Lumen & Colours: A journey into the world of science

Abstract

Abstract A metallographer is often rewarded with a beautiful image when looking through the microscope. These images deserve to be made accessible to the general public. Within the project “Lumen & Colours: Faces of a city – a participatory project combining media art and urban design” funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation (German: Kulturstiftung des Bundes), the opportunity arose to map images recorded via light optical as well as scanning electron microscopy onto different building facades of the city. A selection of images from research and failure analysis conducted at the Institute for Silicon Technology (ISIT), for example, were projected onto the facade of the cleanroom. The appeal lies in the fact that an image is associated with a location, that matter is merged with imagination and natural sciences with art. On the cleanroom building, which is a work of art in itself as its structural design is modelled after a silicon wafer, the image and the facade merge to become one. Art and science are surprisingly close to each other. A new dimension is revealed on the huge 36-meter wide facade of the Fraunhofer ISIT by a giant video projector with a weight of around 100 kg and an output of 30 000 ANSI lumens. [1] Moreover, the images were animated and projected onto different buildings in the city as part of a virtual presentation. This contribution will explain the technical background of the images obtained in battery research and from the analysis of silicon wafers and solder joints and will show the different views offered by microscopic observation and how these images become one with different facades.