Surface Tension

Karyn Nakamura

Track: Artwork

Keywords: Machine perception, computational imaging, latent representation, stable diffusion, post-truth, ethical AI

TL;DR: An installation that revolves around a microscopic animation in which individual neuron cells are meticulously choreographed to form a “THOUGHT” using the technology of optical tweezers.

Abstract:

Surface Tension is an experimental installation that explores the power of visual media in shaping our realities, probing the tension between visibility and authority in the systems through which we produce and share knowledge. At its center lies the installation’s kernel of truth - raw footage from a microscope capturing a meticulous process of animating individual neurons through physical manipulation. Using optical tweezers, neurons are lifted and orchestrated into movement by the energy of a light beam, drifting in and out of formations that attempt to spell out the word "THOUGHT.”

Over the course of the installation, this raw footage undergoes continuous visual transformation, cycling through color inversions, latent textures generated by diffusion models, and other computational processes that conceal and reveal different aspects of the image. Images at various stages in the technological reconstruction of the absurd reality morph in and out, slide over and under each other, wearing the traces of their own making like a skin.

In this layering of the real and the speculative, Surface Tension confronts the condition of being human in a world increasingly mediated by black-boxed machine perception. It traces the double-edged power of media to traverse boundaries between physical reality and representation, simulation and experiment, model and metaphor. In animating the very matter that constitutes consciousness, the work both literalizes and questions the future of agency, asking what it means to see, know, and be, amid increasingly autonomous systems.

Submission Number: 51