Jeff Lieberman (born March 1978) is an artist and engineer working in a wide variety of artistic and technological media. He was also the host of the documentary show '' Time Warp'' on

Discovery Channel Discovery Channel (known as The Discovery Channel from 1985 to 1995, and often referred to as simply Discovery) is an American cable channel owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, a publicly traded company run by CEO David Zaslav. , Discovery Chan ...

, and directed a number of short films featuring greatly speeded-up or slowed-down time sequences.

Early life and education

Lieberman earned two bachelor's degrees, in Mathematics and Physics, and two master's degrees, in Mechanical Engineering and Media Arts & Sciences with a focus in Robotics, all from

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

. He took a leave of absence from pursuing a

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper ''Piled Higher and Deeper'' (also known as ''PhD Comics''), is a newsp ...

due to the demands of filming. Before his leave, he worked in the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

Cynthia Breazeal Cynthia Breazeal is an American robotics scientist and entrepreneur. She is a former chief scientist and chief experience officer of Jibo, a company she co-founded in 2012 that developed personal assistant robots. Her most recent work has focus ...

's Personal Robots Group.

Career

One of Lieberman's main interests is making

kinetic sculptures Kinetic (Ancient Greek: κίνησις “kinesis”, movement or to move) may refer to: * Kinetic theory, describing a gas as particles in random motion * Kinetic energy, the energy of an object that it possesses due to its motion Art and ente ...

. With

Daniel Paluska Daniel Paluska is an American artist and roboticist known for his computer art installations and collaborations. Paluska is originally from Michigan,. He received both his BS and master's degrees in Mechanical Engineering from MIT where he worke ...

he built the ''Absolut Quartet'', a music machine which has been exhibited at

Ars Electronica Ars Electronica Linz GmbH is an Austrian cultural, educational and scientific institute active in the field of new media art, founded in Linz in 1979. It is based at the Ars Electronica Center (AEC), which houses the Museum of the Future, in th ...

in Austria. He has made many technological sculptures, which resulted in him starting his design firm Plebian Design. He also successfully launched art projects on the

crowd-funding Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and alternative finance. In 2015, over was raised worldwide by crow ...

site

Kickstarter Kickstarter is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of July 2021, K ...

. "One thing that I don’t want to do as an artist is inflate the prices of my work to artificially make them more valuable. Often artists do this in order to make a living; so I wanted to figure out another alternative." he said, explaining why he chose Kickstarter for one of his projects. His first Kickstarter project was ''Moore Pattern'', and a second one, ''Slow Dance'' was later converted into an ongoing product. Both projects appear to be

minimalist In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Do ...

, but incorporate a deep understanding of

human visual perception Visual perception is the ability to interpret the surrounding environment through photopic vision (daytime vision), color vision, scotopic vision (night vision), and mesopic vision (twilight vision), using light in the visible spectrum reflecte ...

. Lieberman is also a musician, playing several instruments as well as singing. His first starring role in a feature film was in the romantic musical comedy ''83 Errers''. In 2010, Lieberman co-directed a 4-minute music video with Eric Gunther, featuring the indie band

OK Go OK Go is an American rock band originally from Chicago, Illinois, now based in Los Angeles, California. The band is composed of Damian Kulash (lead vocals, guitar), Tim Nordwind (bass guitar and vocals), Dan Konopka (drums and percussion), an ...

performing their song " End Love". The video was shot in a continuous take using three cameras, running 18 hours from before sunset to 11am the following day. The footage was condensed using

time lapse Time-lapse photography is a technique in which the frequency at which film frames are captured (the frame rate) is much lower than the frequency used to view the sequence. When played at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and thu ...

techniques ranging up to 170,000 times speedup, with some brief slow-motion segments also recorded at 1500 frames per second. The art production is deeply influenced by the relativity of time and of the human bodily perceptions. In his 2011 speech at TEDxCambridge, he exposed his belief that "time and space are modes by which we think and are not condition in which we live", according to

Albert Einstein Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theor ...

who also affirmed "thought suffers from an optical illusion of consciousness", the illusion that it can exist "a separate person inside an envinronment" while person it can be realized it is pure and undifferentiated energy in motion everywhere, from the time of the

Big Bang The Big Bang event is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. Various cosmological models of the Big Bang explain the evolution of the observable universe from t ...

to the ethernity. The feeling to be alive, the "I am" is all what remains, without the possibility to know its content, form and structure, and definitely what we are.

Plebian Design

Plebian Design is Lieberman's design firm, which has done projects like ''Quartet'' and '' Patterned by Nature'', which is a sculptural ribbon wide and in length.

Wonder Machines

After the success of a Kickstarter project, Lieberman decided to offer his artwork ''Slow Dance'' as an ongoing product through his new company, Wonder Machines. The modestly-priced artwork is a simple, minimalist wooden frame incorporating stroboscopic LED lighting and a vibrating electromagnetic coil, which can animate a small item such as a feather or a flower in apparent slow motion.

References

External links