Nano flower

A while ago I blogged about NanoArt 2007 , which is an online competition to create nanoart. Well, it turns out that I had completely forgotten about this competition, so I have done nothing more than form a few vague ideas about what I planned to create as a submission. The closing date for submissions is 31 December 2007, which leaves very little free time to create a worthwhile submission, so I wondered how I could create something using the bits and pieces that I happen to have lying around already.

One of the 3 electron microscope pictures that are supplied for you to start from is this

which they fittingly call "Nano Flower", and you are allowed to submit up to 5 "artistic" images for the competition.

I think I will choose to submit a 5-frame animation generated using a variant of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction simulation software that I described here, where I use the "Nano Flower" image as an external input to steer the the reaction dynamics. This means that I am simulating a modified version of the BZ reaction, where the surface on which the reaction occurs is weakly contaminated so that the BZ reaction dynamics vary across the surface.

Here is a 5-frame animation that I quickly created, which fortuitously turns out to be cyclic because the period of the BZ dynamics is 5 frames.

Well, that's one frame of the animation. I gave up trying to get the animation to upload successfully to blogger.com, so I have put it on my web site here.

I have called this work "Fizzix" for fairly obvious reasons. Now I will wait to see whether I have broken the submission rules for the NanoArt 2007 competition, which don't mention animation as being an acceptable artform, not even 5-frame animations.

Update (7 January 2008):

All of the NanoArt 2007 competition entries can be viewed here, and the album containing my single competition entry is here (with the animation hosted here). My competition entry is a lot less colourful than other peoples' entries, so it is unlikely to attract much attention. I have to hope that people click down to my animation to discover the true nature of my competition entry.