Fluid Bodies - From the Celestial to the Subatomic
Dmitry Gelfand & Evelina Domnitch
Every second, Earth’s inhabitants are bombarded by billions of charge carriers, arriving from every possible direction in outer space. As they traverse the supersaturated vapor within a cloud chamber, these subatomic messengers, known as cosmic rays, macroscopically disclose their identity and the plenum underlying the empirical void. In Memory Vapor, the artwork presented at the Biohaker Summit, a cloud chamber, combined with a particle accelerator, is illuminated by a scanning white laser sheet, transforming its -200° C gaseous contents into a dynamic prism. Ionized nuclei, muons, electrons and positrons are trailed by a thread of condensation droplets, each of which the laser turns into a luminous micro-lens. Resultantly, the spatio-temporal perception of particle tracks is vastly enhanced -- a piercing sensation of iridescent depth emerges.
By fine tuning our senses and opening our consciousness to the universe, we realize that the solid state is an illusion. Everything is fluid; everything is in a vibratory state. This is how you ultimately hack your ego.
Summary
- High-energy cosmic particles interacting with the ionosphere create subatomic showers that can be visualized through experimental artworks such as Memory vapor. - Water vortices serve as physical analogs for black holes, demonstrating how space-time warps and illustrating phenomena like super radiance. - Direct sensorial experience of natural phenomena is a more effective way to connect with the universe than symbolic language or human narratives. - Acoustic levitation of water droplets in the artwork force field serves as a physical analog for subatomic dynamics and the liquid model of the atomic nucleus. - The solid state of matter is an illusion because everything is fluid and in a vibratory state; recognizing this facilitates the process of hacking the ego.
Article
Fluid Bodies, Black Holes, And The Art Of Hacking The Ego
At Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam, Dmitry Gelfand And Evelina Domnitch Turned Science Into Sensation
There are talks that explain the world, and there are talks that try to dissolve it.
At Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam, held in Amsterdam, Netherlands on Saturday, 15 October and Sunday, 16 October 2022, the presentation *Fluid Bodies - From The Celestial To The Subatomic* by Dmitry Gelfand and Evelina Domnitch offered something rarer than explanation. It offered destabilisation. Not confusion for its own sake, but a deliberate loosening of the habits through which modern people imagine matter, selfhood and reality itself.
Their argument, if it can be called that, was both austere and intoxicating: solidity is a comforting fiction. The universe is fluid, vibratory, in ceaseless transfer. To encounter it properly, one must step outside the tyranny of symbolic language and return to the senses.
In that sense, the talk was not merely about physics, nor only about art. It was about attention, perception and the possibility that the self, that overprotected modern idol, might be hacked not through optimisation but through surrender.
A Universe Of Invisible Impacts
Evelina Domnitch began with a reminder that would have sounded apocalyptic if it were not so scientifically ordinary. At every moment, she said, human beings are being bombarded by charged particles arriving from every direction in the cosmos. When these high-energy visitors strike the ionosphere, they fracture into showers of muons, electrons, positrons and ionised nuclei.
This was not presented as abstract textbook knowledge. It was the basis of *Memory Vapor*, an artwork shown during the event, where cosmic activity was made perceptible through experimental means. The point was not to reduce the sublime to a diagram, but to restore awe through contact.
Some of these particles, Domnitch noted, carry energies beyond anything produced by the Large Hadron Collider. They are, in effect, emissaries from supernovae and active black holes, arriving silently into the atmosphere above our heads. In a culture trained to seek significance in words, metrics and screens, Gelfand and Domnitch asked the audience to recognise that the universe had already been speaking all along, only in another tongue.
Beyond Words, Toward The Language Of Energy
Domnitch made a striking confession. She said she did not like giving talks because words are deceptive.
“Words and symbolic language are not the language of the universe,” she said. “Through our art, we want to penetrate how energy transfers happen in space and how information travels through the universe.”
That sentence landed at the heart of their practice. Dmitry Gelfand and Evelina Domnitch described themselves as “art scientists”, figures less interested in interpreting nature than in staging encounters with it. Their work avoids narrative wherever possible. No moral framing, no anthropocentric symbolism, no overexplaining. Instead, they build conditions in which physical phenomena disclose themselves directly to the senses.
It is a radical proposition in an age saturated with commentary. Their belief is that human beings do not necessarily deepen their relation to reality by hearing more about it. Sometimes they do so by standing inside an analogue of it.
The Black Hole In A Vortex
One of the most compelling examples in the presentation was *Orbihedron*, their physical analogue of a black hole. Here, a water vortex became more than a visual metaphor. It became a site of inquiry.
“As soon as we started working with vortices, we realized that they are ubiquitous drivers of energy in the universe,” Domnitch said.
The observation was simple and profound. In the centre of a toroid lies a vortex, and in the centre of many cosmic and terrestrial transformations lies the same spiralling logic. Scientists, she explained, have long used water vortices as laboratory analogues for black holes. If a wave moving through water travels slower than the rotational speed of the vortex, it is swallowed. In this strange hydrodynamic theatre, one glimpses behaviours associated with black holes, including superradiance and other effects that bend intuition to its limits.
Black holes remain unobservable by definition, but analogues allow their behaviour to be approached obliquely. What Gelfand and Domnitch achieved was to move that approach from equation to embodiment. The audience was not simply told that space-time warps. They were invited to feel how a fluid surface can model that warping, how the incomprehensible can become tactile.
Force Field And The Liquid Secret Of Matter
If the celestial was one pole of the presentation, the subatomic was the other. In *Force Field*, Gelfand and Domnitch levitated a droplet of water in mid-air using a standing acoustic wave at 15 kilohertz. The result was not merely beautiful, though it was that too. The droplet elongated, transformed, and took on shapes that seemed improbably alive.
What fascinated them was the way sound-induced rotational dynamics sculpted the droplet into forms that echoed deeper structures in physics. Domnitch connected this to the liquid model of the atomic nucleus developed by Niels Bohr and Archibald Wheeler. At the subatomic scale, she explained, the atom does not split like an orange cut into neat halves. It destabilises under precise packets of energy, deforming through stages before division.
The comparison mattered because it punctured one of the oldest perceptual lies. Matter appears solid, stable, definite. But under pressure, under sound, under energy, it reveals itself as mutable and fluid. The atomic nucleus itself can be understood through liquid behaviour. The droplet in *Force Field* therefore became not only an artwork, but a philosophical instrument.
Attention As The Ultimate Medium
There was, beneath the physics and poetics, an ethics of perception.
“The most precious thing you have is your attention,” Domnitch said. “It is where you direct your attention that fills up your consciousness.”
Here the presentation pivoted toward what the summit audience would have recognised as biohacking, though in a register far less commercial than the term often invites. Domnitch, who studied philosophy, drew on phenomenology and the concept of intentionality. Consciousness is shaped by what it attends to. If one’s awareness remains trapped in the cramped circuitry of self-concern, then one inhabits a shrunken universe. If attention is redirected toward cosmic and subatomic processes, toward the immense and the minute, the ego begins to lose its monopoly.
This was their answer to the subtitle *Hacking The Ego*. Not self-improvement as branding exercise, but self-decentering as ontological practice.
“As artists, we work with human senses because it is all about sensorial experience,” Domnitch said. “If you experience natural phenomena, you will have an interaction with the universe on a much deeper level.”
The Solid World As Illusion
The deepest provocation of the talk was also the simplest: the solid state is an illusion.
“Everything is fluid,” Domnitch said. “Everything is in a vibratory state.”
In that claim was both scientific humility and existential relief. The rigid categories through which people organise life, object, body, identity, even separation itself, begin to falter under such a view. Gelfand and Domnitch have built a nearly two-decade collaboration around this premise, using gases, liquids and exotic forms of light while rejecting recording media and conventional storytelling. They do not tell audiences what to see. They construct the conditions in which seeing can become newly possible.
The implication is quietly radical. If reality is fundamentally transfer, vibration and relation, then the ego, that hard shell of presumed centrality, is no more fixed than the matter it claims to possess.
A Plea For Dark Skies
The presentation ended not in abstraction but in grief.
“Sometimes when I think about myself, I see myself as a Hubble telescope looking at the stars,” Domnitch said. “Reconnecting to the universe is the ultimate hack of the ego and the cosmos itself.”
What followed was a lament for the disappearance of dark skies. Light pollution, she suggested, had severed one of humanity’s oldest sensory bonds with the cosmos. The stars that once structured wonder, orientation and scale had been dimmed by our own excess illumination. Her appeal to support dark sky efforts was more than environmental nostalgia. It was a demand to restore the conditions under which humility might still arise.
In an era obsessed with personal enhancement, Gelfand and Domnitch offered a rarer invitation: to become smaller, more porous, less certain of where the body ends and the universe begins.
That may be the most subversive form of hacking now available.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2022 Amsterdam