The Body Electric

What does your “energy avatar” look like? In September, scientist and artist David Glowacki, presently in residence at Stanford, exhibited an interactive installation, danceroom Spectroscopy, on campus. Fusing 3-D imaging and molecular physics, dS transforms people intoenergy fields and lets them wander through the nano world, where they trigger sounds and images according to their movement, and in real time. “Our human sensory organs cannot see the atomic world; nevertheless, scientific communication relies on how we imagine it to look, and this opens up fascinating aesthetic territory,” Glowacki told Stanford Report. Shown here are dancers in a performance designed to reimagine the Impressionist exploration of passing time. In addition to its artistic purposes, Glowacki hopes dS can be used to conduct scientific investigations to learn how biological molecules work.