Designer Marcelo Coelho and artist Vik Muniz have teamed up to etch microscopic castles onto single grains of sand in a painstaking art project -- more than four years in the making -- called Sandcastles.
The pair teamed up to develop a complex, time-consuming technique that involved using an ion beam to etch the pictures of European castles.
Gallery: Microscopic castles etched onto grains of sand
Muniz first had the idea more than a decade ago, but the concept remained theoretical until he discussed it with MIT Media Lab resident Coelho at an event more than four years ago at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Coelho then arranged for Muniz to spend some time at MIT to develop the process.
Muniz has created the drawings -- outlines of castles from across Europe -- using a camera lucida. It was Coelho's responsibility to develop an etching process that would work on such a small scale. The pair attempted to use lasers initially, but found that the photon beams emitted were too big for the job: they wouldn't allow for a precise etching on the tiny grains of sand.
Instead, the sand was etched with a focussed ion beam under a scanning electron microscope.
Coelho told Wired.co.uk that the whole process starts with cleaning the sand in methanol. "This removes the hydrocarbons," he says. Once that's done, the methanol is removed with acetone, "then you have sand that's clean enough to put into the machine". The grains are then sieved to find ones of the right size -- less than half a millimetre.
The grains of sand were then attached to a small metal stub used to mount objects into the scanning and etching machine. The stub was covered in a double stick carbon tape, which keeps the sand grains in place. The stub -- covered in between 50 and 150 grains of sand -- is then placed into the machine and inspected. The machine in question -- a Focussed Ion Beam Scanning Electron Microscope -- is conventionally used for fixing integrated circuits. "The chips are made out of silicon wafers, which are made out of really pure prepared silicon. This is also the same material you find in sand, so it's quite poetic," says Coelho.
Once the stub is in the machine, the hunt is on for the right grain. "That process can take anywhere from ten minutes to ten hours," explains Coelho. "I'm looking for a grain of the right size with a surface that is flat enough so you can draw onto it."
It's a painstaking process that involves moving the microscope across the surface of the stub to find the perfect piece of sand.
Once the right piece of sand is found, the machine needs to be focussed precisely on the facet of the grain that is going to be etched. Then the ion beam is used to etch onto the grain. It works by heating up a gallium source, which then vaporises and emits ions, which travel down a tube and are beamed onto the grain, which breaks down the surface of the sand. This is done continuously to create a line.
It doesn't work every time. "Because it's sand I have no idea what the actual material is. Sometimes it looks beautiful, sometimes nothing happens, sometimes it destroys the grain. But assuming all of that works, we then have an image," he explains. "It's a frustrating task of trying and trying."
Once the castle has been etched, Coelho needs to take an image of it, which is then converted into the large scale artworks for exhibition. The image is taken using an electron scanner at the maximum resolution. This tends to require around nine shots of each castle, which are then stitched together to get the larger image.
Coelho then sends these to Muniz, who prepares and prints the image.
Each image -- when it works -- takes between ten and 12 hours to capture from the time the right grain has been found. So far, the duo has managed to take four images, using more than 300 hours of lab time. "It was totally worth it," says Coelho. "That's the crazy thing.
You spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to do it and once it works out it's beautiful. There was this bizarre moment of revelation."
That moment of revelation was delayed because the basic scanning tool on the machine isn't very high resolution. In order to see the detail, he needed to take a high-resolution scan, which would take around 20 minutes. "Then the image would show up and it would be either 'awesome' or 'damn!'"
The successfully etched grains are now stored in a little box, along with dozens of other sand candidates (sandidates?) on the sticky stubs. They are unremarkable to the naked eye -- hence why the final artworks being exhibited are blown up images of the work.
The work is currently being exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.