A breathtaking tour of the natural world is offered in Nanocosmos, an examination of majestic topographies revealed by powerful scanning electron microscope (SEM) technologies.
The humbling beauty and cosmic immensity of our surrounding universe of planets, stars, and galaxies has inspired humanity since prehistoric times. But what about the vistas at the other end of the size-scale?
The tiny worlds here, invisible to our unassisted eyes, are if anything more intricate, complex, and extraordinary than anything so far seen in deep space. Lauded artist and author Michael Benson's sensational Nanocosmos corrects this oversight with an unprecedented examination of natural design at sub-millimeter scales.
Nothing like Nanocosmos has ever been seen before. Benson has produced an exhilarating, aesthetically magnificent examination of complex microscopic worlds.
Constructed from SEM scans that he made over the course of six years at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Quebec, the images presented here reveal an eerie, awe-inspiring beauty in subjects taken from the natural world. These include radiolarians, dinoflagellates, and diatoms, as well as many varieties of insects, microscopic flowers, and even lunar samples from the Apollo program.
The composite mosaic micrographs in Nanocosmos fuse art and science in revelatory ways, exposing an astonishing sublimity hidden to the naked eye. An artist, author and filmmaker, Michael Benson has pursued a wide-ranging creative practice. His work spans a range of media, from large-format photographic prints to nonfiction books and essays, illustrated books, films and visual-effects sequences. Following an influential period of engagement with the avant-gardes of the Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia, captured in feature articles for Rolling Stone magazine and his award-winning documentary Predictions of Fire (1995), Benson turned his attention to the intersection of art and science in the 2000s. Over the last two decades, he has staged a series of large-scale exhibitions of extraterrestrial planetary landscapes at venues including the American Museum of Natural History in New York (2007); the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC (2010); the Natural History Museum in London (2016); and The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University (2025). Benson's highly regarded books include Beyond (2003); Far Out (2009); Planetfall (2012); and Cosmigraphics (2014). He contributed to, and in some cases supervised the production of, the visionary cosmology sequences in Terrence Malick's films The Tree of Life (2011) and Voyage of Time (2016). His most recent book, Space Odyssey (2018), recounts the making of Stanley Kubrick's 1968 classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Benson has had solo gallery shows in New York and London and is currently represented by Flowers Gallery in London. His work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri; the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts; and many private collections. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among other venues. For the last few years Benson has been using scanning electron microscopes (SEMs) to focus on natural design at sub-millimeter scales for Nanocosmos, the project presented in this volume. A recent Visiting Scholar at the Center for Bits and Atoms at the MIT Media Lab, Michael Benson is a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities.
For more on his work, see www.michael-benson.com
