vied for control over the sacred Olympia site for hundreds of years,17 so the temple can be seen as a boast of final victory. The impressive size of the temple (approximately 27m by 37m) made it the largest in mainland Greece until the Parthenon barely exceeded the record roughly fifty years later. This imposing size would have instilled a sense of awe over the supplicant, both for the gods housed within, but also for the people who built the monumental structure. This added to Elis’s prestige. In return, the religious cult of Zeus at Olympia received a powerful educational tool. As

Osborne notes, ancient Greeks were largely illiterate, so cultural lessons and stories had to be

13 Edmund Thomas, Monumentality and the Roman Empire: Architecture in the Antonine Age (OUP Oxford, 2007), 19. 14 Aristolte, Nichomacean Ethics, l122a26-29. Translation from James Stover and Ronald Polansky, “Moral Virtue and Megalopsychia,” Ancient Philosophy 23, no. 2 (2003): 351–59, doi:10.5840/ancientphil200323231. 15 Instead, the altar formed the center point of religion in ancient Greece. For example, the great ash altar at Olympia existed hundreds of years before the first construction started, on treasuries to contain dedicated items. Instead, the temple primarily served as a protective housing for cult statues and metaphorically as the house of the god. See Tomlinson, Greek Sanctuaries. 16 Pausanias, Description of Greece, 5.10.2. 17 Tomlinson, Greek Sanctuaries.

Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe transmitted visually, and temples serve admirably for this purpose. 18 The sculptural program of the temple featured stories from the founding of Olympia—the mythical oath of Oinomaos and Pelops before their chariot race on the east pediment, as well as more general stories such as the labors of

Hercules are depicted on the metopes surrounding the temple. This highlights the mutually beneficial role that temples played for Greek religious and civil institutions: a city state gained some reflection of the respect given the sanctuary, and the religious cult gained an educational tool.

The benefit a city state derives from commissioning a temple can be more clearly seen in the context of the secular uses of temples in the Archaic and Classical eras. At Athens, during the height of its power in the fifth century BCE, the Parthenon was the final destination of the great Panathenaic

Procession, in which city states allied with and subordinate to Athens brought tribute to the Akropolis.

The frieze of the Parthenon displays this procession, which legitimizes this controversial practice by associating it with the sacred act of dedication. The gods at the end of the frieze suggest that Athenian arche (empire) is somehow fundamentally divine. However, it seems unlikely that the frieze was designed as a propaganda tool. As Holsher points out, the distance between viewer and image makes it unlikely the designers sought “to intensely influence and persuade their specific audience.”19 While the original paint may have improved visibility and the column positions may have been altered to improve the view of the frieze,20 the frieze is so difficult to see that it would be of little help convincing others of

Athens's divine right. Instead, the Athenian aristocrats who commissioned the temple would be the ones to closely inspect the frieze, which suggests the frieze played a role in self-justification of the

Athenian arche. In that way, building the Parthenon enabled the secular political forces within Athens to assert their own identity.

18 Robin Osborne, N. Keith Rutter, and Brian Sparkes, “Archaic and Classical Greek Temple Sculpture and the Viewer,” in Word And Image In Ancient Greece (Edinburgh University Press, 2000). 19 Tonio Holscher, “Architectural Sculpture: messages? Programs? Towards rehabilitating the notion of ‘decoration,’” in Structure, Image and Ornament, ed. Peter Schultz (Oxbow Books, 2009), 54. 20 Jennifer Neils, The Parthenon Frieze (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 38.

Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe

The Invention of the Crane

Figure 1: A possible form for early Greek cranes.21

Temples, with their ability to unify political and religious objectives and assert a city state’s identity, served a key role in the growing Greek society of the Archaic and Classical eras. These utilities drove new construction that could not be supported by older building methods. The traditional approach for constructing these monumental structures, likely derived from the techniques of the

Egyptians, was exceedingly laborious, particularly for larger structures. In this method, a shallow earthen ramp was built and the large elements were rolled or dragged into place. As the structure became larger, the ramps had to be heightened, and eventually removed.22 This is the method that Pliny suggests was used to place the lintels of the massive Temple of Artemis at Ephesus as late as the mid-6th century23. Shortly after, use of the crane and other lifting technologies appears to have largely supplanted this older method. Indirectly, the distinctive holes from Lewis irons and lifting tongs that appear on several buildings constructed in the late sixth century BCE suggest wide adoption of the crane

21 Figure by Eric Gaba. Attribution-Sharealike license. 22 Andrew I. Wilson, “Machines in Greek and Roman Technology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, ed. John Peter Oleson (Oxford University Press, 2009). 23 Pliny, Natural History, 36.14.

Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe near this time period24. While the crane may have existed before this time, there is no record of use before these lifting aids appear, which suggests that the crane was developed for monumental architecture. The crane enabled much faster and cheaper construction of large buildings, but cranes also limited the weight of individual elements, causing a shift toward smaller blocks, though later innovations increased the maximum moveable weight25.

There are no surviving records of the form of these early cranes, but later designs26 suggest they may have been simple frame structures held up with tension ropes (see Figure 1 for a reconstruction).

The lifting motion would likely have been accomplished with just a simple winch. Coulton argues, based on mass of blocks lifted that the compound pulley may have also been used as soon as the late 6th century BCE.27 These compound pulleys, along with the winch, utilize the principles of mechanical advantage to allow workers to lift heavier loads at the cost of moving more slowly. As Vitruvius, the famous Roman architect writing in the 1st century BCE, notes, these machines could be “ingenious and suitable for quick work”28, and they enabled much of the architecture that classical Greece is famous for.

It is important to note, however, that the crane fit in with a wide variety of other lifting and moving technologies. The Greek crane was almost exclusively a lifting device—unlike modern cranes, horizontal motion could only be finely controlled with great difficulty. Cranes were nonetheless effective for the architraves, which could be lifted between the columns and rotated into place, but for many other elements, a crane have been used to lift a block to another crew that rolls it horizontally. 29 Despite these limitations the crane facilitated, and arguably enabled, a late archaic and Classical boom in monumental architecture projects.

24 J. J. Coulton, “Lifting in Early Greek Architecture,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 94 (November 1974): 1–19, doi:10.2307/630416. 25 Wilson, “Machines in Greek and Roman Technology.” 26 Hero, Mechanica,3.2; Vitruvius, De Architectura, 10.2. 27 Coulton, “Lifting in Early Greek Architecture.” 28 Vitruvius, De Architectura, 10.2.8. 29 Carmelo Malacrino, Constructing the Ancient World: Architectural Techniques of the Greeks and Romans, 1 edition (Los Angeles, Calif: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010), 102.

Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe

Spread of the Crane outside Monumental Construction

The crane did not stay trapped within monumental architecture. Slowly, the crane became a general purpose tool in the Greek world, spanning construction, ship handling, and war. One of the better examples of this phenomenon is the possible remains of a crane found near the diolkos, an overland transportation route crossing the Isthmus of Corinth.30 This crane was likely used for lifting cargo, but may have also lifted warships to cross them to Gulf of Corinth.31 This suggests that the crane quickly became a more generic tool for lifting in a variety of contexts, and was not relegated to an industry-specific tool. There are few other primary sources suggesting crane usage in ancient Greece.

Instead, we must skip forward several hundred years to the Roman era.

Vitruvius describes several different uses of cranes in De Architectura, including variations of the common crane used to lift architectural elements, as well as a more innovative use that formed a part of pile driver. The standard lifting crane took on many forms, named by the number of pulleys used—

Vitruvius mentions the tri-, pente-, and poly- paston32. However, despite variations in the form of these cranes, the function remains primarily to lift large elements of stone or metal during the construction of monumental architecture. The pile driver, however, uses this same motion in an innovative way. By lifting a large weight and dropping it sharply onto a spike, pile drivers could sink poles deep into the earth, creating a stable anchorage where the soil might otherwise prevent large scale construction of bridges or roads.33 Vitruvius and Caesar only mention these devices and do not discuss the details of their construction. However, the need for large weights lifted high above the spike and the form of later pile drivers suggests that they would likely have involved variations on the pulley and crane that were

30 Thucydides, The Pelopennesian War, 3.15 and 8.7. 31 Brian R. MacDonald, “The Diolkos,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 106 (1986): 191, doi:10.2307/629658. 32 Vitruvius, De Architectura, 10.2. 33 Vitruvius, De Architectura, 3.4.2;Caeser, Commentarii De Bello Gallico, 4.17.

Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe originally developed for monumental architecture. Thus we see the technology, originally developed in one place, transferring to another.

Looking further afield, there are also several tales related to Archimedes that demonstrate the wide variety of uses ancient Greeks adapted the crane for. According to several sources, Archimedes developed a method of moving enormous weights, culminating in a demonstration to Heiro II in which he launched a grain freighter with one hand while sitting down34. Oribasios suggests that Archimedes invented the polyapaston in order to do so. Archimedes may have also used such pulleys as part of his famous hook devices described by Livy and Plutarch that were used to capsize roman ships in the

Syracuse harbor during the second Punic War.35 Recent cross disciplinary scholarship suggests that these hooks would likely have been feasible, and would have required some sort of mechanical advantage besides the lever, likely from a pulley system36. Both of these innovations demonstrate the wide variety of ways lifting technologies were adapted to other problems throughout the ancient world. What had started as a tool of the architect for creating architectural dedications became a widespread tool of daily life.

It is difficult to draw a direct line in the historical data between the crane developed in the

Greek world during the late sixth century BCE and these later practical technologies, however, the incremental evolution toward more elaborate machines suggests steady progress from the winch crane, to the compound pulley crane, to the more advanced variations described by Vitruvius or associated with Archimedes. Archimedes and other anonymous inventors would likely have seen the crane in operation frequently, since it was such a generic tool, particularly if many of those inventors themselves worked as architects coordinating construction. So while a direct causal relationship is impossible to

34 Plutarch, Life of Marcellus, 14.8; Oribasios, Medical Collections, 49.6 and 23. 35 Plutarch, Life of Marcellus, 15.2; Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, 34.10. 36C. K. Young, “Archimedes’s Iron Hand or Claw – a New Interpretation of an Old Mystery,” Centaurus 46, no. 3 (2004): 189–207.

Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe draw, it nonetheless seems that the invention of the crane in an artistic context led to a wide variety of further applications throughout ancient daily life.

Figure 2: A relief on the grave of Haterius Antigonus in Rome for the first or second century CE depicting a later roman crane

on the left, with compound pulleys driven by a human powered treadwheel.37

The crane is in many ways an ideal candidate for technology transfer because of the versatility of construction techniques and the class-spanning nature of architects’ work. The same crews of laborers and craftsmen that worked on temples would have worked on a wide variety of projects as well, both artistic and mundane.38 Because of this it would have been easy for a crew to adapt technology developed for one project to another. Thus transfer of this technology was aided by the fine

37 Image credit to Barbara McManus (1988). 38 The crews of craftsmen required to create a temple covered an astonishing variety of fields. Pausanias, Description of Greece, 12.5-7 writes “The craftsmen who elaborated and worked upon these materials were builders, molders, bronze-workers, stone-cutters, dyers, fold and ivory workers, painters, embroiderers, and engravers; in addition there were suppliers and transporters of materials, like the merchants, sailors, and navigators by sea an, by land, the wagon makers, the breeders of draught animals, drivers, rope-makers, linen-weavers, road-builders, and miners. And each craft, just as a general has his own army, kept his own private throng of workers organized like an army, as an instrument and body of service.” Translation from John Humphrey, John Oleson, and Sherwood Andrew, Greek and Roman Technology: A Sourcebook (Routledge, 1997), 264.

Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe boundary between what we anachronistically refer to as the artistic and practical fields of architecture and construction.

Perhaps even more importantly is the odd position that architects held in ancient Greece, which is unique for being at the border of the low class craftsman world and the high class world of the educated, wealthy, landowners. Vitruvius, in the first chapter of his architectural encyclopedia, begins by emphasizing this point, writing, “Architects who boorishly seek manual skill will not receive prestige for their work, while those who examine thought and literature follow an image, not reality. Those who conquer both… gain power and meet their goals.”39 Thus, architects could avoid the deep divide between theory and practice that pervaded the rest of classical society40. This may have enabled a greater rate of innovation because, for example, architects could write about their inventions and pass that knowledge along, as Vitruvius did.

Conclusions

I argue that the crane should be added to the body of practical inventions which came into the world thanks to a human passion for fine arts. While the crane may have been invented as a faster way to satisfy a cultural itch for building monumental architecture at an unheard-of rate, it eventually came to be a central tool throughout civil engineering. This story—artistic experiments creating new innovations that can be applied to practical pursuits—is something that has occurred in a wide variety of other contexts and time periods. In particular, the works of Smith suggest that such transfer was critical

39 Vitruvius, De Architectura, 1.1.2. 40 See John Peter Oleson, “Introduction,” in The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World (Oxford University Press, 2009). This divide, and the slower pace of technological development that it created, has been a main thesis of the scholarship of classical technology since the 1950s. Manual laborers were looked down upon in ancient Greece. Xenophon, On Household Management, 4.2 writes “The so-called vulgar arts are spoken against and rightly held in contempt in our states, for they ruin the bodies of those practicing them and those who supervise, forcing them to sit still and pass their time indoors… As their bodies are softened so too their minds.” This attitude meant that practical inventions were rarely written about or thought about by the educated upper classes, hindering the transfer and development of ideas.

Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe to the development of metallurgy well into the 19th century. From early casting techniques, perfected by artisans working to create finer details on decorative objects,41 to the development of mass production technologies derived from decorative stamping procedures,42 the metalworking industry owes a great debt to the world of fine art. We can add to this list the central role of artistic reproduction in biology, the practical understanding of acids and bases learned in decorative etching, and the knowledge of chemistry gained developing new dyes43. While art does not need any extrinsic justification, this history nonetheless suggests that the pursuit of art is useful for more than gratia artis.

Despite this historical background, art and technology are still largely seen as orthogonal pursuits in the modern world, both by practitioners and the general public. There may be exceptions, for example in the design-oriented software industry,44 but on the whole art is rarely considered as an avenue toward deep innovation. This societal blind spot discourages artists, scientists, engineers, and funding agencies from actively pursuing the interdisciplinary collaboration that can, as shown here, lead to deep innovation. Whereas crane technologies may have been able to move to other applications because of the close relationship between different fields of construction in ancient Greece, our strong divide discourages transfer of techniques.

Practically, such technology-art partnerships may be difficult to conceptualize. In my own field of nano-engineering, however, there are signs of a growing intersection between art and science in the nanoart movement. 45 The main patrons of this new discipline have been nanoscale photo competitions

41 Cyril Stanley Smith, “The Early History of Casting, Molds, and the Science of Solidification,” in A Search for Structure (MIT Press, 1981). 42 Cyril Stanley Smith, “Reflections on Technology and the Decorative Arts in the Nineteenth Century,” in A Search for Structure (MIT Press, 1981). 43 Lynete I. Rhodes, Science Within Art (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1980). 44 R. L. Rutsky, High Techne: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman, 1 edition (Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1999). 45 Paul Thomas, Nanoart: The Immateriality of Art (Intellect Ltd, 2013).

Olin College AHS Capstone Fall 2014 Jeff Holzgrafe aimed at researchers,46 so most works have been made by people who identify as scientists and engineers, making these images as incidental side projects to their main research. To fully embrace the capabilities of artistic innovation, an independent discipline focused on creating nanoscale art, with the scientific tools and knowledge to develop new techniques in the pursuit of aesthetics. This could be a way to inject new creativity into the nanoengineering world; adding aesthetic goals gives us new directions to improve fabrication technology. The history of practical artistic innovation, including the lifting technologies discussed here, suggests that doing so could create beneficial new technologies that can be applied to practical nano-engineering as well.

Figure 3: “Trust” A nanoart sculpture created using a two photon lithography process from a UV hardening polymer. The figure stands about 80micrometers tall, slightly less than the width of a human hair.47

46 See for example, the Material Research Society’s Science as Art competitions. Although there are some artists working in this space as well (See for example the next footnote) they generally simply ask researchers to build something using already developed techniques, and take little part in the fabrication themselves. 47 Jonty Hurwitz, Trust, Photopolymer Resin, 2014, http://www.jontyhurwitz.com/nano/.