The World’s Smallest Sandcastles Built on Individual Grains of Sand

I just thought this was really cool.
Check it out.

Artist Vik Muniz is known for his gigantic composite installations and sculptures created from thousands of individual objects. In this new collaboration with artist and MIT researcher Marcelo Coelho, Muniz takes the opposite approach and explores the microscopic with a new series of sandcastles etched onto individual grains of sand.

The process of getting a sandcastle onto a speck of rock was anything but straightforward and involved over four years of trial and error utilizing both antiquated and highly technical methods. Muniz first drew each castle using a camera lucida, a 19th century optical tool that relies on a prism to project a reflection of whatever is in front of you onto paper where it can be traced. The drawings were then sent to Coelho who worked with a number of microscopic drawing processes for several years before deciding to use a Focused Ion Beam (FIB) which has the capability of creating a line only 50 nanometers wide (a human hair is about 50,000 nanometers wide).

Pretty Awesome Huh

The World’s Smallest Sandcastles Built on Individual Grains of Sand by Vik Muniz and Marcelo Coelho

reply to post by watchitburn


That is cool, reminds of the nano-Enterprise!

Yeah that's cool and all but it's not as much fun as sitting at the tide line for hours building a real sand castle. Getting sunburned and going in for a dip when you get too hot. That's the way to make a sand castle. I'm one of those people who never outgrew this form of play. I'm much better at it now and sometimes other people at the beach stop to look at my work.

Haha... I love that he was willing to go to this extent for a pun on words... sandcastles. Yes, it was totally worth it. This guy's out of control! What sort of wild & zany ideas will he come up with next?