Artist M.C. Escher died in 1972, leaving behind iconic optical illusions that are now generations old. Painter Joy Garnett was born in 1965, and her career is in full swing. But when nanoscience researcher Robert Hovden copied works from both for a recent project, he could use Garnett’s with impunity. Escher’s estate, meanwhile, thinks he’s breaking the law.

Unless he told you, though, you’d never know he’s ripping off someone else’s work.

"They think that's maybe where the art is. But probably not."

When Art Exceeds Perception looks like an exhibit of blank gray discs. Those silicon discs, however, hold a series of miniscule etchings: sketches made by a process called nanoscale lithography, in which charged ions blast away silicon atoms like an invisible chisel. The technique can be used for beautiful effects, like sandcastles printed on a single grain of sand. In this case, the images' individual details are roughly a tenth of a micron wide, and each picture is so small that it’s impossible to see even with a high-powered optical microscope — you’d have to turn to more recent inventions like the scanning tunneling microscope. At Cornell University’s Jill Stuart Gallery, where the installation will hang until December, "people will stare, and they usually find small imperfections in the disk," says Hovden. "They think maybe that's where the art is. But probably not."

Intellectual property creates an incentive for artists and inventors by letting them profit from their work, but Hovden’s pieces demonstrate the levels of surreality it can reach. The Escher estate, in fact, was deeply unamused by his idea. "All of [Escher’s] work is protected by (international) copyright laws and unauthorised use is thus punishable by law. The size of the (unauthorised) reproduction is irrelevant," said Mark Veldhuijsen, who manages licensing, in an email to The Verge. "What actually does amaze me, is the fact that you write that it is an artist who produces these small works. An artist should realise whether something is original, or just ordinary thievery."

If Hovden had etched his source materials at scale, you probably could call it blatant plagiarism of some of the best-known works of the mid-20th century: Escher’s tessellations, for example, along with Henry Matisse’s Le Platane and Rene Magritte’s The Treachery of Images. Or you could call it appropriation art — a legally and ethically gray category that’s created landmark copyright feuds over, say, whether a collage artist who paints over the subject’s eyes and mouth in a photo creates a new work (the case was settled, so we’ll never be quite sure.) As it is, though, When Art Exceeds Perception is a test of our increasingly stringent copyright laws.

"I think maybe the better title of this project would be Reductio ad Absurdum," says Hovden. Technically, what he’s made is a traditional sort of reproduction. Each piece "is not digitized or encrypted like information on your hard drive," he insists. "This is a real replica in normal interpretable space, and it's been hung on the wall for public display." And since the standard copyright term lasts 70 years after the creator’s death, those reproductions won’t be legal for decades. But no human eye will ever see any of them, and just figuring out where they are on the disc would be like "finding a parked car in the state of New York." And if virtually no one can tell what it is, who would hold him accountable for copying?

Can something really be a copy if you'll never be able to see it?

Hovden says he thinks of his work as a commentary on artistic integrity in general, not just regulation. "The law doesn't necessarily have to represent the moral question," he says. "Some people believe that the person that created the work, that that work belongs to them indefinitely." There’s also the more subtle question of plagiarism, or at the more extreme end, forgery. Nanoscale drawings call into question what it really means to "steal" a work — is it enough for the piece to, theoretically, be visible? If visitors could somehow bring specialized equipment and extract the image, would that count? Is simply evoking a brand like Escher’s its own kind of violation?

Garnett’s painting Laylah K is protected by a Creative Commons license, which allows Hovden to use it freely. Potentially, his other three works could be granted legal immunity under fair use rules. It’s acceptable to copy part of a work if you’re commenting on it, parodying it, or presenting research on it, among other things. But the limits on fair use are only determined through lawsuits, and the US Copyright Office warns that they will "not always be clear or easily defined." Courts will judge each case by weighing four factors, including how much of the original work is used and whether it will hurt the market for it.

"When you do projects in the domain of fair use, you can't really feel secure in your actions in knowing that they're legal," says Hovden. It’s all about the context of an image, and how people use it — one court said Google Image Search was infringing on other sites by copying image thumbnails from them, another said it legally "transformed" the photos by shrinking the originals and using them as a search tool. In theory, these works should eventually fall into the public domain, where they can be copied and remixed at will. But copyright terms have been extended multiple times — they’ve gone from a maximum of around 30 years to, at present, the creator’s life plus 70 years, and there’s no reason to think it won’t be extended again. The Supreme Court has even ruled that Congress can take works out of the public domain and re-copyright them.

Whatever the legal status, though, there’s little chance that Escher, Magritte, or Matisse’s estates will lose money because of When Art Exceeds Perception. Not only will visitors never see the tiny drawings, they’ll never even see a likeness of them — with the exception of Laylah K, no magnified images exist. "The art director also wanted to see the pictures," says Hovden. "But I felt strongly that the point of this wasn't to show a picture that you could see of these works. It would be just like taking another person's work and printing it out on your printer and hanging on the wall." And the etchings are so delicate that even imaging them could damage the art.

If Hovden had scuttled his exhibition, what would we have lost? Outside their intellectual property implications, the tiny pictures are also clever references to their source material. Escher’s tessellations mirror the array of atoms on the silicon disc, and The Treachery of Images — a picture of a pipe paired with the statement "this is not a pipe" — has been updated for a new century: the first evokes the idea of a pipe, the second evokes the idea of the idea of a pipe. Whether or not they’re masterpieces, it’s easier to see them as adding to culture than stealing it — which is, of course, the point.

Correction, November 19th, 10am ET: The image details in Hovden's pieces, not the images themselves, are less than a micron wide.