Winner: 2021 Interdisciplinary Prize
Dr David Glowacki
University of Bristol
For contributions to research and teaching in chemistry using interactive virtual reality simulations.
Consciously and unconsciously, scientists rely on aesthetic projections because they enable us to think about and imagine domains that are otherwise imperceptible. This is especially true at the nanoscale, which is inaccessible to our sensory organs, and effectively invisible. Making scientific progress in domains such as this depends on our ability to construct aesthetic projections that our brains can effectively parse and process, in order to support effective communication. In many cases, the act of aesthetic projection is as important as the experimental data: the aesthetics projection shapes our scientific imagination and therefore focuses our data-gathering efforts.
Building on psychology and neuroscience research linking multisensory processing and attention, Dr Glowacki’s research attempts to actively integrate both artistic and scientific practices to extend new technologies like virtual and augmented reality to enable multisensory perception of nanoscale dynamics, exploring perceptual channels beyond vision – for example, audio, touch and proprioception. This opens up new ways to imagine and communicate complex scientific realities, helping us to better understand the invisible atomic and molecular world around us.
Biography
Dr David Glowacki is originally from Milwaukee, USA. He studies a range of different areas in an ongoing effort to connect different knowledge discourses. He is a Royal Society URF, a Philip Leverhulme prize holder, and ERC grantee. He founded a research group called the Intangible Realities Laboratory (IRL), a joint collaboration between the University of Bristol Centre for Computational Chemistry and the Department of Computer Science. David graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003, studying chemistry, mathematics, philosophy, comparative literature, and religions. In 2004, he obtained an MA in Cultural Theory as a Fulbright finalist at the University of Manchester, UK.
In 2008, he completed a PhD in molecular physics at Leeds University. He has published across several domains: non-equilibrium molecular physics, classical and quantum dynamics, computational biochemistry, human-computer interaction, high-performance computing, computer graphics, evolutionary algorithms, machine learning and data science, digital aesthetics, interactive computational art, religion and power, cultural theory, optics, and scientific instrument development. As a computational artist, David has led projects that have been experienced by over 200,000 people across Europe, the USA, and Asia, at some of the world’s best known cultural venues.
This work has forged an international network of scientists, artists, philosophers, and authors, all of whom are interested in exploring how aesthetic imagery guides scientific imagination. This is particularly important in domains that cannot be seen with the naked eye, where our scientific intuition is guided by the aesthetic representations and metaphors we use to imagine phenomena which are otherwise invisible. Over the last few years, the IRL’s work in computational aesthetics has driven a range of scientific research outcomes – the algorithms they’ve designed to make artworks have proven transferable to scientific research contexts.
The freedom to follow the creative impulse for its own sake is something which scientists share deeply with artists.
Dr David Glowacki
Q&A
Who or what has inspired you?
David Bohm is a character that I find very inspiring. Not only was he a fantastic scientist who developed a beautiful new interpretation of quantum mechanics, but he was also a gifted philosopher who was unafraid to extend scientific ideas and concepts to other domains, including arts, noetics, and spirituality. His observation that all of matter is essentially ‘frozen light’ has become a kind of mantra for my own scientific and artistic practice, and informs much of what we explore in our lab.
Can you tell us about a scientific development on the horizon that you are excited about?
I’m very excited about how new forms of technology like augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality are enabling us to ‘see’ and to imagine the world around us in completely new ways. It’s my generation – the ones that grew up playing video games – who are pioneering applications of these new technologies to scientific domains. As this generation grows up and begins to fill the various positions in scientific institutions, it won’t be long before these kinds of scientific visualisation tools become just as important as those in the wet lab.
What has been a highlight for you (either personally or in your career)?
In the spirit of the interdisciplinary prize, a recent highlight for me has been to observe the impacts of our molecular VR work in radically different fields – specifically neuroscience and psychology. For example, we recently developed a multi-person molecular VR experience called 'Isness', which enables people to experience the emergence, fluctuation, and dissipation of their bodies as energetic essences. Normally we imagine our bodies as solid material objects; the idea with Isness was to explore what happens if we use VR to enable people to re-imagine their bodies (and others’ bodies) as fundamentally energetic essences. To do this, we used graphics strategies similar to those we use to render molecular electronic densities. We collaborated with psychologists to investigate the impact of Isness on hundreds of participants across the world, and found that it produced phenomenological effects which are statistically indistinguishable from moderate to high doses of psilocybin, a serotonergic psychedelic drug which the US FDA has recently identified as a potential ‘breakthrough therapy’ for treating anxiety, depression, and addiction.
Isness is fascinating because it provides a case study that VR may offer therapeutic and mental health benefits which are comparable to drug interventions, but without the associated risks. We submitted the Isness paper to “CHI 2020”, which is the premier annual computer science conference on human computer interaction, and were delighted when it was recognised with a ‘best paper’ award from amongst more than 3000 submissions! It’s a great example of what happens when you branch out beyond your field, and I’m very excited to see where it goes. At present, we are developing this line of research in collaboration with my friend Professor Robin Carhart-Harris, the founder of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial, who has just moved to take up a position at UCSF.
What does good research culture look like/mean to you?
The freedom to explore ideas for their own intrinsic beauty, and also to pursue intellectual curiosity where it leads for its own sake (ie, without the requirement to be motivated by profit), is historically a crucial reason for the success of the natural sciences and the arts in transforming the way that we imagine the world around us. The freedom to follow the creative impulse for its own sake is something which scientists share deeply with artists. With the dramatic changes to artistic funding, scientific and university funding over the last decade, especially in the UK, it feels like the culture has shifted to one which is less focused on creativity for its own sake and is more profit-focused. Research has become a path to industrial impact, education has become a commodity, and many institutional hierarchies have shifted to accommodate this more business-focused, metrics-driven, managerial way of thinking. I’ve seen how these changes have negatively impacted some of my colleagues. It’s important to nurture environments where fundamental creative enquiry can arise, unencumbered by all the various restrictions that arise when profit motives become dominant. Scientists and artists are often both motivated by creative enquiry for its own sake, and therefore I feel that we have a responsibility to talk about these things.
Why do you think teamwork is important in science?
Certainly it’s very important in my lab. We face a number of significant challenges to building new VR frameworks to visualise the microscopic world: the hardest ones involve questions over how best to design aesthetic projections that enable multimodal forms of sensory perception for nanoscale objects that we cannot directly experience.
In this respect, close collaboration between artists and scientists is crucial, because it encourages a kind of positive feedback loop where both kinds of enquiry drive one another to explore new domains: the science inspires artistic imagination, and the artistic imagination then drives technological developments that enable fresh scientific approaches, which then again drives the artistic imagination.