> “Black 4.0 absorbs an astonishing 99.95% of visible light which is about as close to full light absorption as you’ll ever get in a paint,” said Semple. He notes this outperforms Vantablack’s S-Vis spray on product which only achieves 99.8%, as did his previous Black 3.0 paint.
> “Black 4.0 absorbs an astonishing 99.95% of visible light which is about as close to full light absorption as you’ll ever get in a paint,” said Semple. He notes this outperforms Vantablack’s S-Vis spray on product which only achieves 99.8%, as did his previous Black 3.0 paint.
Also, you yourself can buy Black 3.0 and 4.0 whereas one person owns the worldwide artistic rights to Vantablack (who is also banned from buying Black X.0)
> one person owns the worldwide artistic rights to Vantablack
Not that it really matters. The "artistic rights" were a one off marketing gimmick.
You can't actually buy Vantablack as a paint. You have to have approval from the UK Ministry of Defense and then send your part to the Surrey Nanosystems facility to get coated.
Imagine: a python formatter with an open source license that has a special clause to forbid usage by a programmer who have previously released a competing closed-source formatter.
It's rather: ... a competing formatter that may not be used on open-source projects.
The composition of both paints is a trade secret ("closed-source formatters"). The controversy is about disallowing the use on a broad class of projects benefitting the society.
Velvet being the operative word; its surface texture captures light, like vantablack creating a furry surface. It's a challenge with paint because it's applied in a flat layer (usually).
> *Note: By adding this product to your cart you confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor. To the best of your knowledge, information and belief this material will not make it's way into the hands of Anish Kapoor.
>Artists like Christian Furr and Stuart Semple have criticised Kapoor for what they view to be the appropriation of a unique material to the exclusion of others.[69][70] In retaliation, Semple developed a pigment called the "pinkest pink" and specifically made it available to everyone except Anish Kapoor and anyone affiliated with him.[71][72] He later stated that the move was itself intended as something like performance art and that he did not anticipate the amount of attention it received.[67] In December 2016, Kapoor obtained the pigment and posted an image on Instagram of his extended middle finger which had been dipped in Semple's pink.[73] Semple also developed more products such as "Black 2.0" and "Black 3.0", which are supposed to look nearly identical to Vantablack despite being acrylic, and "Diamond Dust", an extremely reflective glitter made of crushed glass shards that are designed to hurt Kapoor if he dipped his finger in it
IMHO he should 'graduate' from this controversy - Stuart Semple is his own brand at this point, and arguably bigger than Anish Kapoor (in the retail space).
I love how the art community has decided to permanently troll this man.
I accidently fell down an Anish Kapoor rabbit role on 1 internet evening, and everything I read about him (or by him) makes him sound like a bit of a prick.
> Like all websites these days this one uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience including personalised advertising.
> [I am not Anish Kapoor and I am happy with Cookies]
Well. No. Not all "international" websites force you to accept being tracked for advertisement purposes with a random joke.
I didn't consent to be tracked and my browser is full of their cookies that very much look like tracking cookies.
Some people clearly don't spend the few minutes to read the GDPR. It's not a magical mystic parchment that needs years of law courses to grasp the meaning. If you can read my comment, you can read the GDPR. You need to get an informed consent first, you need to leave a choice, both choices should be as easy to make, you shouldn't force people into tracking. How hard is it seriously?
If you care about cookies, then use a browser that manages them how you like. Cookie popups don't do anything and GDPR is not meaningfully enforced. Don't waste your time with them.
It's like putting some cash on the sidewalk next to a sign saying "do not take" and then walking away. Someone's gonna take it. The solution is to not do that.
I don’t care about cookies, I care about tracking.
I wish for more GDPR enforcement but we finally start to see some honest fines. Hopefully they will be a bit more than the cost of doing business in the future.
I got to see a ball painted with vantablack in real life. It was surreal, it looked almost flat when you glanced at it but then you realized it had depth if you looked more closely. I wasn’t allowed to touch it, the man with gloves was very serious about that. I really wanted to touch it. I bet it would’ve been weird to feel it as you looked at it.
This is apparently more black than vantablack. I have no need for this but I kind of want to buy some to paint a ball and finally see what it’s like
Warmer in color tone or warmer in that it retains more heat?
These blacks are "black" in that they absorb visible light. How or if they absorb IR light (the bulk of heat energy) is a different story. They may be totally reflective in IR. But yes, something that is more black in visible light is probably also more black in IR. But also remember that black objects are also better at emitting IR.
Thanks for your reply. I meant warmer in terms of heat.
I remember being told that white objects reflect heat, which is why white clothes and white buildings are better in hot, sunny locations. I thought the reverse would be true for black. Thanks for educating me!
For example our hearing range is 20-20000 Hz, yet we can perceive a 20 Hz sound as different from a 40 Hz one, the difference between them being 20 Hz which is 0.1% of our hearing range.
I was using their black 2.0 and while it's exceptional and has a certain unnatural feel to it under the right lighting, it doesn't achieve the same effect as Vanta black. This sounds like a good improvement.
> I wasn’t allowed to touch it, the man with gloves was very serious about that. I really wanted to touch it.
It’s basically asbestos. Vantablack is the posterboy for nanotoxicity thanks to the carbon nanotubes.
That’s why the manufacturer licensed it to a single artist in the beginning - it has to be used in a lab environment with proper handling and ventilation.
> I really wanted to touch it. I bet it would’ve been weird to feel it as you looked at it.
You can get that weird feel by walking around an indoor space with only one eye open. When I do that, it feels as though all the (varied) colors I see are flat paint strokes lying on some flat surface at some undefined distance from me (as if my perception was stripped of all distance content). I become comically bad at simple tasks like reaching for the door handle or the light switch. When I use my hands to touch the wall it feels like I'm touching something that I'm not seeing (even though I'm looking right at it!)
Or even some of us who do. Nothing looks the slightest bit different to me with one eye closed (unless it is close enough to have an obvious double or one of those 3d popout thingies, which I have a hard time seeing). I did check quick and it seems I might have occasional differences picking stuff up when I first close an eye but most of the time it is fine. One of my eyes has been non-trivially worse than the other for at least most of my life, although it isn't all that bad (but it does involve some astigmatism so maybe because of that my brain found it easier to not bother much with the binocular stuff).
There are many ways to achieve this state; closing one eye is a shortcut that may work for some. For me, achieving extremely high focus on a difficult problem will also induce this state, as my brain filters out all incoming signals to become singularly focused on the problem.
If I'm pulled out suddenly to attend to something totally unrelated, I'll often be distracted by appreciating just how altered my senses are until they reacclimatize to "normal."
If I remember correctly vantablack is a coating of carbon nanotubes, so what little reflects off of a given tube tends to get scattered inside the surface, and very little is able to make it back out after bouncing around.
I got to see a bunch of Anish Kapoor things last year in Venice (coinciding with but not part of Venice Biennale) and it was everything you would want in a demonstration of vantablack paintings/sculptures. Very trippy and mind-bending.
Would painting an inside of a old manual camera lens barrel with this cause issues? Like, dust, fungus, I don't know. Because there are a couple of vintage lenses that could use a bit more contrast.
Interesting, his pinkiest pink still looks to be quite raspberry (red), he should try a pantone 2037 as it's a purer pink that isn't as darkened by red tone.
> *disclaimer: we're not actually sure if this is the worlds pinkest pink ever, it could well be! It's the pinkest we could come up with, and we've not seen anything pinker.
The "Gossip" "hot pink" looks like the pantone pink you mention.
Owning a small tub of the stuff, once used as a paint it's actually startlingly pink. Most definitely more pink than anything else I've ever seen. I would not describe it as reddish at all.
They ought to add a white paint product line and make it the whitest paint ever. Paint the roofs of California with it so it reflects sunlight and reduces energy costs.
They were one step further than just reflecting heat, they were tuning emissivity to actually give off heat and cool the surface underneath. Extremely impressive from a heat transfer perspective to cool a surface passively!
The idea is basically "sky is really cold, give it your heat." Fascinating.
My sedan has reflections from the dash on the windshield and it gets annoying in the sun. Can this paint help or will it turn into millions of lung impaling particles when the car is parked in the sun?
Try polarized sunglasses. At typical windshield angles, the reflection from the dash to your eyes is close enough to Brewster’s angle for the reflection to be highly polarized.
Try polarized sunglasses and a different car? Seriously, I’ve never driven a car with a polarized display that was incompatible with polarized sunglasses.
(Or are you driving with your head sideways? If so, forget polarized sunglasses.)
“Absorbs all the light in the universe as well as other universes.”
I wonder how much of the electromagnetic spectrum it actually absorbs. Surely it’s not the entire spectrum, but does the absorption band stretch beyond visible light?
91 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 1283 ms ] thread> “Black 4.0 absorbs an astonishing 99.95% of visible light which is about as close to full light absorption as you’ll ever get in a paint,” said Semple. He notes this outperforms Vantablack’s S-Vis spray on product which only achieves 99.8%, as did his previous Black 3.0 paint.
> “Black 4.0 absorbs an astonishing 99.95% of visible light which is about as close to full light absorption as you’ll ever get in a paint,” said Semple. He notes this outperforms Vantablack’s S-Vis spray on product which only achieves 99.8%, as did his previous Black 3.0 paint.
Also, you yourself can buy Black 3.0 and 4.0 whereas one person owns the worldwide artistic rights to Vantablack (who is also banned from buying Black X.0)
Not that it really matters. The "artistic rights" were a one off marketing gimmick.
You can't actually buy Vantablack as a paint. You have to have approval from the UK Ministry of Defense and then send your part to the Surrey Nanosystems facility to get coated.
Can I get this in a gloss?
The composition of both paints is a trade secret ("closed-source formatters"). The controversy is about disallowing the use on a broad class of projects benefitting the society.
Black 3.0 was severely disappointing and way less black than simple triple black velvet material in my home theater.
Also, while I lived 2.0 is important to dust objects otherwise the dust will ruin the effect.
Here's a ledge before painting: https://photos.app.goo.gl/9gxk4d3NqcUrt3Bj6 Note the distracting lines.
Here's with b2.0 painted in the groove, notice how it's gone! https://photos.app.goo.gl/rKNrnffQmkCGAxXBA
Closeup https://photos.app.goo.gl/rAUGZmjGxtV1gW22A
So if Black 3.0 next to black velvet looks like this? What must be the light absorption value of black velvet?
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/824109424255434803/88...
Black 4.0 now apparently claims 99.95?
So yeah, I wonder how it now compares.
>Artists like Christian Furr and Stuart Semple have criticised Kapoor for what they view to be the appropriation of a unique material to the exclusion of others.[69][70] In retaliation, Semple developed a pigment called the "pinkest pink" and specifically made it available to everyone except Anish Kapoor and anyone affiliated with him.[71][72] He later stated that the move was itself intended as something like performance art and that he did not anticipate the amount of attention it received.[67] In December 2016, Kapoor obtained the pigment and posted an image on Instagram of his extended middle finger which had been dipped in Semple's pink.[73] Semple also developed more products such as "Black 2.0" and "Black 3.0", which are supposed to look nearly identical to Vantablack despite being acrylic, and "Diamond Dust", an extremely reflective glitter made of crushed glass shards that are designed to hurt Kapoor if he dipped his finger in it
Excellent phrasing.
I accidently fell down an Anish Kapoor rabbit role on 1 internet evening, and everything I read about him (or by him) makes him sound like a bit of a prick.
"It’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black."
Well. No. Not all "international" websites force you to accept being tracked for advertisement purposes with a random joke.
I didn't consent to be tracked and my browser is full of their cookies that very much look like tracking cookies.
Some people clearly don't spend the few minutes to read the GDPR. It's not a magical mystic parchment that needs years of law courses to grasp the meaning. If you can read my comment, you can read the GDPR. You need to get an informed consent first, you need to leave a choice, both choices should be as easy to make, you shouldn't force people into tracking. How hard is it seriously?
It's like putting some cash on the sidewalk next to a sign saying "do not take" and then walking away. Someone's gonna take it. The solution is to not do that.
I wish for more GDPR enforcement but we finally start to see some honest fines. Hopefully they will be a bit more than the cost of doing business in the future.
This is apparently more black than vantablack. I have no need for this but I kind of want to buy some to paint a ball and finally see what it’s like
Edit: People are quoting 99.95% for Black 4.0 which is impressive!
Curious, under what circumstances will this 0.365% be practically important?
The difference is 0.4 to 0.035
An order of magnitude more light reflected.
These blacks are "black" in that they absorb visible light. How or if they absorb IR light (the bulk of heat energy) is a different story. They may be totally reflective in IR. But yes, something that is more black in visible light is probably also more black in IR. But also remember that black objects are also better at emitting IR.
I remember being told that white objects reflect heat, which is why white clothes and white buildings are better in hot, sunny locations. I thought the reverse would be true for black. Thanks for educating me!
For example our hearing range is 20-20000 Hz, yet we can perceive a 20 Hz sound as different from a 40 Hz one, the difference between them being 20 Hz which is 0.1% of our hearing range.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/824109424255434803/88...
Seems there is a lot to go beyond 99.6%
I don't know what the absorption value of the black velvet is though. I am curious how Black 4.0 would compare to black velvet.
It’s basically asbestos. Vantablack is the posterboy for nanotoxicity thanks to the carbon nanotubes.
That’s why the manufacturer licensed it to a single artist in the beginning - it has to be used in a lab environment with proper handling and ventilation.
You can get that weird feel by walking around an indoor space with only one eye open. When I do that, it feels as though all the (varied) colors I see are flat paint strokes lying on some flat surface at some undefined distance from me (as if my perception was stripped of all distance content). I become comically bad at simple tasks like reaching for the door handle or the light switch. When I use my hands to touch the wall it feels like I'm touching something that I'm not seeing (even though I'm looking right at it!)
There are plenty of people who don't have binocular vision, who learn to rely on other signals for 3D.
See the cues at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_perception for some other cues that you may use.
If I'm pulled out suddenly to attend to something totally unrelated, I'll often be distracted by appreciating just how altered my senses are until they reacclimatize to "normal."
Essentially the surface is a physical light trap.
Would painting an inside of a old manual camera lens barrel with this cause issues? Like, dust, fungus, I don't know. Because there are a couple of vintage lenses that could use a bit more contrast.
> *disclaimer: we're not actually sure if this is the worlds pinkest pink ever, it could well be! It's the pinkest we could come up with, and we've not seen anything pinker.
The "Gossip" "hot pink" looks like the pantone pink you mention.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zW9_ztTiw8
The idea is basically "sky is really cold, give it your heat." Fascinating.
Race cars solve this with flocking. I’m sure someone makes a “flocking mat” or something you can rest in the dash
"Flocking is the application of millions of tiny fibers onto an adhesive-coated surface to create a velvet-like texture."
https://www.flockit.com/what-is-flocking/whatisflocking
(Or are you driving with your head sideways? If so, forget polarized sunglasses.)
The cold furnace in which we stare
A high pitch on a future scale
It is a starless winternight's tale
It suits you well
It is that black, It is that black
It is that black, It is that black
I wonder how much of the electromagnetic spectrum it actually absorbs. Surely it’s not the entire spectrum, but does the absorption band stretch beyond visible light?