Our relationship to images has an ergonomic relationship.
We walk towards images and whatever is there has a certain scale that conforms to 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.
You think that there is a grain of sand with a castle in it.
It's not just a trick, it's real.
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 work sort of expanded.
In the beginning of the, I think it was around 2000 and one 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 that would create similar impressions.
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 Coelho.
The first time that Vic talked to me about this project, I thought he was joking.
He came to me and 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 a castle into a grain of sand.
And I think the sheer impossibility of it is what excited me.
And then from then on, it was basically me trying to figure out how to do it.
And that lasted about four years.
Project starts at pre-photography.
We started using a camera lucida, which is a drawing instrument that Vic used to draw
these 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 on a board right
below it.
And all you have to do is to trace it.
The inventor of photography, Henry Fox Double, 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.
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 it to 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 I just loaded the image of the castle here.
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.
And I would just wait two minutes, fingers crossed.
It's really strange because you're basically drawing onto a canvas and 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 I would draw and nothing would 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 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 follow.
This question about the image, when you're looking at something, you realize how the
hell was this done?
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 are
on top of mountains basically.
And they actually match the actual outline of the grain.
So there's this really interesting symmetry, right, where the mountain actually looks like
the grain of sand and they're in 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.
We're trying to understand the world around us.
I think photography in some ways is just sort of restarting.
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 and 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 factory world.
Painters had to think, what is painting?
In a similar fashion, the relationship between photography and reality has changed significantly
with the advent of digital imaging.
It's becoming what Leonardo mentioned as cosamentale, 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 and yet so monumental.
I'm very happy with the result.
We should have started with that.
