artificial elements 

The Imachination project dedicates to the interaction of the human imagination with machines. Above all it explores the pictorial results of this process. The interaction of man and machine must not only result in images, but also can create new physical structures like synthetic elements.

Synthetic elements are radioactive elements, that were not discovered occurring in nature but as artificially produced isotopes.


borosilicate vial from
New Year Edition 04/05


table of pure synthetic elements

The first element to be prepared synthetically was technetium. The element was discovered in 1937 by the Italian mineralogist Carlo Perrier and the Italian-born American physicist E. G. Segrè (Palermo/Italy) in a sample of molybdenum that was bombarded with deuterons in a cyclotron at the Univ. of California at Berkeley.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=
000669FB-B5F4-1C75-9B81809EC588EF21

An Elemental Mystery - Who really discovered element 43? 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technetium#Official_discovery_and_later_history
offcial discovery of technetium and later history


Technetium

Places where synthetic elements had been produced:

Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (at Berkeley) 
Argonne National Laboratory
Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), Dubna/Russia
Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI), Darmstadt/Germany 

Elementology - Places where elements were discovered: http://www.vanderkrogt.net/elements/

 



U-400 cyclotron/ Dubna

Imachination or no imachination:
Currently there is a big debate if the ammunition used in the second Iraq War contained beside the so called depleted Uranium (DU) also traces of an artificial isotope of Uranium. This U236 does not exist in nature and has to be created artificially e.g. in a nuclear power plant.

New Year Edition 04/05

U236 is created by targeting U235 with a neutron. The result in the most cases is a nuclear fission: the U236 nucleus decays in smaller nuclei. But sometimes the nucleus of U236 keeps stable. An artificial isotope is created - an imachination.

There is often a big confusion in the debate because the people don't know to differ between Depleted Uranium and non Depleted Uranium: DU and NDU (Uranium Medical Research Center)

A New Year edition (04/05) dedicates also to this subject. Samples of soil collected in the Iraqi desert play with the uncertainty which kind of matter the borosilicate glass vials may contain. Imachination or no imachination means in this case if the vials may contain traces of DU ammunition or of ammunition made with atomic rubbish. It is interesting how the view on the small amount of matter changes. This charging processes of imachinations are similar to processes in the arts maybe they are even stronger.


Iraqi desert

Links:

Military Armaments - Depleted Uranium Weapons
More about the concept of Imachinations.
Web ethymology of the notion of Imachination