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our relationship to images has an
ergonomic relationship
we walk towards images and whatever is
there
has a certain scale that confirms the
scale of our body and our distance to it
and as we approach it something happens
we either find the connection or we lose
it
photography gives you the ability to
play with that scale
once you go beyond and you really blow
the scale out together
beyond the boundaries of what we
understand ergonomically
this is the kind of images that i am
always interested in
to think
that there is a grain of sand with a
castle in it you know it's not just a
trick it's real
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i used to work in a very small studio
and my work had a certain scale
and then i realized that by moving into
a larger studio
the world sort of expanded
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in the beginning of the
i think was around 2001 2002 i had the
opportunity to work in an environmental
scale
we made
almost
25 drawings some of them up to a scale
of 500 meters long and they could only
be seen from helicopters
the drawing itself becomes something
from your mind
around the same time it made me think of
going the opposite way around it and
actually making things so small
they would create similar impression
they would be so tiny that it could only
be imagined it cannot be seen
and it was a very fortunate event that i
ran into marcelo cuello
the first time that vic talked to me
about this project
i thought he was joking
he came to me he was like i've had this
idea for a long time and i've really
been wanting to do this
i want to draw castle into a grain of
sand
and i think the sheer
impossibility of it is what excited me
and then from there on it was basically
me trying to figure out how to do it
and that lasted about four years
project starts at pre-photography i
started using camera lucida which is a
drawing instrument that vic used to draw
this castles
the camera lucida is a 19th century
device that allows you to make pictures
it's something that allows you to see
what's in front of you projected in a
board right below it and all you have to
do is to trace it
the inventor of photography henry fox
was a terrible camera lucida draftsman
that's probably the reason why he
invented photography
so we start before cameras exist
and we end up at a point where cameras
are kind of irrelevant or they're not
even necessary
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the machine we ultimately use is called
the fib for focus ion beam
it's normally used in the electronic
industry for fixing integrated circuits
so instead of using your draw chips
we're drawing castles with it
this is about half of a millimeter
and i'm trying to find a grain that
looks good
all right so
um i just loaded the image of the castle
here and i'm going to frame it now
on this screen here we have the ions
that we use to etch the grain and on
this screen we have the electrons that
we use to see the grain and the
combination of both is what creates the
image
now just wait two minutes
fingers crossed
it's really strange because if you're
basically drawing onto a canvas you
don't quite know what it is and you
can't hold it sometimes i would draw and
the grain would just break into pieces
because it's too soft or sometimes it'll
dry nothing will show up because it
might be too hard and you have to
restart the entire process
i don't think i've ever
worked on something that was this
complicated and difficult
over the course of four years like
sometimes i ask myself should i just do
this in photoshop
but
you realize that it's not the same thing
in some ways the final image carries
with it the history of the process that
you've developed
recognition has been the basic principle
of my work since the very beginning
the word recognition
is very interesting because it means
assimilating something twice
i rely on imagery that's very simple
things that you've seen a million times
because that's what creates this little
trick you think you know it and then you
have to know it again
the idea is that you create a path but
you leave breadcrumbs for the viewer to
to follow
and this questioning about the image
when you're looking at something you
realize
how the hell was this done
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all right it looks like we got something
here
so this is the first castle that we got
with this new batch of grains
it's actually really nice now to sort of
navigate through the image and see some
of the details
when you look at the castle in the
drawing you see the outlines of the
rocks that they're on top of the top of
mountains basically and they actually
match
the actual outline of the grain
so this is really interesting symmetry
right where the mountain actually looks
like the grain of sand and they're
entirely different scales
the interesting thing about projects
that connect scientists and artists i
think it comes down to the point that we
feel that we're always looking for
the same thing you know we're trying to
understand the world around us
i think photography in some ways is just
sort of restarting and i think there's a
whole new kind of photography kind of
emerging now
a lot of it is happening because of this
combination between computers and
cameras
in a new form of storytelling narrative
can sort of emerge from it
it is a great moment to be a
photographer today
because photography is completely
obsolete in terms of its relation to
reality
we're pretty much at the spot where
painting was around 1839 when
photography was invented
painting was sort of released
from its relation to the factual world
painters had to think
what is painting
in a similar fashion the relationship of
between photography and reality has
changed significantly with the advent of
digital imaging
it's becoming what leonardo mentioned as
cosa mentale it's a it's something from
the mind which has always been
when somebody tells you hey there's a
grain of sand there's this moment where
the reality that you have
in front of you sort of falls apart and
you have to reconstruct it you have to
really take a step back and rethink what
that image is and what it means
and i think that's the motivating force
behind vic's work and why he wanted to
do this project
it's so insignificant it needed so
monumental
i'm very happy with the result
we should have started with that
do
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you