Macro/micro photolithography: an unlikely collaboration
Enrique Escobedo-Cousin1 and Erika Servin2
1School of Engineering, Institute of Neuroscience 2Fine Art
Newcastle University
We would like to begin this article with a brief note on Mexican culture. It is common knowledge in Mexico that when anyone tells you something along the lines of ‘Hey, we should definitely meet up again sometime...’ they haven’t got the slightest intention of making that meeting happen. To the untrained ear, this sentence may sound like an actual invitation to do something fun in the near future, however, what often follows is the inevitable disappointment of not being able to get back in contact with the Mexican in question ever again. Through the Mexican ear, the above expression would actually sound closer to: ‘Hey, it is really nice to see you, perhaps not quite as much as to actually go and make an effort to make it happen again, although I would not be completely against the idea if it were you who made the plans for it but you don’t really seem very interested either. It’s still nice to see you though...’ A polite response would be to agree and suggest that one of the two could maybe one day call the other, but making sure that no specific details about the time, duration or purpose of such call are discussed.
Perhaps the most unlikely aspect about this collaboration (funded by Newcastle University Institute for Creative Arts Practice), is not that Erika is an artist while Enrique is an engineer and therefore have no common professional links whatsoever, but the fact that, against all odds, it actually happened despite the fact that we are both Mexican and the idea of ever working together first came up during a conversation a couple of years ago: ‘Hey, we should definitely do some kind of collaboration some time.’
Erika’s work is related to cultures and subcultures of contemporary Mexico, aiming to create and explore visual and symbolic references to them through the process and imagery of print. As the printmaking technician in the School of Arts and Cultures, she routinely uses techniques such as etching, relief printing, mono prints, lithography, screen-printing, among others in her work. Enrique is a biomedical engineer working with the Emerging Technology and Materials group at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and the Institute of Neuroscience. He designs and fabricates micro-devices for medical applications.
We realised that photolithography and etching are techniques that we both use routinely, albeit for very different purposes and results. This is exactly where the idea for a collaboration came about, to explore the unlikely relationship of two entirely different disciplines: fine art printmaking as a means to social communication, and semiconductor micro-fabrication applied to biomedical engineering. The objective of this collaboration was to produce a collection of macro- and micro-scale prints to be exhibited, to share conceptual approaches and to exchange technical processes.
Erika produced what we call macro-prints: images of medical electrodes which were designed and fabricated by Enrique as a part of a project aiming to develop a medical device to be used in the clinic to diagnose skeletal muscle disorders (micro-electrode myography). These images were captured in the lab using a microscope (since the devices are tiny!) and the prints were produced using the methods and materials that are common in art printmaking. To contrast with the first collection of images, Erika provided Enrique with some of her artwork focusing on societal themes of Mexican popular culture. Enrique digitised these images to produce micro-masks of them to finally print them at the micro-scale using semiconductor fabrication techniques. The result was a series of images the size of fractions of a millimetre, printed in titanium and gold on glass slides to view under a microscope using a HD digital camera.
The exhibition Interdisciplinary Exchange in Technical Processes of Photolithography (a.k.amicro-macro photo-litho) will run from 29th June to 7th July at the Fine Art Atrium, King Edward VII building, Newcastle University.