When we say a sculpture is impressive because of its scale, we're usually alluding to how big or tall it is.
But in the case of artist Jonty Hurwitz' nano-sculptures, the scale is impressive — mind-boggling, really — because of how tiny it is.
Hurwitz claims the sculptures are the smallest depiction of the human form, and that they've been seen "in one way or another, in the web sphere, by 20 or 30 million people so far."
The South African-born artist used more than 200 cameras in a warehouse in Sussex, England, to capture live models. The cameras all go off at the same time to provide data for reconstruction.
Technicians at Nanoscribe, a spin-off of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, recreated the models in a sterile lab. Light is focused on one point of a polymer to create "a tiny 3D pixel (called a Voxel)," Hurwitz writes on his website. "The sculpture is then moved along fractionally by a computer controlled process and the next pixel is created."
These voxels number in the "tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands" per sculpture, each voxel measuring between three and five hundred nanometers, Hurwitz told Business Insider. This tiny figure is still small enough to fit on a human hair.
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