Surface Tension

Karyn Nakamura @frog_spit_simulation 2025

Official documentation on SHOWStudio, including a process documentary, an interview with fashion photographer Nick Knight and a talk with architect and writer Jack Self .

When we rely on technology as an intermediary for vision, how do we validate its interpretations? Surface Tension is an installation that explores the power of visual media in shaping our realities, probing the tensions between visibility and authority in the media through which we produce and share knowledge.

At its core lies the installation’s kernel of truth – raw footage from a microscope capturing a meticulous process of animating individual neurons (cellular matter of human brains) 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 the word “THOUGHT.”

Throughout the part live-generated, part pre-sequenced 15 minute experience, the microscopic footage undergoes visual transformations through computational processes from color inversions to textures generated with diffusion models. These textures cycle through – each one concealing and revealing different facets, filtering and molding our perception of the neurons. 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.

The installation unfolds across five screens, a wall of projection, and a slide projector modified into a microscope that projects the actual specimens on the slides used under the optical tweezers, creating a meta-animation of its own process. A choreographed drone weaves through the space capturing a single, curated perspective of the work. This is broadcasted on a TV in the front gallery, where a large mirror sculpture obscures full view of the main space. Like the microscope that lets us peek into microscopic world, the drone’s eye becomes the only way to see inside the gallery – another mediated gaze, filtering reality through a particular perspective, shaping what can be seen and what remains hidden.

 

Curator and Exhibition Sponsor – Nick Knight (SHOWStudio)

Bioengineering Advisor – Yitong Tseo (MIT)

Optical Tweezers Specialists – Professor David Grier (NYU), Jatin Abacousnac (NYU)

Exhibition and Editorial support – SHOWStudio Team

Set Construction – Andy Tomlinson

Installation Photographer – Lara Hughes

Grant Support – Steve Jobs Archive