In this work we use a multi-layered interactive audio journey in which  participants embody different scenarios. Each participant is faced with choices that seem agential but are often primed and triggered through immersive sound cues. As the experience progresses, they are cued to pay close attention to how the immersive environment of the audioscape regulates and modulates their autonomic responses to specific triggers (Blumenthal 1996; Soon et al. 2008). The project uses aesthetic experience to explore the fascinating world of molecular self-assembly from an embodied perspective, and by doing so it also invites participants to imagine selfhood from a non-human perspective. Using such guided and immersive techniques, artists and scientists can invite subjectivity into research that is usually far removed from human experience.

Creative Science Reflections

Poetics of Inquiry is a series of projects that stem from close collaboration between the author (an artist) and a scientist, co-exploring the unknown. The first version of the project titled “Poetics of Inquiry: How to Stay with Trouble” was developed in collaboration with Anna Romanov, a bioengineer and immunologist. It explored the undocumented subjective noise data within life science research and living specimens, delving into the complexities of informed consent among human and non-human research subjects (Ishraki 2023). The second version of the project titled “Poetics of Inquiry: Agential Self” emerged in a collaboration with a materials chemist. It draws inspiration from molecular self-assembling nanostructures called J-aggregates, to relocate the self as an extension of the environment (Arachchi et al. 2024). These projects are part of ongoing research into how aesthetic and scientific methodologies overlap  to interrogate questions of self, perception, and knowledge production from an expanded lens. Ultimately, Poetics of Inquiry is not only an aesthetic experience but also a hybrid research experiment. Its broader contribution lies in demonstrating how art-science collaborations can circulate across cultural platforms, scientific journals, and academic conferences to build a more integrated, reciprocal culture of inquiry—one that extends beyond aestheticizing scientific data and into the co-production of experimental, theoretical, and embodied knowledge.