Nano Art: Mountain Castle

Materials scientist Dr. Moon Kim is an expert at working with the very smallest pieces imaginable. His science practice has also inspired him to take part in an art discipline called Nano Art which aims to discover and accentuate the artistic beauty of nanometer-sized natural and artificial structuresso small they cannot be seen with the naked eye.

“From time to time I came across interesting features that may not have had a scientific value, but they were aesthetically beautiful for different reasons,” said Kim, a Louis Beecherl Jr. Distinguished Professor who holds appointments both in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science and in the School of Arts, Humanities and Technology at UT Dallas.

Nano Art is a discipline that discovers and accentuates the artistic beauty of nanometer sized natural and artificial structures.

AI stylization uses convolutional neural networks to calculate statistical data for both the style image and the content image. The final neural network is run through training iterations to produce the combined output image.

Mountain Castle depicts a cross-sectional transmission electron micrograph of thin films on a silicon substrate. Each of the distinct layers is a separate film that was deposited individually, and the final image resembles the annual growth rings of a tree’s interior.