Nanoart | Against the dogma of the "medium size"

Tracing the origins of the Anthropoperiphery: the perceptual axis and the optical dictatorship.

The key to Paradise, 2007

In the early 2000s, while the world was obsessively shrinking, art was standing still.

I looked at my cell phone and saw a device that was becoming radically smaller, yet paradoxically faster and more "intelligent". I looked at the history of science and saw that since 1959 - from Feynman’s intuition to the invention of the Scanning Tunnel Microscope - humanity had been learning to manipulate matter atom by atom. The nanometer was becoming the silent hero of our era, yet a relevant sector of human knowledge seemed completely untouched by this revolution: "High Art".

Unlike technology, the size of artworks had remained more or less constant throughout history, trapped in a "mediocrity" (medietas) between the monumental and the miniature. It seemed that in Art, size mattered in a very specific way: the work had to be addressed to the human eye as the ultimate judge of value.

This was the spark of my first annoyance.

Why should the biological limits of our eyes define the boundaries of what is real or what is art?

At the time, I was wrestling with the "normative theory of art" proposed by the philosopher Maurizio Ferraris. His thesis was clear: for an object to be an artwork, it must satisfy the requirements of sensibilità (it must fall under the senses) and manipolabilità (it must be within hand’s reach). To Ferraris, an artwork was a physical object of a certain size—neither too big nor too small.

To me, this felt like the ultimate expression of human arrogance. Our eyes are just a contingent biological apparatus, limited to a tiny window of the visible spectrum—about 380–700 nanometers. By creating works below that threshold, I wasn't just trying to make "small things"; I was attempting a phenomenological reduction.

I wanted to challenge the "optical dictatorship". I sought the collaboration of the Politecnico di Torino to create a physical trace—a thing engraved in silicon—that existed with absolute certainty, but which denied itself to the "bulimic eye" of the contemporary observer.

I wanted to see what remained of art when the "biological receiver" was removed. I wanted to find the relief of being irrelevant to the work's existence.

Looking back today, this was not just an experiment in nanotechnology. It was the moment I began building the Anthropoperiphery: the systematic discovery that the human being is peripheral to perception. We are not the measure of significance; we are merely one of the tools through which significance sometimes becomes visible.

In the next record, we will look at the first "scars" I left on the silicon: the works that made the invisible continent real.