Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

3D Printed Art Smaller Than an Ant's Forehead

Posted by timothy on from the my-usual-measure-is-a-newt's-nostril dept.

ErnieKey (3766427) writes Artist Jonty Hurwitz has created the world's smallest sculptures: nanosculptures, no wider than a human hair and unable to be seen without an electron microscope, created using a specialized 3D printing process. Hurwitz says this project was 'Art, literally created with Quantum Physics.' While this seems quite a claim, it seems to be very well deserved. Hurwitz enlisted a team of approximately 15 people to help him bring his vision to life. After scanning his models in a 200-camera array, the sculptures were printed — with advice from the Weizmann Institute of Science — using a 3D print technique by the Institute of Microstructure Technology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, with multiphoton lithography used for the fine detail work.

2 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. The two photon effect by umafuckit · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here's a nice page on the two photon effect, which explains how the resolution was achieved. Two-photon imaging has been used for some time in the life sciences to achieve super-thin optical sectioning.

    --
    soylentnews.org
  2. Sorry, this is bullshit photoshopped "art". by Gavin+Scott · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No, I'm sorry, it appears to me that this is all photoshopped fakery. Yes, two-photon lithography is a real thing, but in this case we have some artist claiming to have done things which are not currently possible.

    This kind of thing happens pretty frequently now and it pisses me off, sorry. Real scientists and engineers (and even artists) dream and strive to accomplish great feats of engineering and discovery. But some people like to pretend their dreams are real and by presenting fake accomplishments to the world they damage society by trivializing the actual accomplishments of real innovators. They present their "art" as if it were real, and it gets sent around the internet and people believe that it's true, and that further blurs the public's view of what's real and what's art or pure fantasy. What's the point of trying to actually do something like this when everyone thinks it has already been done?

    So, anyhow, a few minutes googling will expose some of the original pre-photoshop images that these people appropriated to create their "art". For example, the microphotograph of the needle's eye can be found here with no tiny statue in evidence:

    http://www.aber.ac.uk/bioimage...

    In addition, depth-of-field, lighting, and other cues like the fact that there's no actual connection to the substrate make these fakes pretty obvious.

    Ergo, I must presume the whole thing, including the video interview is all just "performance art".

    Here's a tip: amazing and groundbreaking scientific and technological breakthroughs are generally not announced to the world by artists.

    G.