Evelina Domnitch y Dmitry Gelfand
Camera Lucida: Sonochemical Observatory, 2007
USA, Belarus, 2007
Camera Lucida investigates and allows the visualisation of an almost unknown and unexplored marginal natural phenomena called "sonoluminiscence". Sonoluminescence consists of the emission of short discharges of light conditioned by the explosion of bubbles in a liquid excited by sound. In the installation/observatory, the activity focuses on a translucent glass ball that contains gas and recreates the process, which can only be seen in complete darkness. The immersive and perceptual space proposed by the artists uses the artefact to discover the hidden ephemeral and esoteric part of nature, making it real and tangible. This project evokes territories to be explored in the kingdom of the invisible and questions the reducing materialness in favour of what is ephemeral and volatile.
Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand create sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices. Current findings, particularly regarding wave phenomena, are employed by the artists to examine questions of perception and perpetuality. Such investigations are salient because the scientific picture of the world, which serves as the basis for contemporary thought, still cannot encompass the unrecordable workings of consciousness. Having dismissed all forms of fixative and recording media, Domnitch and Gelfand's installations exist as ever-transforming phenomena offered for observation. Nearly all of Domnitch and Gelfand's works require a certain period of retinal adaptation to the darkness before a corridor of luminescent details is unlocked. Without the darkness, the light would be invisible, as would the delicate horizon of converging energy systems from which the light emanates. In order to engage such ephemeral processes, the artists have collaborated with various scientific laboratories in Japan, Germany, Russia, Belgium, Belarus, and the U.S. In 2002, they were awarded a residency at the IAMAS (Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences), Japan. Camera Lucida was last exhibited in the V2, Rotterdam (2007).