Mucilaginous Omniverse
Art Performance - Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand
Above the surface of upwardly sonicated silicone oil, falling droplets of the same liquid are suspended by a thin membrane of air, acoustically regenerated underneath each droplet. Without coalescing for extended periods, these palpitating spheroids bounce on the air-oil interface and merge into self-assembling lattices. Ten million times larger than an atom, a non-coalescing oil droplet is the largest object to manifest the self-interferential signature of wave-particle duality. The slippery frontier between macroscopic and quantum phenomena can now be pierced by the senses.
Dmitry Gelfand (b.1974, St. Petersburg, Russia) and Evelina Domnitch (b. 1972, Minsk, Belarus) 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 investigate questions of perception and perpetuity. 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 the use of recording and fixative media, Domnitch and Gelfand’s installations exist as ever-transforming phenomena offered for observation. Because these rarely seen phenomena take place directly in front of the observer without being intermediated, they often serve to vastly extend the observer’s sensory envelope. The immediacy of this experience allows the observer to transcend the illusory distinction between scientific discovery and perceptual expansion.
Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand create immersive artworks that simultaneously comprise scientific experiments, multi-sensory environments and philosophical inquiries. The duo’s practice has emerged through unorthodox collaborations with pioneering research groups, including LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory), the Atominstitut (TU Vienna), and EU Quantum Flagship. They are recipients of the Witteveen+Bos Art+Technology Award (2019), Japan Media Arts Excellence Prize (2007), Meru Art*Science Award (2018) and five Ars Electronica Honorary Mentions (2007, 2009, 2011,2013, and 2017).
Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand present "Mucilagin
It seems to us that we are surrounded by solid, separated objects. However, reality is composed of waves and fields, a vibrating, cascading latticework of light quanta.
Summary
- Art science aims to bridge the gap between human perception and counterintuitive scientific realms like quantum physics and cosmology. - Oil droplets levitate on an acoustically pumped pillow of air to prevent them from coalescing with the oil bath beneath them. - The performance serves as an analog for wave-particle duality, allowing both states to be observed simultaneously in a liquid environment. - Interaction between droplets and capillary waves creates geometric formations, path memories, and analogs of quantum tunneling. - Quantum-like behaviors are exhibited by tiny droplets measuring between two and five millimeters in diameter.
Article
Mucilaginous Omniverse: Where Art Science Made Quantum Strangeness Visible
At Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, Evelina Domnitch And Dmitry Gelfand Turned Fluid Dynamics Into A Sensory Encounter With Physics
On 1 November 2019 at **Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki** in **Helsinki, Finland**, the artists **Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand** presented **Mucilaginous Omniverse**, a performance that stood at the slippery edge between scientific demonstration and aesthetic revelation.
The premise was as elegant as it was disorienting. Tiny oil droplets, each only two to five millimetres wide, were suspended above a bath of the same liquid by an acoustically regenerated cushion of air. Instead of collapsing into the surface beneath them, they bounced, hovered and persisted, becoming visible analogues for some of the most perplexing ideas in modern physics.
A Performance That Refused Ordinary Perception
Domnitch framed the work not as spectacle but as an invitation to feel beyond habit. “As artists, we work with human senses,” she said. “We want to make your senses more sensitive, more subtle, and more perceptive.”
That ambition lay at the heart of the presentation. Rather than telling a story or centring human drama, the artists sought to expose audiences to realms usually sealed off by scale, abstraction or mathematical difficulty. Quantum mechanics, cosmology and field theory often seem to contradict the evidence of daily life. Solids appear separate. Objects appear stable. The world appears intuitive. Science, as Domnitch noted, had long since shattered that comfort.
“The amazing achievements of science are so extremely counterintuitive that they often contradict our daily perceptions,” she said. “We invite you on a journey within realms that are not usually accessible to the senses but are made available through your normal perception.”
Oil Droplets As Quantum Actors
In **Mucilaginous Omniverse**, the medium was liquid, but the subject was far larger than fluid mechanics. The suspended droplets acted like particles. The rippling capillary waves generated by their repeated impacts on the air-oil boundary expressed their wave-like nature. In that coupling, the performance staged a physical analogy for **wave-particle duality**, one of quantum theory’s defining paradoxes.
For decades, physicists held that wave and particle states could not be directly perceived at once. Yet Domnitch and Gelfand drew on work by **Yves Couder** and colleagues in the early 2000s at the University of Paris, which showed that bouncing droplets in a vibrating fluid bath could produce striking quantum-like behaviours on a macroscopic scale.
“In this liquid environment, both wave and particle states can be indeed simultaneously perceived,” Domnitch said.
That line gave the performance its intellectual voltage. What is usually quarantined in equations appeared here as motion, rhythm and pattern. The droplets did not merely bounce. They remembered.
Geometry, Memory And The Shadow Of Quantum Tunnelling
As the droplets struck and rebounded, they generated capillary waves that spread, overlapped and interfered with one another. Those interactions created more than visual beauty. They formed temporary architectures, path dependencies and behaviours that echoed phenomena from quantum physics.
“Capillary waves can interlock, leading to geometric formations and to path memories,” Domnitch explained.
This was where **Mucilaginous Omniverse** became especially arresting. Path memory, in this context, suggested that a droplet’s present movement was shaped by the waves left behind by its past motion. The system folded history into behaviour. What emerged was a fluid-scale analogue to effects such as **quantum tunnelling**, in which particles appear to cross barriers classical mechanics would forbid.
No one was claiming that the droplets were quantum particles. That was not the point. The point was that the performance opened a perceptual bridge. It allowed a human audience to witness, in bodily time and visible space, how a simple system could produce behaviour that felt uncannily close to the logic of the quantum world.
Art Science As A Radical Form Of Attention
Domnitch and Gelfand have long occupied the fertile borderland between experiment and installation, working with physicists, chemists and advanced research groups while refusing the fixity of recorded media. Their works exist as phenomena rather than objects. They must be encountered directly, or not at all.
That philosophy was fully present in Helsinki. After the formal performance ended, Domnitch invited the audience to come closer and inspect the levitating device with their own eyes. Scale mattered. So did proximity. The droplets were tiny, almost modest, yet they carried the conceptual weight of an entire scientific revolution.
The gesture was emblematic of the duo’s practice. Knowledge, here, was not delivered as doctrine. It was offered as encounter.
A Summit Briefly Reoriented By Wonder
The setting made the performance all the more striking. Biohacker Summit is often associated with optimization, enhancement and future-facing technology. Yet **Mucilaginous Omniverse** shifted attention away from metrics and toward mystery. It reminded the audience that the deepest frontier may not be performance at all, but perception.
In Helsinki that evening, Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand did not attempt to simplify science. They did something rarer. They made its strangeness intimate. Through droplets, waves and a trembling membrane of air, they gave form to a truth modern physics had long insisted upon: reality is not only stranger than it seems, but stranger than our senses were built to grasp. For a moment, art made them equal to the task.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki