10k PEACOCK FEATHERS IN FOAMING ACID
Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand
Dmitry Gelfand and Evelina Domnitch 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 present "10
We are going to take a voyage into the ancestors of living cells, into the membranes of soap film, simply by pointing a white laser beam into this membrane.
Summary
- 10k PEACOCK FEATHERS IN FOAMING ACID explores soap film membranes as analogs for the ancestors of living cells. - The performance utilizes a single-point white laser beam directed into a soap membrane to create intricate live projections. - Instead of passing through the membrane, the laser light is captured within the film and traverses it like a waveguide. - The soundscape is generated live and reacts dynamically to the behavior and movement of the light during the performance. - An upcoming performance, Force Field, involves using acoustic waves to levitate water droplets to simulate matter behavior in zero gravity.
Article
10k Peacock Feathers In Foaming Acid Turned Soap Film Into A Living Cosmos
At Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki, Evelina Domnitch And Dmitry Gelfand Offered A Performance Where Light Did Not Simply Illuminate Matter But Seemed To Enter Its Memory
There are presentations that explain science, and then there are presentations that make science feel strange again. At Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki, held in Helsinki, Finland on 13 and 14 October 2017, the artists Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand did precisely that with *10k Peacock Feathers In Foaming Acid*, a performance that transformed soap film membranes, laser light and reactive sound into an immersive meditation on the origins of life and the behavior of matter.
Appearing on Friday, 13 October, the duo returned to the summit with the confidence of artists who had stood before this audience before. Dmitry Gelfand opened with warmth and wit, noting their pleasure at being back among the event’s "super drinks" and "super food". Yet the lightness of the introduction quickly gave way to something more ambitious: an invitation to think of a soap membrane not as a trivial surface, but as a stand-in for the ancestors of living cells.
A Schedule Change Became A Statement Of Intent
The presentation also arrived with a practical twist. The evening’s program had shifted. The audience would not, in fact, see *Force Field* that night, but the following day. Gelfand made clear that the postponed work was no minor experiment. In his words, it involved "levitating droplets of water with acoustic waves", a sophisticated scientific procedure linked to space research and the behavior of liquids in zero gravity.
That detail mattered, not merely as housekeeping, but as context. Domnitch and Gelfand do not treat scientific phenomena as decorative reference points. Their practice, as outlined in their biography, is rooted in sensory immersion, bringing together physics, chemistry and computer science with philosophical inquiry. Their work rejects recording and fixative media in favor of live, changing phenomena. What the audience witnesses is not a representation of discovery, but discovery as an event.
When A Laser Entered The Membrane Instead Of Passing Through It
The core of *10k PEACOCK FEATHERS IN FOAMING ACID* rested on a deceptively simple action: directing a single-point white laser into a soap film membrane. But from that gesture unfolded a visual and conceptual world.
As Gelfand explained, the light did not behave as it would in a conventional optical medium such as glass. "Instead of going through the membrane," he said, "the light gets swallowed by the film and moves through it as though it were traversing a waveguide." It was a sentence that carried the eerie precision of laboratory observation and the poetic force of metaphor. The membrane did not merely reflect or transmit. It captured. It guided. It became a channel through which light wandered as if inside a fragile liquid architecture.
This was the performance’s great seduction. Something most people associate with play or domestic accident, a soap film, was reintroduced as a site of profound complexity. Through it, Domnitch and Gelfand asked the audience to look again at matter in its most transient forms and to consider that the earliest conditions of life may have depended on precisely such delicate boundaries.
Sound Reacted To Light In Real Time
Nothing in the performance was pre-packaged. "Everything is happening live during this performance," Gelfand told the audience. The sound, he said, reacted to the behavior of the light, while all projections were generated by that single white laser point.
This commitment to liveness is central to the duo’s artistic philosophy. Their installations and performances resist mediation. They unfold directly in front of the observer, changing in real time, refusing the safety of a fixed image or repeatable recording. In that refusal lies their deeper argument: that perception itself can be stretched when phenomena are encountered without technological cushioning.
At Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki, that principle gave the room an unusual tension. The audience was not simply watching visuals accompanied by sound. It was witnessing an active exchange between optical behavior and sonic response, a system in which matter seemed to compose itself in front of them.
The Broader Vision Behind The Performance
Domnitch and Gelfand’s wider body of work has long occupied the border between scientific inquiry and perceptual experiment. Their stated interest in wave phenomena, consciousness and perpetuity makes *10k PEACOCK FEATHERS IN FOAMING ACID* more than an elegant technical demonstration. It becomes an attempt to probe where scientific description ends and sensory understanding begins.
That tension was especially resonant at an event such as Biohacker Summit, where the rhetoric of optimization can often dominate. Here, instead of improving the body through data or supplementation, the artists proposed another kind of expansion: an enlargement of the sensory envelope itself. Their performance suggested that one could approach the mysteries of life not only through measurement, but through awe sharpened by precision.
A Reminder That Matter Still Exceeds Explanation
The most striking aspect of the presentation was not its novelty, though there was plenty of that. Acoustic levitation, waveguided light inside soap membranes, audiovisual reactions built live from scientific behavior: these are rare enough on any stage. What lingered was the deeper suggestion that the physical world remains more alien, more beautiful and less fully known than contemporary culture often admits.
In the hands of Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, soap film became an ancestral archive, laser light became a traveler, and sound became a witness to the movement of matter. At Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki, *10k PEACOCK FEATHERS IN FOAMING ACID* did not merely present an experiment. It restored a sense of astonishment to the act of seeing.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki