Reagent

The molecules and crystals the world is made of, one at a time.

Everything around us is made from a little over a hundred kinds of atom, arranged in particular ways. A handful of atoms bound into a small unit is a molecule — water, the caffeine in coffee, the sugar the body runs on. The same few atoms repeated without end, locked into a lattice, is a crystal — table salt, diamond, the silica of sand and glass. Reagent shows them, one substance at a time, and builds each one atom by atom in front of the viewer.

The tour moves slowly between the loose, countable molecules and the endless crystals, turning each in the light before it dissolves and the next assembles. Every atom is struck as it arrives, so a substance sounds out the elements it is made of as it comes together. The piece is meant to play for hours. It never repeats.

What you are seeing

Each sphere is a single atom, coloured by its element in the scheme chemists have long used to read a model at a glance — oxygen red, nitrogen blue, carbon a dark graphite, hydrogen a pale white, sodium violet, chlorine green. The sticks between them are the bonds that hold the atoms together. The label beside each object names it in plain words, gives its formula, and keys the colours to their elements, so nothing on screen needs a chemist to be read.

The arrangements are not invented. Every molecule's three-dimensional shape is a real, measured structure; every crystal is built from its published lattice. What turns in front of the viewer is the true geometry of the thing.

Sound

The audio is generated entirely in the browser. A quiet open fifth on D breathes with the activity of the field, set inside a long convolution reverb. Events arrive as twinkles, brief chirps, and slow string plucks, tuned to D Dorian pentatonic against the implied root of D2 at 73.42 Hz. Each element owns a single pitch — oxygen always the same note, carbon another — so as a molecule assembles it plays out the elements it contains, and settles into a soft chord of them once it is whole.

Nothing in the score is fixed. The cadence is set by the substance on the stage — by how many atoms it has, and which, at the moment a visitor begins to listen.

Image

Each structure is lit like a specimen — a warm key light, a cool fill, and a thread of cyan along the edge to lift it from the dark ground — and turned slowly, so the eye can walk around it. There is no room, no bench, no glassware; only the object itself, in space. Colour is spent only where an atom is, and the type on the frame is set as part of the work rather than laid on top of it.

Specification

Title

Reagent

Year

2026

Medium

Real-time generative 3D and sound installation; web audio

Duration

Continuous, non-repeating

Subject

The molecules and crystals of ordinary matter

Structures

Real measured molecular geometry; published crystal lattices

Colour

The conventional element (CPK) scheme

Tuning

D Dorian pentatonic; implied root D2 at 73.42 Hz; one pitch per element

Edition

Open browser edition; an installation configuration is available on request

Series

Reagent joins an ongoing series of real-time sonifications that includes Sounding (Pacific Northwest tides), Ephemeris (low Earth orbit), Selenography (the lunar surface), Lightcurve (James Webb imagery), and Helioscope (the Sun).

Artist

Joshua Borsman makes sculpture, sound, and kinetic work — staged in galleries, gardens, sidewalks, and orbit. The pieces convert real, public signals — orbital trajectories, ocean tides, the protocols that hold the internet together — into work that unfolds in time and refuses to repeat. Documentation and other work at joshuaborsman.com.

Colophon

Molecular structures

PubChem 3D conformers (PubChem PUG REST)

Crystal lattices

Built from published structure geometry

Element colours

The conventional CPK scheme

Graphics

WebGL (three.js)

Audio

Web Audio API

Typography

Cormorant Garamond · IBM Plex Mono

The code, audio synthesis, three-dimensional artwork, and accompanying text are © 2026 Joshua Borsman. All rights reserved. The molecular coordinates referenced by the work are drawn from the PubChem database, in the public domain. They are used as measurement, not decoration.