Thirty-one-year-old Jeff Lieberman is the host of Discovery Channel’s Time Warp, a show that uses high-speed photography to slow down events like a water balloon hitting the face or a free runner taking a leap. While normal video cameras shoot at 30 frames per second, these photos are taken by ultra high-speed digital cameras that shoot up to 650 times faster and display these events much slower. Hosted by Lieberman, scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, and digital photography expert Matt Kearney, the show aims to help viewers understand the world around them better. Here, Lieberman, who likes to make music and invent robotic sculptures, tells Sharon Fernandes about science and art

•What excites you about high-speed photography? Why did you base a show on it?

Science in general is the search for things that are beyond obvious perception. So, you’re always looking for things that you can’t directly perceive yourself. Time Warp is a show that is designed to show how technologies can show people things that they can’t see otherwise. We tend to focus on high-speed video—and these things go up to almost a million frames a second—which we display really slowly. Being a scientist, I try to use this to teach people about science that’s all around them every day.

•The show treads the line between science and art...

I think art and science are both parts of the same exact thing. So, it’s hard for me to really separate the two. In both, you have to have intuition and you have to follow that intuition and derive some kind of rationale in order to execute your intuition as best as possible. But, in either case, you’re really searching for the truth.

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