Aerogel Art Attracts Attention

Subheadline

Comet-catching NASA technology enables exotic works of art

Artist Ioannis Michaloudis must have seemed like an unusual choice of speaker at first. Much of his talk before the scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs gathered in Dallas for the 2024 summit of the Advanced Research Projects-Energy agency was abstract. He spoke of the sky as the planet’s protective garment, floated the idea of making shade clouds from space junk, and characterized his artwork as “biomimicry of the sky.” 

But as the world’s best insulator, the translucent, ethereal silica aerogel material Michaloudis works with has concrete energy applications. He finished his talk by proving this with a video of his aerogel Coperni AirSwipe bag, which had caused a sensation at its debut months earlier, being filled with molten brass. 

“It was amazing because they were like, you know, an artist is speaking, OK, he’s making beautiful things,” recalled the Greek artist, researcher, and professor. “And then lava inside this bag that had gone viral all over the world.” 

Michaloudis, now based in Limassol, Cyprus, is probably the world’s only artist molding sculptures and fashion accessories from this striking material, mainly because it’s extremely hard to do. He was able to invent his own recipe and process only due to a nearly obsessive drive to create a three-dimensional cloud. It was a quest that took him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Shivaji University in Maharashtra, India; and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. 

The impulse that propelled him to the Coperni collection debut and, subsequently, a slew of speaking engagements, took hold when he was completing his Ph.D. in 1998. In one of a series of photos he had taken, he noticed a cloud shaped like a hook. That was all it took. “I say to myself, if this cloud it looks like a hook, if nature can make this kind of shapes, why not to make a cubic cloud?” 

From the start, he had a hunch NASA could help, but the agency didn’t respond initially, so he went to do post-doctoral work at MIT. There, he attempted to use lasers to manipulate steam, but it required too much electricity. Then in 2001, a researcher at the university approached him asking, “You are the guy who wants to make a cubic cloud?” The man claimed to have a piece of cloud right in his office. It turned out to be a small sphere of silica aerogel. 

At about 99% air, aerogel is the world’s lightest solid. It’s made by combining a polymer — typically silica-based — with a solvent to create a gel that is then flash-dried under pressure. This leaves a solid, dry structure filled with microscopic pores. Many aerogels hardly even look solid. Smokey blue, sometimes tinged with orange, their edges seem to blur. 

Origins in Stardust 

One of NASA’s most successful commercial spinoffs has been a method for incorporating aerogels into insulating blankets (Spinoff 2022, 2021, 2020, and more). But NASA has also used chunks of pure aerogel for other purposes — such as trapping dust from the tail of a comet.

Steve Jones was hired by JPL in 1996 to develop an aerogel for the Stardust mission. The idea was that a probe with an exposed, porous surface could capture particles while flying behind a comet. But that “stardust” is traveling so fast that even a foam would vaporize it on impact. After extensive testing, aerogel had been identified as the substance that could catch and preserve it. 

“They knew how to make an aerogel, but it wasn’t consistent or flight quality,” said Jones, who spent the next two years developing an aerogel that was up to the task. 

The Stardust spacecraft did eventually drop its sample return capsule into a Utah desert, containing comet particles and interstellar dust that revealed a wide range of organic compounds. 

By the time Stardust launched in 1999, other NASA researchers were interested in aerogels for insulation, and Jones won funding to set up a new aerogel lab. He went on to use aerogel to insulate electronics boxes for the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers and the heat source in the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment on the Perseverance Mars rover, among other projects. 

In the early 2000s, Michaloudis heard about Stardust and reached out to JPL. By then he had done some work with an aerogel company but was still exploring methods and recipes. Jones invited him to the lab. “He visited two or three times,” Jones recalled. “I went through the primer on aerogel with him, the different kinds you could make and their different properties.” 

Michaloudis said he was especially impressed at the size of the 50-liter reactor in Jones’ lab. The company he’d been working with had a single-liter reactor. Thanks to NASA, he said, he decided to equip his own lab with a 20-liter reactor, allowing for large sculptures. 

He started sending over molds that Jones made sculptures from, but some of them cracked. In the end, Michaloudis said, NASA’s aerogel recipe wasn’t ideal for making large, three-dimensional objects. But he left with some important takeaways, he said. In addition to tips on working with this rare class of materials and the inspiration to go large on his own apparatus, he said Jones taught him about safety. “He explained to me that if you go for big volumes, you have big risks.” To avoid explosions, a large reactor needs emergency release valves known as burst discs, he learned. 

The Sky in a Bottle, then on the Catwalk 

With his JPL experience in tow, Michaloudis traveled to India, where he learned to use methanol as the solvent, resulting in aerogels better suited to making large objects. This was also where he learned they could stand up to molten metals, after he convinced a foundry worker to submerge a sample in liquid brass. “We had lava surrounding sky. It was amazing,” he said. “I was crying like a baby.” 

Michaloudis had his first solo exhibition in 2006 and has had a dozen more since. “My general vision about silica aerogel is that it is the personification of the sky, which is in danger at this moment on our Earth,” he said. “Because it is blue and orange at the same time, I say it is like a piece of sky. So it’s like molding the sky.” 

His works include reinterpretations of ancient sculptures, wispy nymphs suspended in blue cylinders, translucent masks, jewelry with aerogel baubles encased in glass. He also sells bottled clouds, Sky Cubes with suspended clouds of magnetized metal filings, “nebulas” of phosphorous floating in aerogel discs, and much more. 

In 2020, he brought aerogel into high fashion when the French luxury jewelry and watch house Boucheron collaborated with him to create the centerpiece of its collection for that year, a big, ice-blue pendant of aerogel encased in quartz and surrounded by white gold and thousands of tiny diamonds. The piece, titled Goutte de Ciel, or Drop of Sky, ended up selling for half a million dollars. 

But none of his creations have captured the world’s attention like the Coperni AirSwipe bag unveiled at that company’s 2024 fall collection debut. Seeming to glow a translucent blue in its model’s hand, “it had millions of immediate ‘likes’ on the catwalk,” Michaloudis said. “For about 48 hours, it was in the media all over the world.” Since the AirSwipe appeared, he has received continuous requests for speaking engagements and products, he said. “I have requests for anything that you can imagine. A chair out of aerogel, glasses out of aerogel, whatever you want.” 

His next collaboration is with Mercedes-Benz, though he can’t say more about it. 

Michaloudis credits his tutelage at JPL as an essential step on his path to developing aerogel as art. “If Stardust wasn’t there, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he said. “I am what I am, and we made what we made thanks to the Stardust project.”