"The idea for Migration came to Viola while he was walking down a street one rainy day in New York. His glasses were covered with raindrops and he saw that each drop was a lens. Everything around him was covered with little hemispherical lenses that contained optical microcosms of the environment. He was surrounded by worlds within worlds . He couldn't see the images in the beads of water on a passing car but he knew they were there. It was a question of scale. He recalled an exhibition of satellite photos that showed first the east coast, then the New York area, then just Manhattan, then just lower Manhattan . What fascinated him was not that one could see buildings from that distance, but that such detail wasn't the result of a zoom or a blowup as we normally understand them. They hadn't used four different telephoto lenses and made four different pictures . It was all one computer-enhanced electronic image, a database. The information in the closeup existed already in the larger-scale".