Three Drops

In Three Drops, visitors walk in front of a video projection to see how their shadows affect simulations of water at vastly different scales. In one segment, falling water is shown at human scale, and gravity is the noticeable force. The piece then zooms into a single drop of water. Here, visitors are immersed in an environment where they are about one thousand times smaller than normal and time passes about one hundred times more slowly than in actuality. At this scale, visitors explore how surface tension makes water behave. In the third segment, the piece zooms into the droplet of water to show individual water molecules at the nanoscale. Here visitors experience a world about one billion times smaller than normal, and time is slowed by a factor of one trillion. At this scale, visitors interact with individual water molecules and see how electric charges attract water molecules to viewers’ shadows.

http://www.nisenet.org/artnano/artists/snibbe/artwork/