Inner Monologue, 2026 – Jeewi Lee x Phillip C. Reiner

Inner Monologue is a series of 13 videos, one per single sand grain from the Lee-Reiner collaboration. The grains were selected by both artists and scanned on a Zeiss X-ray microscope in nano-CT at 400-nanometre resolution. The resulting scan volume is a grayscale field of X-ray attenuation. The data carries no colours. Each video takes its name from the site where the grain was collected and a grain number, e.g. Son-Real_23-01. The videos project the interior of each grain as moving images: the raw scan data is decomposed into successive cross-sections that show the density and an interpretation of the composition of the individual grains depending on their origin.

The colour of the videos comes from the Locality Palette research. The collection site determines which minerals can be present in a grain and the range of density they occupy, so each locality carries its own palette indexed to the physical sample and its coordinates. The anchor colours derive from measured mineral reflectance spectra in the USGS Spectral Library, and a lookup table interpolates between them. Each of the 13 videos therefore stands in the palette of its own grain's locality.

Research:
A standard scan recording is decomposed along the three axes, x, y and z, although the recordings are in fact generated by scanning in a single direction, z. Moving straight through the body along that single axis, the cross-section grows and then shrinks again, a pure consequence of the linear traversal rather than anything about the grain itself. Inner Monologue instead traverses the grain with cross-sections oriented along periodic curves: circle, helix, torus, Viviani and similar closed periodic curves.

Three reasons stand behind the choice, in this order. First, it challenges the regular representation, since nature does not have to be forced into straight axes and a linear axis is as arbitrary an interpretation as any other. Second, the relationships inside the grain can be understood freely in space, not only in two and a half dimensions. Third, the periodicity allows the videos to run in an endless loop, which comes closer to the cycles of nature than imposing a beginning and an end.