RYANS EYES - 1982
Ryan’s Eye was the outline of a human eye etched into a crystal of sodium chloride. A manmade image of submicron scale, the work was designed as a companion piece to Reflections From Earth (1980), a manmade image of an eye viewed from space.
Ryan’s Eye was 100,000 times smaller than the human eye (250 nm vs. 2.5cm). Reflections From Earth was 100,000 times larger than the human eye (2.5 km vs. 2.5cm). Van Sant’s intention for these companion works was “to demonstrate the parameters of the realm in which we operate.”[1]
“As a demonstration of extremes in scale, these are the largest and smallest drawings ever made, the larger being ten billion times the size of the smaller. This project was designed to give us a sense of the size of atoms in relation to ourselves.”[2]
Ryan’s Eye was created using a scanning electron microscope under the direction of Dr. Michael S. Isaacson and A. Muray of the School of Applied and Engineering Physics, Cornell University, at the National Research and Resource Facility for Submicron Structures. Dr. E. J. Kirkland, Cornell University, carried out the computer pseudo-color enhancement. Calculations were provided by physicist Richard Feynman, California Institute of Technology. The project was funded by the artist and named after his son.
Physicist Richard Feynman presented Ryan’s Eye and Reflections from Earth as examples of the very small and the very large in his seminal talk Infinitesimal Machinery at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1986.” The video is available on Vimeo, HERE.
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Cornell University
Ithaca, NY
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April 1st, 1982
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N/A
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Scanned electrons. One salt crystal and a scanning electron microscope.
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250 nanometers across (0.25 of a micron).
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Unknown
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Tom Van Sant
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Unknown. Unknown but most likely
“degraded by now.”
[1] Chris Xu, Director, School of Applied and Engineering Physics Cornell University, and Mong Family Foundation Director, Cornell Neurotech – Engineering. Email to the author, September. 30, 2023.
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Ryan's Eye, 1982, TVS digital records.
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“The distance across the pupil spot is approximately one hundred atoms. If one were to write in letters the size of RYAN’S EYE, the 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica could be transcribed without overlap on the head of a pin.” [1]
“TOM VAN SANT: Well, of course, Ryan's Eye was nearly a decade earlier than the GeoSphere Project. And it was done as a companion piece to Eyes on Earth [From Space, 1986] or Reflections from Earth [1980]—I'm sorry— which was the large shape of an eye on the Mojave Desert. And so the eye theme continued to Ryan's Eye, named for that because he was four months old at the time. This was, what, April 1, 1982.
JO LAURIA: Ryan being the name of your first son?
TOM VAN SANT: My son, right. And he had these very strange, large eyes, which fascinated me. And I came across an article, I believe in the Scientific American, about the installation of the new National Center for Submicron Studies at Cornell University [Ithaca, NY], with a new large electron scanning microscope. And it occurred to me that, having sort of an interest and obsession with scale, how small an image one could make, as well as in contrast to the large image out on the desert.
And I spoke with the most interesting man, a Dr. Michael Isaacson, who operated the scanning electron microscope. And he invited me to come back to Cornell, which I did. And we talked over this project. And he felt that we could make—I could design an image, and he could create a stencil in a film of gold, gold atoms. And with a scanning electron microscope, he could cut to the stencil and create this shape.
And then we could put that stencil on a crystal of sodium chloride, salt, which is a very common, but very finely structured crystal. And then the electrons would pass through this stencil and create this image in the salt crystal. And then as fast as possible, we would immediately scan it by going back and forth across the image before it dissolved, which was going to happen in about a 10th of a second.
And so we were operating down at the uncertainty principle: You destroy a thing by looking at it. In other words, you can't look at it and have it exist and get your cake and eat it, too. See, this is much smaller than the wavelength of light. A quarter of a micron across is something like an inch or something in relation to 10 feet of a wave of light. So you have to do it with electrons.
And the groove that it cuts into the salt is 600 times as deep as each line is wide. I mean, these are strange and bizarre facts, which create sort of bizarre images of the process of doing this. But that's what was fun about it." [2]
[1] Tom Van Sant, “Ryan’s Eye,” Public Art Archive, https://publicartarchive.org/art/Ryan-s-Eye/bf6d86c8. Last accessed January 3, 2024.
[2] Jo Lauria, “Oral History Interview with Tom Van Sant, 2008,” Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
