Comment on Fuck you in particular
themeatbridge@lemmy.world 6 months ago
For what it’s worth, Vantablack isn’t a pigment, it’s a process for applying carbon nanotubes that absorb light. They don’t sell the “paint” part by itself because it requires special equipment and it finicky. They don’t sell it because then a bunch of social media influencers would try to spray their bathrooms with the stuff and make a bunch of videos about how it doesn’t live up to the hype.
The owner might be a douche who uses the licensing to make himself feel powerful, but there is a justifiable explanation for why the licensing exists in the first place.
a justifiable explanation for why the licensing exists in the first place.
“because people doing it wrong would make it look bad” is a terrible reason. I’m fairly certain I can buy an OLED TV and mess with the settings and make the picture look horrendous - time to create a restrictive license on who gets to buy TVs?
The effect is also completely ruined if you handle it, and the broken off nanotubes from handling it are a serious health hazard. It’s expensive, dangerous, extremely fragile and almost impossible to clean.
But like mostly, having seen “Anish Kapoor” (which is the real name of the installation where that dickhead debuted his vantablack art), it… sucks. It’s impressive in photographs, incredibly lame in person. And, it can’t be cleaned without ruining the coating! so the dust from all those people builds up and just ew.
(also, and just on a personal note, he had nine years and did absolutely nothing conceptually interesting with it. Seriously it was the early-2000s 3D movie of art. Just one gimmick, repeated over and over with no change to the formula. “Look, it’s black”. It felt more like an ad for the lab that developed the coating than an art exhibition). It would have been cool if he’d developed the process, but we all know he didn’t, so it just fell so comically flat.
On the other hand I’ve seen vantablack on crumpled aluminum foil and it was in a plexiglass box. I’m sure it must’ve been incredibly black, but it was completely impossible to tell over the reflections on the plexiglass. Never mind that they mounted the fucking thing in a corner on the ceiling for some reason.
How hard is it to paint an irregularly shaped object in vanteblack, suspend it in a weighted 5ft plexiglass sphere sitting on some ball bearings, and let viewer or motors rotate it so the changing silhouette fucks with perspective, like a 3d shadow puppet?
“That sounds like actual investment into the art. Howabout instead I vantablack a heap in the middle of a room, leave it uncovered an let people walk around it? Same effect but soooo much less work for me, Anish Kapoor’s straw-filled bodydouble”
Paint a cup handle, some of the side where it is attached to the cup black, so that it looks like the cup has no handle.
what the fuck is this even supposed to look like…? the entire point is that it turns an object essentially to its silhouette, and he couldn’t come up with an interesting silhouette?
Plus that’s probably automatic lung cancer if you breathe it.
Damn just looked up the MSDS because i wouldn’t expect carbon nanotubes would be very dangerous. Probably not immediate cancer but definitely not something to handle outside a controlled environment for application. It is relatively safe once it is applied though.
Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
Carbon nanotubes are real? I thought that shit was invented for upgrades and repairs in No Man’s Sky…
MintyAnt@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Carbon nanotubes, son!