Guest Column: Re-Conditioning Our Perceptions With Phenomenological And Sensorial Artworks

Hydrogeny – Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand

Optofonica is an ongoing project and experimentation lab founded by TeZ (Maurizio Martinucci), Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand devoted to the investigation of ephemeral art-science—inter-media artworks often employing advanced sound spatialization techniques. Much of Optofonica’s interest lies in the exploration of the phenomenological and sensorial manifestations of light and sound, including areas such as nanophotonics, psychoacoustics, hydrodynamics, and quantum chemistry. More importantly, the core behaviors and manifestations of these phenomena are explored from a rigorous scientific perspective and then re-combined in multi-modal ways to create cross-wirings and interrelationships that reveal hitherto unseen properties. A further layer of philosophical and historical contextualization extends their art-science works into the realm of the poetic.

Denouncing fixative media such as video in favour of the ephemeral, and distancing themselves from the moribund acoustics of audio compression by organizing live sound-surround audio, their work promotes the totality of lossless experience.

The group are notoriously famous for their pristine works employing high-powered lasers. Domnitch and Gelfand’s recent work Hydrogeny consists of a tank of ultra-pure water scanned by a white lazer sheet. Electrodes at the bottom of the tank liberate hydrogen and oxygen bubbles through the process of hydrolysis. Diaphanous bubble clouds rise in bifurcating paths to the surface. The penetrating lazer sheet reveals the intricate dynamics of this bubble flow matrix. The water is further transduced by sound which generates complex spatio-temporal configurations and vortexes within the bubble clouds. The streams appear iridescent as each bubble acts as a lens to reflect and refract lazer light.

Anharmonium—TeZ

TeZ’s Anharmonium utilizes the cymatic properties of water to perturb the path of a laser beam reflection by using sound as a modulator. Infrasonic sound is applied to a concave mirror containing water to impart dynamic fluid motions. The reflected and refracted beam becomes a real-time projection of the phase-transitioning hydrodynamic effect. Different colored beams produce layered patterns of lumia creating the illusion of extruded forms transforming and merging in 3-dimensional space. The end result, far from being distantly technical, is in fact highly meditative. The standard viewer to artwork dichotomy is broken, participants of the installation tend to zone-out, relax on cushions and absorb the interplay of light and sound. This psycho-physical observatory is reminiscent of the mind-machine environments of the frontier mystics of the psychedelic era of the late ’60s.

Anharmonium—TeZ

Other important works by Domnitch and Gelfand include Camera Lucida, in which a chamber of gas-infused liquid is, again, sonically transduced to create light emission through the process of sonoluminescence. As well as Sonolevitation, which explores the process of acoustic levitation. A 15 kHz standing wave is used to levitate slithers of gold leaf. The frictionless, gravity-independent motion of the gold leaves continuously transform the sound field that keeps them airborne, creating a self-organizing sonic system.

Aside from their own works, the group engage in a number of collaborative, curatorial and educational projects. The Optofonica DVD, curated by TeZ, and released on the Line imprint, grouped together visual music pieces from 35 internationally renowned musicians and video artists. The works toured the globe at festivals and exhibitions presented within the Optofonica Capsule—a specially made viewing isolation/immersion pod that provides a 'tactile audio' experience.

Another initiative, Ambisonica, aims at bringing together artists to work together on collaborative projects using ambisonic sound—a method for creating mutli-channel planer (2d) or periphonic (3d) sound spatialization. TeZ has created a scalable modular MAX/MSP patch which allows various configurations of sound to be generated in space—including aleatorial and generative arrangements. Sonia Cillari’s work Sensitive to Pleasure, which won the 1st Prize at VIDA 13.0 utilizes ambisonic cubes and skin sensors to explore the body as an interface via electronic impulses.

Sonolevitation—Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand

One more off-shot from the Optofonica lab is the art-science society Synergetica. On a monthly basis, artists, scientists and a myriad of hybrids meet at the lab, to cross-fertilize ideas, engage in experimentation, give talks about their work and present performances. Here, the remit is wide and expansive. Recently a talk was given by Dove Bradshaw, a pioneer in the use of indeterminacy in sculpture, who has used weathering techniques and chemical activation in her works since the 1970s.

One of the particularly refreshing aspects of the group’s work, both as individuals and as a collective, is the way in which it imparts an attunement of the senses. Their work acts as re-conditioning protocol to cognition and perception so that everyday phenomena, such as wave patterns on water affected by wind, appear intensely more engrossing, supernatural and infinitely more complex than they were before.

Paul Prudence is an audio-visual performer and installation artist working with computational, algorithmic and generative environments. His work, which have been shown internationally, focuses on the ways in which sound, space and form can be combined to create live-cinematic visual-music experiences. Paul maintains the research weblog Dataisnature in which he writes about the interrelationships between natural processes, computational systems and procedural-based art practices.