Despite all claims that modern technology lays to interactivity, a truly
encompassing and stimulating sensory experience in exhibitions of media art is extremely rare. By chance
INMYX stumbled upon a work that is an unusually successful blend of art and technology at the Natural
Habitat exhibition in Amsterdam’s Montevideo/Time Based Arts. The Camera Lucida
by Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand requires utter darkness, and our wait in front of a small chamber
- the installation only admits a few people at a time - was well worth it. Once inside, Dmitry first
invited us to sit and get accustomed to the total lack of light, before he led us to positions with
our noses just centimeters from what seemed to be a huge fishbowl perched on a high pedestal. Then,
without much ado, the play of light and sound began.
Starting with a
slight (unintentional) jerk, electronic sounds seemed to magically produce swirls of dancing light of
different intensity within the orb. With our faces so close to the glass it was easy to lose a sense
of scale as our thoughts wandered with the sound. A display of aurora borealis
across a night sky? A
reflection in a pool of water? Glow-in-the-dark deep-sea creatures? The associations were numerous but
none could quite describe the delicate light show we were witnessing.
Described
by the artists as a ‘sonic observatory’ that converts sounds into light through the phenomena of ‘sonoluminescence’,
the Camera Lucida is both a musical instrument and a work of art. It essentially functions by irradiating
a gas-infused liquid, in this case a solution of luminol and ammonium sulfate, with strong ultrasonic
signals. Luminescence is then generated by collapsing bubbles within the liquid. Inspired by the lyrical
notion of making sound waves visible to the naked eye, the technical apparatus of the instrument was
perfected with the help of Honda Electronics. While the operator-player of the instrument can generate
audible sound, these frequencies must also be translated to the non-audible, ultra-sonic frequencies
that permeate the liquid via eight ultrasonic transducers with adjustable directionalities.
Although
Dmitry was able to make the basic technicalities of the Camera Lucida understandable even to the
non-scientist, it was the work as a whole - the padded softness of the chamber, the quiet tones of the
artist’s voice, the momentary flicker of his pen flashlight across the equipment, the entire interplay
of light and sound - that made the experience highly personal. One can immediately sense that the works
of the Russian-born duo, so versed in the principles of science, are also grounded in the precepts of
humanism, or what they might describe as esoteric philosophical inquiry. The private performance of
the Camera Lucida was an intimate look at a little-known phenomenon. As the artists write in a recent
article for MIT’s Leonardo journal: ‘Technology and art need not strive to imitate nature, but instead
to participate in its multifarious unfolding.’
