[spectre] Sincronie 2009-Data: lecture/screening/live

[Redazione Digicult]

Sorry for any crosspostings

Digicult presents:
Sincronie 2009 - Data

lecture/videoscreening/concert curated by Marco Mancuso/Digicult
guests: Evelina Domnitch & Dmitri Gelfand

15th of December 2009, from 7.30pm to 11.00pm
c/o Teatro Arsenale, Via Cesare Correnti 11, Milan (Italy)

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7.30pm - 8.30pm: lecture by Evelina Domnitch & Dmitri Gelfand

9.00pm - 10.00pm: videoscreening - Hidden Worlds

10.00pm - 11.00pm: live performance - 10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid

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On Tuesday the 15th of December 2009 Digimag presents DATA, the third 
meeting of the Sincronie Festival of 2009. The event will be directed by 
Marco Mancuso from Digicult, and will take place from 7.30 PM until 11 PM in 
the Teatro Arsenale in Milan, and will be an encounter with two Soviet 
artists, Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, who will talk about their 
artistic production on the brink between art and science, and will exhibit 
their live performance 10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid. The event 
will be enriched by the projection of the video screening Hidden Worlds, 
where a series of audiovisual works have been selected that investigate the 
relationship between audiovisuals and science.

Sincronie is a contemporary and experimental music event that began in 2003. 
As with the previous editions, this edition is also developed on a theme, 
which in 2009 was the relationship between music and numbers. From this 
year, Sincronie is broadening its activities by proposing a three-concert 
event with international guests, preceded by a series of introductive 
meetings that are true Listening Workshops. The workshops will then continue 
throughout 2010.

To stay true to the theme dictated by Sincronie 2009, Marco Mancuso has 
structured the DATA event like a reflective critique on the existing 
relationship between contemporary art and science and their rapport with 
digital, electronic and analogical technologies, on the basis of 
mathematical processes, numbers, logic abstractions and formulae. The event 
is centred on the work of the artists Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, 
pioneers of the creation of sensorial environments where chemistry, physics 
and philosophy meld together, in relationship with the analysis of human 
perception of such phenomena. After presentation of their work, which will 
take place at 7.30 PM, there will be a video screening at 9 PM entitled 
Hidden Worlds dedicated to some examples of artists who work on the rapport 
between sound and image, through different techniques, that are generated by 
physical, chemical-physics, mathematical, electromagnetic and nanometric 
phenomena. The evening will conclude with the audiovisual performance 10000 
peacock feathers in foaming acid where Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand 
will make laser projectors and soap bubbles interact to create immersive and 
organic images.

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The Psychophysics of Force Field Tailoring
Lecture by Evelina Domnitch & Dmitri Gelfand

Introduction by Marco Mancuso / Digicult

Immersive art-science is a form of creative expression that aims to rise 
above the notion of art as representation, in favor of multi-sensorial 
experience. Instead of creating mere objects of aesthetic seduction, it 
invites audiences to transcend the limits of habitual perception. 
Immersivity awakens a synesthetic awareness of both physical and mental 
space. A myriad of vibratory phenomena, customarily beyond the observer's 
reach, are rendered starkly tangible through careful psychophysical 
conditioning: "the analysis of perceptual processes by studying the effect 
on a subject's experience or behavior, of systematically varying the 
properties of a stimulus along one or more physical dimensions." Force field 
tailoring refers to the efficacious structuring of spatio-temporal 
characteristics by means of interlocking energy fields. The resultant states 
of matter/energy can be further harnessed so as to incite specific sensory 
responses. Psychophysicists are empowered by formerly unimaginable 
instruments of detection and analysis, providing increasingly higher 
resolutions of multi-event, multi-dimensional interactions. Nevertheless, 
the ephemeral workings of consciousness have barely been punctured, and 
remain among the leading questions of modern science. It has become evident 
that despite its exponentially accumulative potential, science alone cannot 
fulfill this daunting pursuit. Because neuronal processes (like most of the 
physical world) lie beyond the human spatio-temporal scale, the origins of 
cognition must be explored through perceptual extension. The convergence of 
immersive art and psychophysical research has spawned this extrasensory 
intimacy and imbued it with limitless evolutionary possibilities.

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Hidden Worlds
Videoscreening curated by Marco Mancuso / Digicult

The Hidden Worlds event pays homage to one of the most stimulating and 
obscure territories of artistic audiovisual contemporary research: that 
relationship between art and science. By staying true to the binding theme 
of the 2009 edition of the Sincronie festival - the rapport between music, 
images and numbers - the video screening collects over 10 works that induce 
the audience into a critical reflection on the existing relationship between 
contemporary audiovisuals and science in their rapport with digital, 
electronic and analogical technologies, on the basis of mathematical 
processes, numbers, logic abstractions, and formulae. A project that 
alternates its artists and avoids concentrating on a common aesthetic, on a 
possible expressive language or used technologies, but rather proposes a 
panorama of specific systems for sensorial perception, for emotional 
mechanisms of "saturation" induces through technical hybrids that expand the 
tradition of analogical experimental cinema and digital audiovisuals, more 
so now than ever before. For its entire duration, the screening takes the 
spectator through beautiful "hidden worlds", made into monitors of the 
curiosity of artists and scientists for the expressive potential inside 
specific mathematical processes, as well as physical, optical, chemical and 
electromagnetic phenomena. From the studies on "cymatics" (the science that 
studies the shapes made by waves, in other words the frequency that can be 
vibrational, sound or electromagnetic) by the scientist Hans Jenny (Cymatics 
SoundScapes) as a theoretical-experimental basis for audiovisual 
compositions by Alvin Lucier (The Queen of South), to the representation of 
electromagnetic phenomena in action on the Sun's surface by a Semiconductor 
(Black Rain), the passage between audiovisual work from the duo portable 
Palace seems to be short, where in their first work present in the event 
(Camera Lucida) they study the chemical-physical reaction of 
photoluminescence, whereas in the second contribution (10000 Peacock 
Feathers in Foaming Acid) they analyse the potential of optical phenomena 
generated by laser lights. And again, if the work on "chemical-grams" of the 
video makers Jurgen Reble (Materia Obscura) underlines the structures that 
come from the chemical corrosion of film, as the work by Victoria Vesna 
(Blue Morph) glorifies the larval evolution of the geometric shape of the 
Blue Morpho butterfly with nanometric investigation techniques, the product 
by Lia & @C (int.16/45//son01/30X1, those of Carsten Nicolai (Spray) and 
Karl Kliem (Vienna Concert - Excerpts), are based on the software 
representation of interference phenomena, beats, accumulation and Moirè (the 
optical illusion generated by geometric sequences of interference 
phenomena). And finally the pioneer works (that aren't included in the 
screening) by Mary Ellen Bute (Abstronic) and John Whitney (Permutations) 
represent one of the first testimonies of the direct rapport between 
experimental cinema and maths, the video by Thorsten Fleisch (Gestalt), 
which constitutes a recognition of the quaternion world (four-dimensional 
fractals) visualised in a three-dimensional space, and the work of art by 
John Campell (LI: The Patterns of Nature), evidences the geometric 
structures spontaneously present in Nature, all represent the perfect 
example of how Hidden Worlds wants to be a testimony of a deep critical 
conviction: contemporary audiovisual art today, more than in the past, has 
the technological instruments and the ethical duty to confront itself with 
the empirical world around us and the "natural" technologies within it. 
Technologies that should be collected, observed and learned to control, just 
like man has shown that he can do with light, sound, images and space

Video program:

- Hans Jenny - Cymatics SoundScapes: Video 4 (1967 - Sui)
- Alvin Lucier - The Queen of the South (1972 - Usa)
- Semiconductor - Black Rain (2009 - Uk)
- Evelina Domnitch & Dmitri Gelfand - Camera Lucida: Sonochemical 
Observatory (2006 - Rus, Bel) (sound by Richard Chartier & Taylor Dupree)
- Evelina Domnitch & Dmitri Gelfand - 10000 Peackock Feathers in Foaming 
Acid (2009 - Rus, Bel) (sound by Francisco Lopez)
- Jurgen Reble - Materia Obscura: Part 5 (2009 - Ger)
- Victoria Vesna - Blue Morph (2006 - Usa)
- Lia - int.16/45//son01/30×1 (2005 - Au) (sound by @c)
- Carsten Nicolai - Spray (2006 - Ger)
- Karl Kliem - Vienna Concert: Excerpts (2008 - Ger) (sound by Jan Jelinek)
- Thorsten Fleisch - Gestalt (2003 - Ger)
- John Campbell - Li:The Patterns of Nature (2007 - Usa)

Out of screening: John Whitney (Permutations), Mary Ellen Bute (Abstronic), 
Joost Rekveld (#37), Roiji Ikeda (Formula), Sachiko Kodama (Breathing Chaos)

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10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid
Live performance by Evelina Domnitch Dmitry Gelfand

A vacuum or semi-vacuum encased within a gravity and temperature sensitive 
elastic skin - the scenario of an early universe, a soap bubble, and later, 
that of a biological membrane. By researching the behavior of soap films, a 
vast variety of optical, mathematical, thermodynamic and electrochemical 
discoveries have been made since the time of the Renaissance. One of the 
earliest means of analogue computing was the soap film calculator (19th 
century), which tackled geometric problems of minimal surface area. Soap 
film soft drives are currently being used for blackhole and superstring 
modeling. In 10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid, Domnitch and Gelfand 
use laser light to scan the surfaces of nucleating and dissipating soap 
bubble clusters. Unlike ordinary light, the laser's focused beam is capable 
of crawling through the micro and nano structures within a bubble's skin. 
When aimed at specific angles, this penetrating light generates a 
large-scale projection of molecular interactions as well as mind-boggling 
phenomena of non-linear optics. Bubble behaviors viewed in such proximity 
evoke the dynamics of living cells (the lipid membranes of which, are direct 
chemical descendants of soap films). At the Lebedev Physics Institute in 
Moscow, researchers Y. Stoilov and A. Startsev have recently discovered that 
a laser beam traversing a soap film can unexpectedly branch out into 
micron-thin channels (spatial polariton solitons) that neither diverge from 
their paths nor interfere with one another upon intersection. These optical 
tracks, which serve as light-confining waveguide antennae, are molded and 
elongated by the laser emission. Presumably, the laser dielectrophoretically 
maximizes the membrane's refractive index to the point of internally 
focusing the light. The system behaves like "a powerful optical computer 
with a gigantic parallel processor, consisting of billions of laser-guiding 
cells" (Stoilov; Phys.-Usp 47, 2004). In contrast to former soap film 
explorations by scientists, mathematicians, and artists (the likes of which 
have included Newton, Chardin, Plateau and Rayleigh to name a few), here, a 
warped, 'impossible' space-time is invented: the laser's multi-angular paths 
through numerous bubble surfaces project a dense layering of diverse scales, 
speeds and vanishing points. The title of the work stems from the Chinese 
expression, 'the ten thousand things', signifying the varifold of cosmic 
phenomena. Though it may become as thin as a single molecule, all 'the ten 
thousand things' are refracted through the sensitive skin of a soap bubble.