PERCEPTIONS AT THE NANOSCALE
David Glowacki. First published in Nature, May 7 2019
Artistic imagination can help drive scientific imagination.
Building on psychology and neuroscience research linking multisensory processing and attention, our laboratory actively integrates both artistic and scientific practices to develop technologies for enabling multisensory perception of nanoscale dynamics, exploring perceptual channels beyond vision — for example, audio, touch and proprioception.
Our work has highlighted a number of applications where multisensory approaches enable more intuitive (and efficient!) nanoscale design and engineering. This is a relatively unexplored territory for nanotechnology research, requiring deep and symmetric exchanges between aesthetic practice and scientific practice, but it has the potential to usher in a new paradigm for nano-engineering, improving our dynamical intuition and our ability to communicate.
TARA: A MEDITATIVE ART PRACTICE AND COLLABORATIVE LOCKDOWN PROJECT
During the pandemic, labs and institutions across the world shuttered their doors, as scientists and artists did our best to adapt to working remotely to continue our studies.
The IRL remained active during lockdown, adapting our Isness co-located multi-person VR experience into a distributed format in which participants could dial in across the globe.
Part of this research was conducted from a remote lab node established at D’Alijo Retreat centre in the mountains of Northern Portugal.
How to visually describe ISNESS: A lightpainting exploration
Communicating the experience of ISNESS to those who haven’t experienced it is difficult, and the in-world visuals are so subtle that they do not convey it’s beauty when seen as footage or stills. While developing ISNESS-D it became even more apparent that we wanted imagery to help us describe the experience we were about to offer to people we may never meet in person! This inspired the team to arrange a photoshoot to create images which better illustrate the ISNESS experience.