What’s the blackest thing you can think of?
A black hole?
A lump of coal?
Martin Skhrelli’s heart?
Well...none of them come close to Vantablack.
The creation of English company Surrey NanoSystems, this blacker than black pigment was originally intended to be used in aerospace, optics and other science and tech projects.
However, the engineers figured out how to make what is effectively, a spray-on version – far cheaper to produce and probably a lot less detrimental to human life than invisible fighter jets.
Plus, this new application for Vantablack created an opportunity for artists to get involved, with one particular artist -Anish Kapoor- getting in ahead of the pack and copyrighting the use of it.
And people were not happy, Jan.
Kapoor’s sculptures play with matter and anti-matter, the real and imagined, distortions of land and sky, but whether they are coated in pigment or reflective and mirrored, the notion of infinity is always present.
It’s no wonder then that he was so interested in Vantablack.
A shade of black that is so black, that it blocks out some 99% of light. To look upon it, is to truly stare into a void.
Ok, I will now attempt to explain how Vantablack works, with the help of some words from Ben Jensen, the CTO at Surrey Nanosystems.
To create the first incarnation of Vantablack, they laid down a billion of tiny, tiny nano-tubes, all sticking upright, covering a square centimeter. Ben – you take over:
“Light comes in as photons, enters the top of the structure, and then the photons bounce around between the carbon nanotubes and get absorbed and converted to heat, and then the heat is dissipated through the substrate.”
Cool, so basically the structure stops every wave of light from bouncing off the surface and back to the human eye. So when you look at something in Vantablack, all you can see is nothing.
No shape, no depth, you can spray it on a 3D object and it looks like a flat piece of nothing.
It’s disconcerting in a way, and certainly looks like bad Photoshop job at times.
See! 🖤
Blacker than black
Black is the cool one isn’t it. Yeah creatives, we all love wearing black all the time yeah, it’s well creative. It’s the most creative colour, yeah?
Cos it’s like actually an absence of colour, think about it right? So like as a colour, it’s not even a colour. Mental. That’s how you know that someone’s a creative, cos they’ve got a black t-shirt on innit…
Here’s some great creative the features and celebrates the shade of black that may or may not have been made by people wearing black t-shirts.
Starting with this perfect execution featuring blackest black to raise awareness of blind spot related accidents:
Extra strong coffee
I didn’t realise Philips made torches until I found this…
An all black ad for a black beer that you have to light up to read:
I don’t really wear black t-shirts, but I’m not above a cliché myself. So here’s the 🐐
Yeah…and this one
Booze again, and they just love to redact stuff in Russia:
Black metal, death metal, Black Death Metal – it’s a very visual, identifiable genre of music that gets bandied around a fair bit. But I do love this pool safety ad:
Possibly the only good Black Friday ad ever made:
An all black ad that apparently* saved energy:
*Enough energy to power a small city made up of 57,000 inhabitants in Brazil for a few hours.
Now that’s a pretty creative excuse for using an piece of all black creative.
Ready to make darkness your ally?
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Thanks for reading,
Jonathan ✌️
Freshly harvested from my cascading collection of tabs.
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Want to know why some artists hate Anish?
Of course you do! Listen to his episode of Kunst Please.