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An MIT-ian challenges human perceptual limits in a new Discovery Channel show
A lot of Jeff Lieberman’s work deals with human perception. In October, the Discovery Channel will premiere Time Warp, a series that uses high-tech visual technologies, such as super high-speed video capable of recording 325,000 frames per second, to explore things that are outside of our perception. Lieberman, whose blend of art and science has already made him a rising star at MIT’s famed Media Lab, will be the host.
The handsome and charismatic 30-year-old roboticist and kinetic sculptor who doesn’t own a TV and lives in MIT housing, got offered the show in a cold call from a producer who had heard about his work at MIT’s high-speed photography lab. He took it because, he says, it fits nicely into what he calls his daily conflict between art and science.

“Every time I do art, I feel like I’m not serving utility in a direct way,” he said. “Every time I do science, I miss the spark of the creative impulse. But I’ve come to realise it’s the same. In science or art, it’s about introducing people to new truths.”
On the show, Lieberman says the goal is to find things that are amazing yet out of our perception, and bring them into a range that we can comprehend. “We’ve evolved techniques for taste and sight and sound, but we have just enough to hunt prey and avoid predators,” he said. “But when you tell someone that the rainbow actually goes farther than what you can see, they have a tough time dealing with that. This show is about using science and technology to experience deeper things, to find the deeper sources of awe.”
Lieberman’s work ranges from the cutely clever to the absurdly complex, such as “Absolut Quartet”—a giant “musical experience” he created with Dan Paluska, a fellow MIT roboticist—in which a user entered a short theme into a web page, and the machine, on display in a New York gallery this spring, generated a unique musical piece with three instruments.
“He’s able to talk about science as something that’s very hip, and he’s a great person to communicate that to a whole new generation,” said Cynthia Breazeal, his PhD adviser in the robotic life group, where Lieberman is focusing on applications of technology in artistic expression.

Lieberman is certainly having fun using visual technology to delve into heavy scientific riddles, such as how a hummingbird keeps its beak still, and simple curiosities, like what happens when you yank a tablecloth off a table. “The more I explore my work—the idea that we have perceptual limits—the more it becomes obvious that the world was not created for us,” he said. “We are part of this vast evolutionary chain of immense complexity.”
BILLY BAKER, NYT