On Perceiving Molecular Time: Computational Chemical Simulations and the Moving Image

Abstract

The perception of time undergoes a radical shift between the human scale and the nanoscale. In an age of rapidly evolving media and scientific technologies, we need to understand how these impact human perception and visual culture. This essay explores computational molecular simulations through the lenses of temporal media theory and moving image practice. Emerging from a creative fellowship with a physical chemistry research group, I focus on two moving image works that depict crystalline structures. One is a nanoscale computational simulation of soot formation and the other is a durational video artwork showing the dissolution of sugar. Computational molecular simulations are shown to produce a feeling of time by smearing an extremely short duration across a longer perceptible duration. This analysis uncovers how the awareness of media as a construct troubles our chronoception (perception of time), while unexpectedly, the screen becomes complicit in scientists’ expert temporal understanding. The videos present vastly different spatial and temporal scales and have different chronoceptive effects: one gives a sense of being within time, the other across time. Ultimately, computational simulations emerge as isomorphic media that have explicit aesthetic properties that connect us to the implicit, abstract energetics of chemical reactivity.