See Wonders of the ‘Nanocosmos’ Through an Electron Microscope

When I first started thinking about what I could do with an electron microscope I always imagined a bridge between my previous work and this work being a link to the cosmos. We’re used to thinking of the cosmos being outside of earth, but actually we are the cosmos. We’re sitting on a piece of rock in the cosmos. This is an image of a lunar sample I got from an Apollo samples curator in Houston, Texas, and it’s a bridge between outer and inner space in a way. What you’re seeing is a piece of geology, but we’re not used to thinking of geology as being one millimeter wide. It’s lunar impact glass, meaning it’s glass produced when an asteroid slammed into the moon about 500 million years ago. What I find fascinating about it is that it looks like a mountain range, and it sort of confirms various things we maybe know conceptually but don’t necessarily see in front of our eyes—a kind of fractal logic.

The universe doesn’t obey some spurious anthropocentric rule that says craters have to be big and are made by big things that slam into the moon or another celestial body. There are also tiny pieces of sand traveling at blindingly fast speeds that impact the lunar surface and others and turn into little bits of glass and create all kinds of effects.

Radiolarians are single-celled marine creatures that were first brought to public attention by the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel at the turn of the 20th century in his book Art Forms in Nature. A lot of people would recognize the incredibly beautiful lithographs he produced of sea creatures and other different kinds. The radiolarians in Art Forms in Nature impacted design, architecture, and art in the Secession period, when the Paris Metro organic entranceways were being made and so on.

To me this looks like a kind of a freeze-frame of atomic motion, or protons whirling around a nucleus. It’s just so out there. What you’re looking at is silica glass distilled from seawater by the single cell that makes these incredible shells. It’s a bio-mineralization process. If I sound like a science geek, well, partly I am. But the intention of this work is not research— it’s art. The intention is to produce a sense of awe or sublimity. I’m using scientific research technologies for artistic purposes. I did that with my planetary work, where I was taking raw data from interplanetary missions and making the case that the landscapes I produced belong to the history of art and the history of representations of landscape in general. Here I’m using research to make a case that all of this belongs to the history of photography and visual representation of phenomenal reality. I’m interested in the science of it all, but I’m most interested in the beauty of it. I always go to these frontier zones looking for image, based on the quality of an image and not on what it might say about the mineral content of the seawater or the distribution of oxygen, geological time, or anything like that.

No matter how much I get used to radiolarians, they continue to, for want of a better term, blow my mind. It’s so confounding that a single cell, after billions of years of evolution, produces something of this kind of beauty, with this level of complexity. It’s rearranged my neurons in the sense that I gave up thinking that multi-cellular creatures like us are more complex than single-cell creatures. That’s just not the case.

Typically, radiolarians are constructed in a more or less orderly mesh of rigid polygons, made out of silica, and, speaking of fractal logic, frequently they’re also made out of nested spheres. The central sphere contains the endoplasm and nucleus of the cell, for those who understand cell structure. That’s where the greatest activity is. Then, surrounding that, protected by the outer shell, is cytoplasm, which is a protein-rich liquid. I do write about that in the book, but I was careful to separate the plates from any explanation of what you’re seeing so you can absorb the visual qualities first.

One more thing: these live for only about two weeks, and when the cell inside dies, the shells gradually snow down to the sea floor. It can take decades for them to sink all the way down, so you have this continuous snowfall of things that look like snowflakes, and then they get compounded in the seabed and gradually become something called siliceous ooze, which gets compressed into a very dense stone over millions of years that we call chert. Chert was a component of Stone Age tools. I had a lot of fun writing about how radiolarians impacted human culture by creating stone that we made into spears, blades, and so on.

I find this one humorous and beautiful. Dinoflagellates are another kind of single-cell organism. Their shells are made out of cellulose, so it’s kind of like paper. They’re very bizarre things, with two little propellers at its north and south poles. The one at the southern end here would be a propulsion flagellum, and around the middle, there’s an equatorial flagellum that spins it. When they move through the water, they’re spinning and whizzing forward at the same time, like little spacecraft. They are also the creatures that create flashes of light at night in a boat wake, magical little flashes of bioluminescence.

All of these creatures, I should point out, are so small that it would be extremely difficult to see them with the naked eye, even when they’re dried and on a slide, let alone in the water. We’re talking about creatures that are maybe 1/8 as wide as a grain of table salt—with this level of complexity! This has a droid-like quality, doesn’t it? If H.R. Giger came up with the droid to rip your head off, it might look like that.

This image took the longest of any of the images in the book. All of the images, with very few exceptions, are multi-scan mosaics assembled digitally by hand. This one was 300 to 400 individual frames that I put together over a period of a month, so it’s closer to making a painting than a single-snap photo. This is about a centimeter wide, which is the biggest subject that we’re looking at here. A centimeter, in electron microscopy terms, is gigantic. With this image—and other examples in the book—I had in mind Dutch still life paintings from the 17th century that lots of people are familiar with: works by Rachel Ruysch and Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder that depict their ecosystems as microworlds. Here you have an aphid surrounded by its natural environment, which is a flowering plant. I didn’t consciously plan this, but while making this image I started thinking about Henri Rousseau’s tiger paintings, where you have tigers surrounded by the jungle.

Here the aphid is about two millimeters long. It came from my lawn. I would go out with a pair of tweezers and little vials of ethanol, like a total geek, which is I guess what I am, to look for  examples of micro life that might be look great in the microscope. I probably didn’t even notice the aphid when I put it in the vial—I probably saw it later.

Obviously the entomologist who had the fun of naming this species saw that it looked like one giant eye. Above that trunk-like proboscis thing, the two eyes practically merge. It’s like a science-fiction monster. But weevils are peaceable vegetarians, so it’s not going to come eat you if you’re miniaturized down to its level. It would just kind of bumble by—it’s got an elephant-like quality too. “The lesser of two weevils” is the joke about weevils …

This is a dung beetle from Papua New Guinea. I had access to dung beetles from all over the world working at the Canadian Museum of Nature. The entomologists there were very generous lending me their specimens. And dung beetles are particularly fascinating because they’re like armored earth-moving creatures, some of which look like they have samurai masks on. They’re some of the most powerful-looking creatures I’ve ever seen in any sphere of any size. They’re vegetarian—or I shouldn’t say they’re vegetarian because they live on dung. They have a very important role to play in recycling elephant excrement in Africa, for example. They live on different kinds of dung, which they roll into huge balls—huge compared to their size—which is why they look so armored like that. They roll these gigantic things and bury them.

I recently went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Divine Egypt” show, and there were a couple of dung beetles, one of the which is a really large stone. The Egyptians were fascinated with them because they saw the rolling of the ball across the landscape and the bearing of it as analogous to the rising and setting of the sun. The dung beetle became venerated in a way I write about in the book.

I also became fascinated by dragonfly wings and, in general, the aerodynamic qualities of dragonflies. The wings are masterpieces of natural design. My marching orders when I started the project many years ago was that Nanocosmos would be an investigation of natural design at microscopic scales. And there are a few better examples of natural design that I found than dragonfly wings. They’re unbelievable structures designed to whiz and whirr at incredibly high beat rates, so they have to be strong and yet light. They’re a structural solution to an engineering problem.

What you see here is the leading edge of the front wing of a dragonfly, so there were a lot of depth-of-field issues to work through. This was another two-and-a-half to three-week build in Photoshop of many, many, many scans to construct the image. I love the fact that it has a certain Victorian glass greenhouse quality to it, but very organically so.