Cupid and Psyche: Second Kiss

"CNN Ones to Watch" captures the figure of Yifat Davidoff — Jonty's art partner and life-long love — dancing delicately on a single strand of human hair. The work can only be seen through a powerful scanning electron microscope.

The documentary follows Hurwitz in the laboratory at one of the world's leading universities in engineering and natural sciences — the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany — as the alchemist turned artist crafts a new work.

Jonty Hurwitz takes the audience inside the science and the romance of nano-scale art — from two-photon absorption in a UV-curing resin to a thirty-year love story that became a Guinness World Record.

A talk about how art, science and human emotion converge at a scale smaller than the width of a human hair.

The nano sculptures are created using a process called multiphoton lithography — a form of fabrication born directly from the strange rules of quantum physics. Instead of carving material away, focused pulses of laser light trigger chemical reactions only at the exact point where multiple photons interact simultaneously, allowing structures to be built with extraordinary precision in three dimensions.

At this scale, the boundary between science and imagination begins to disappear. The sculptures are not shaped by human hands in the traditional sense, but emerge from controlled interactions between light, matter, and probability itself. Using techniques developed from cutting-edge physics and nanotechnology, it becomes possible to create objects smaller than the wavelength of visible light — structures that exist at the threshold of what humans can physically perceive.

The nano sculpture work has been the subject of peer-reviewed research across materials science, art theory and intellectual-property scholarship. A selection of the most cited and most compelling English-language papers:

1. Art on the Nanoscale and Beyond — Advanced Materials (Wiley), 2016. Read paper

2. Nanoart: Art on the Nanoscale and Beyond — Cover Feature — Advanced Materials, Vol. 28, Issue 9, 2016. Read paper

3. Molecules to Masterpieces: Bridging Materials Science and the Arts — Advanced Materials (Wiley), 2025. Read paper

4. Inverting the Paradigm: From Art to Granular Science — Leonardo (MIT Press), 2022. Read paper

5. Navigating Intellectual Property Rights, Nanotechnology and Art — Master's thesis, KU Leuven, 2018. Read paper

Browse the full citation graph on Google Scholar.

This revolutionary filming technique draws on the early days of the film industry, using stop-frame photography to painstakingly create a moving image.

Using a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) at high magnification, hundreds of images of the nano sculpture were captured as a Piezo stage was rotated to a precision of below one ten-thousandth of a degree. Each individual frame can take several minutes to capture — meaning a single second of film can take up to four hours to shoot. A painstakingly detailed process, in which any micro-blip means starting again from scratch.

All of this is achieved with a ground-breaking optical system developed by Stefan Diller in Würzburg, Germany, called Nanoflight.Creator — the only system in the world capable of SEM film.

At this scale, the very act of observation alters the subject. Electrons fired at the sculpture behave less like particles and more like waves of probability — a reminder that the quantum world refuses to sit still for its portrait.

Each resulting film is minted as a one-of-one NFT — a permanent, on-chain record of a moment that took weeks to capture and only seconds to witness.

In 2015 the figure of Trust was certified by Guinness as the smallest sculpture of a human form. The Fragile Giant — a nano elephant — followed, an entire herd of which could comfortably stand on the eye of a needle.

Developed in collaboration with optical engineer Budd Wentz and precision instrument specialist Stephan Diller, the custom microscope and interactive stage were conceived as an integral part of the nano sculpture experience itself. More than a viewing device, the system transforms the act of observation into an intimate encounter with a world beyond ordinary perception.

Engineered specifically for the demands of museum-grade usage, the microscope enables viewers to navigate the artwork dynamically — shifting perspective, adjusting position, and exploring the piece in real time through a responsive mechanical stage. The result is not a passive act of looking, but an active journey through a hidden landscape measured in microns.