The Tiniest Sculpture and the First Atomic Film: It's a Good Day for the Smallest Art Ever

It's a rare day that two separate trailblazing science-inspired artists announce that they've created the smallest art ever—one by hand, and one with the aid of one of the most powerful scanning tunneling microscopes in the world.

Today, IBM's artistically-inclined research team released "A Boy and His Atom," the film short that now holds the Guinness World Record for being the smallest movie ever made. Using a scanning tunneling microscope, nanophysicists in the computing giant's research department manipulated thousands of carbon monoxide molecules to make this miniscule stop-action film, which is visible only when magnified 100 million times.

IBM calls it "a movie made with atoms."

Across the pond, a few hours earlier, renowned UK micro-artist Willard Wigan—the man who built nine camels in the eye of a needle and paints his pieces using "a single hair from a dead fly"—announced that he has created what he believes is the smallest sculpture in history.

It's a microscopic motorbike carved from gold flakes inside a hollowed-out piece of his own stubble. It is smaller than a human blood cell.

According to the UK newspaper the Sun, Wigan "hollowed out the piece of stubble using a tiny fragment of diamond as a tool." In order to "avoid damaging the piece he had to hold his breath and only work between heartbeats which would have otherwise dislodged his steady hand."

"It drove me mad to do," Wigan told Yahoo! UK. "I burst a blood vessel in my eye staring so hard through the microscope."

So really, we're considering two radically different feats of smallest-ever art. Certainly, Wigan requires the aid of technology to craft his tiny pieces. But he's working by hand, and it's a Herculean, and totally unprecedented, feat.

Here is what Wigan's work process—"it's misery," he says—looks like:

And here's a quick look at the immensely powerful, atom-moving microscope IBM used to shoot its film.

IBM is pushing the boundaries of how small it can go for commercial and technological purposes—the smaller the materials it can build, the faster transistors and superconductors it can sell. Its artwork is a primarily a corporate PSA to the public: this is what we can do now. This is what's possible.

Wigan's work, meanwhile, which some have given the dubious label of "nano-art," is actually a profoundly human test of will and physical endurance. Scientists can replicate IBM's methods—it is science first and foremost, after all—but there might not be another person on earth who can do what Wigan does.

It makes some sort of sense that these twin frontiers are being advanced in unison; regardless of the motive root, we humans are drawn like lumen-seeking moths to the task of mastering the physical matter that surrounds us. Artists have been experimenting with tiny art for decades, and so have computer scientists and physicists. As with our fascination with the biggest things in the universe, we're similarly piqued by the smallest—building, manipulating, controlling that which the human eye can't even see is one of our ultimate challenges. Doing it successfully is definitely some kind of art.