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‘Art and science address the same issues’

in the form of a Doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab and forging a glittering television career.

When he was a child growing up in Miami, Jeff Lieberman discovered his love not only for music and the arts, but also the sciences. Everything from playing with Lego to becoming one of Florida’s highest scorers in state school maths competitions, Jeff’s appetite for the mechanics of the world around him was insatiable. So when he turned 18, Jeff enrolled at MIT, where he gained a double major in physics and mathematics.

Post graduation, after working at several start-up companies, Jeff decided to focus on the intersection between art and technology and returned to MIT to work at the Media Lab in the Robotic Life Group. There he headed design on the Cyberflora installation - a robotic flower garden that senses and responds to people in a lifelike manner, and the Motor Learning Robotic Wearable Suit - a robotic suit that teaches motor skills. Jeff has also produced kinetic art sculptures, including - ‘Absolut Quartet’ - a music-making machine that incorporates the audience into the performance; and ‘Light Bulb’ - an electromagnetically levitated and wirelessly powered light bulb.

In addition to his robotic research and pursuit of higher learning, Jeff continues to make art. Not only is he a passionate high-speed photographer, he has also been on several concert and performance tours around the world, even releasing an album with his duo ‘Gloobic’.

We caught up with Jeff to talk about his new TV series ‘Time Warp’. ‘Time Warp’ is a fun educational programme which reveals astonishing feats such as breaking twelve concrete blocks with your bare hands or breaking a plank of wood over someone’s abdomen in super slow motion in order to appreciate things that are normally beyond our senses and to demonstrate what really happens with every crack, fissure and crash.

Your new series ‘Time Warp’ uses new and innovative technology. What made you decide to focus on this type of programme making?

We need to raise children with a sense of awe towards the natural world around us. ‘Time Warp’ doesn’t just entertain; it shows us that there is always more, lying underneath our immediate and direct perception. Taking a scientific mindset and questioning everything around us, trying to look closer, yields beauty, and can find solutions to the problems we have as a world. Science does not occupy the primary role in society that it should. Right now we possess the technology to combat most of the problems in the world (energy, health, poverty, etc), if only it were our priority. The only solutions to these problems will come from us; we need to get involved. I hope that shows like this re-energise people to get involved in science, to solve the problems that plague us.

How do you decide on the subject matter of the show?

Initially, Matt and I came up with about 200 ideas from our previous knowledge - we then sat down with the production team and discussed those and many others. It comes down to several factors. One of the most important is visual impact - if the visuals don’t tell the story on their own, it won’t play on TV. We also have to choose segments that are feasible; some of our ideas would take weeks to organise, which at this point is impossible. Equally important is choosing subjects that people experience every day - the best thing we do is show someone a completely new view of something they have known for years. Matt and I originally put together a list of roughly 200 possible topics for filming. We then sat down with the production team, and tried to balance several factors: the ability to capture the event, the interest it would serve to the general public and the surprise it would yield. Many high-speed phenomena, when slowed down, appear ‘slower’, in the expected sense (such as something like playing piano fast), but some phenomena (like popping a soap bubble) reveal completely new elements that our human bodies completely miss.

What is the greatest discovery you have made?

Post graduation, after working at several start-up companies, I decided to focus on the intersection between art and technology and returned to MIT to work at the Media Lab in the Robotic Life Group where I headed design on the Cyberflora installation - a robotic flower garden that senses and responds to people in a lifelike manner, and the Motor Learning Robotic Wearable Suit - a robotic suit that teaches motor skills (dance, sports, rehab, etc). I also produced kinetic art sculptures, including ‘Absolut Quartet’ - a music-making machine that incorporates the audience into the performance; and ‘Light Bulb’ - an electromagnetically levitated and wirelessly powered light bulb. Probably the most recent one was a bodysuit that you wear and it was trying to study the way that we learn movement from other people. If you go to a golf lesson or a tennis lesson or some kind of sports lesson, your teacher shows you how to do things but then if you are having trouble understanding it, usually they’ll move your body through that motion. The feeling that your body actually gets just from doing the motion itself uses your brain in a fundamentally different way than seeing it or hearing about it and it is just motor memory. So I built this bodysuit that you will wear and the teacher who is teaching you something will also wear. In this space you both get tracked by an optical tracking system and, as the teacher does a motion and you try to imitate the motion, it records what the teacher is doing and it maps it onto your body and plays it out with vibration. So the more that you differ from what the teacher is doing, the more your body parts start to vibrate, so you can feel what’s wrong and that way you can transmit someone’s – they call it a sense of appropriate perception, which is the sense of – you know even with your eyes closed you know where your body is, you know where your arms are, that sort of thing. That’s usually a very internal sense and the suit lets you map that sense from one person to another. I can hopefully try to share it and accelerate the ability to learn new things.

What has interested you most during the making of the series?

With regards to ‘Time Warp’, the technology is really amazing to me. I mean in terms of – technology does serve an end in itself for me. I’m never interested in technology for the sake of technology. What I’m interested in is what can technology really do for human beings? And in this case it can let human beings see beyond their own means, see beyond what their bodies can see normally and, because of that, just from seeing things maybe fast or just from seeing things slow or seeing things that are infrared or ultraviolet or things that human bodies are not designed to see, from seeing those things you can immediately learn more about the world; you can immediately understand more about science and physics and chemistry and biology and all of these various topics. And being able to show people things like that without needing to get into the math that’s underlying everything is a much more immediate way to get people interested in science. To me the most amazing side of a show like this is the ability to get people energised and interested in science again.

Is this your perfect job with the mixture of arts and science?

Most definitely! Science reveals an unrivalled depth of beauty about the universe. The more we understand, the more beauty we are shown. I think that science is naturally extremely exciting. The ability to look beyond our normal means and find out new truths about the world is an amazing process. How can we not be amazed at the world around us! I think what I like the most about it is seeing how different things are really connected, seeing how art and science are part of the same thing and seeing how we can be involved in all of them at the same time. For me, both art and science address the same issues in different ways.

What has shocked you most during the making of ‘Time Warp’?

The most challenging elements are one-time events. Sometimes the event is so specific, requires so much setup, or is just plain dangerous enough, that there’s not going to be a ‘take two’. Technically, gauging how the shots are going to look is usually easiest with testing, so when we have no testing option, it requires extremely careful planning to make sure we get it right the first time. Rusty Haight, the ‘human crash test dummy’, was a great subject, but how often can you ask someone to crash a car? Similarly, how often can you ask someone to put their finger in a table saw blade?! That was an amazing segment.

Where does your love of science stem from?

As a child, growing up in Miami, Florida, USA, I discovered my love not only for music and the arts, but also the sciences - everything from playing with Lego to becoming one of Florida’s highest scorers in state school math competitions. So when I turned 18, I enrolled at MIT, where I gained a double major in physics and mathematics. At MIT where I’m finishing a PhD, there’s a course that is about high speed imaging techniques. Dr. Edgerton at MIT invented that in the 1920s, so it still seems to be the whole technology, what has come from them, what is new about them and how can we use them. I took that class about six years ago and really got emotionally involved in it, very much enjoyed the material and what it tells us about ourselves. So I started working when the class was done, just started working on personal projects in that lab. When ‘Time Warp’ was getting put together, people contacted MIT to find out if they knew anyone who was involved in the things and I’m good friends with the man who runs the centre now, who is Jim Bales, and he recommended me. The rest is history…

What is the best invention you can imagine coming to fruition in the next 10 years?

Science does not occupy the primary role in society that it should. Right now we possess the technology to combat most of the problems in the world (energy, health, poverty, etc), if only it were our priority. The only solutions to these problems will come from us; we need to get involved. I hope that shows like this re-energise people to get involved in science, to solve the problems that plague us.

you can catch

Time Warp on the Discovery Channel every Wednesday at 23:00 UAE

david@khaleejtimes.com