Rules
of
Six

At the heart of the project is a custom piece of software that simulates formation over time in the same way molecules assemble themselves in the lab. Three-dimensional output from this application is used to produce a large-scale wall relief mounted in the gallery alongside two monitors: one running the simulation “live” and the other displaying a slideshow of actual nanostructures designed by Scullin and his colleagues.

Like the nanostructures it emulates, Rules of Six is designed to multiply indefinitely without sacrificing stability. It is indifferent to scale; its sprawling construction could represent molecules, rooms, buildings or entire neighborhoods.

Imagine a few drops of water about to freeze. The endless variety of crystal shapes that emerge in that moment of crystallization became an obsession for one self-educated farmer from Vermont, Wilson Bentley, who spent a lifetime photographing snowflakes. For over forty-five years, from the time he attached a microscope onto a  bellows camera in 1885, to the release of his only book, Snow Crystals, published three months before his death from pneumonia in 1931, Bently used his own photographic inventions to document over five-thousand snowflakes at the rear of his Jericho farmhouse. The painstaking process of capturing and photographing a snowflake was a fine balancing act between brutal weather and fussy equipment. The most photogenic crystals required serendipitous conditions: below freezing temperatures with westerly or northerly winds, the barometer standing precisely between 29.6 and 29.9 inches and slowly rising, a one-foot square blackboard to catch the fluffy snowflakes, a sharp pointed wooden splint to move the flake onto a microscope slide, a pair of thick mittens, a microscope on a stand attached to a camera and lastly, the photographer holding his breath once the flake is caught in order to avoid melting the specimen.