FORCE FIELD
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 FORCE
The universal language is the language of vibrations. That is how the universe exchanges information and transports energy. We believe that we can tune our senses and train ourselves to be more sensitive to this universal language.
Summary
- FORCE FIELD uses standing acoustic waves to levitate water droplets, creating a three-dimensional visualization of sound and high-speed spiral vortices. - Sectorial oscillations in levitating droplets serve as physical analogs for the behavior of celestial bodies, such as black holes and stars, and the nuclei of atoms. - The performance creates a synesthetic experience where the audio is generated directly from the resonances and vibrations of the levitating water droplets. - Water droplets in zero gravity form shapes that resemble biological cells, like erythrocytes, illustrating the connection between microscopic and macroscopic levels. - Scientific inquiry is treated as a cultural and poetic pursuit meant to expand the mind, focusing on the beauty of phenomena rather than practical technological applications.
Article
Force Field Turned Sound Into Matter, And Science Into Poetry
At Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki, Evelina Domnitch And Dmitry Gelfand Offered A Rare Vision Of The Universe Through A Levitating Drop Of Water
In a conference culture often dominated by optimization, metrics and the practical seductions of future technology, FORCE FIELD arrived as something stranger, quieter and ultimately more radical. Presented by Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand at Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki on Friday 13 October, the work did not promise a product, a hack or a protocol. It offered a phenomenon.
And in doing so, it seemed to restore a forgotten idea: that science, before it became an industry of applications, was also an instrument of wonder.
FORCE FIELD, the pair’s presentation on acoustic levitation and the interplay of microcosm and macrocosm, used standing sound waves and high-frequency transducers to suspend water droplets in midair, creating an uncanny simulation of zero gravity. Those droplets, held in a sonic architecture just above the threshold of hearing at around 20 kilohertz, trembled, divided, spun and pulsed with an eerie autonomy. They became not just objects of observation but analogues, tiny theatres in which the motions of blood cells, atomic nuclei, stars and even black holes could be glimpsed at once.
The Levitating Droplet As A Cosmos
What Domnitch and Gelfand achieved in Helsinki was not merely a demonstration of technical finesse. It was a collapse of scales. In the suspended droplet, the microscopic and the cosmic appeared to recognize one another.
Dmitry Gelfand described how the spheroidal water body periodically entered a state known as sectorial oscillation, dividing itself into distinct sectors. This, he noted, is not only a property of fluid behavior under extreme acoustic conditions. It also appears in celestial bodies, from stars and planetesimals to the theorized dynamics of black holes, and in the nuclei of atoms. The artwork thus functioned as a kind of perceptual bridge, using fluid dynamics as a physical analogue for realities normally inaccessible to direct human experience.
That notion of the analogue ran through the entire performance. Here was tabletop astrophysics turned into sensorial encounter. Here was nuclear behavior rendered as choreography. Here was cosmology without mediation, unfolding not on a screen through simulations but directly in front of the eye.
Eight Years To Defy Gravity
The elegance of FORCE FIELD concealed a punishingly long research process. Domnitch explained that while acoustically levitating flat objects was relatively straightforward, water posed a much more difficult challenge. In zero gravity, water naturally forms a sphere, a shape too large and too unstable for the phase-changing antinodes of a standing acoustic wave to trap with ease.
It took the duo eight years, working with a physicist from St Petersburg, to master the phenomenon.
That timescale matters. It speaks to the ethic behind their work, which rejects novelty for novelty’s sake. These are not artists who borrow scientific language as decoration. Their installations emerge from deep collaboration with physicists and laboratories, and from an unusual commitment to processes that may never become useful in any ordinary sense.
That refusal of utility was central to the presentation. Evelina Domnitch said, “We believe that science is itself an immense instrument to expand your own mind and to grow. Just doing science is much more important than any kind of technology or practical application that comes out of it.”
It was one of the most quietly incendiary statements of the event.
A Performance Decoded By The Senses
Perhaps the most striking feature of FORCE FIELD was that it resisted explanation even as it invited scrutiny. Domnitch said that they usually avoid lengthy introductions before performing because the work is meant to be decoded by the senses themselves. Vision, hearing and tactile imagination are braided together into what she described as a synesthetic awareness.
“It is really for your senses to decode what you are seeing,” she said. “We like to work with sensorial extensions, blending the senses together to achieve a kind of synesthetic awareness.”
That ambition was palpable in the room. The sound was not a separate score laid over the event for atmosphere. It was generated from the resonances and vibrations of the droplets and the surrounding mist, captured by microphones placed near the field itself. The audience was not simply watching science. It was hearing matter respond to force.
The result was a rare fusion of rigor and enchantment. High-pressure sound became visible as fluid dynamics. Frequencies just beyond hearing returned as audible resonance. The droplet was both specimen and instrument.
The Human Body Between Gravity And Vibration
FORCE FIELD also asked a subtler question: what kind of creature is a human being, suspended between the laws of gravity and the language of vibration?
Domnitch reflected on gravity not as an abstract force but as the hidden author of human experience. “For the level of the human body, we are completely in the tenets of gravity,” she said. “It completely determines our perception of the world, our perception of time, and our physical capacities.”
That observation gave the performance its philosophical depth. At the molecular and quantum levels, gravity recedes in significance. But at the mesoscopic scale, the scale of our bodies and daily lives, it governs almost everything. Acoustic levitation therefore did more than produce a visual marvel. It staged a temporary escape from the force that ordinarily anchors our perception, allowing viewers to encounter water as though from outside the normal conditions of earthly life.
When asked about the body’s relation to such vibratory systems, Gelfand noted that while humans are aqueous, they are more precisely structured as liquid crystal systems, highly sensitive to optical and acoustic activation. It was a reminder that the performance was not merely external to us. It implicated our own material makeup.
Science As Cultural Knowledge, Science As Art
The deepest challenge posed by FORCE FIELD may have been to the categories by which art and science are usually kept apart.
For Domnitch and Gelfand, scientific inquiry is not valuable only when it yields devices, therapies or marketable applications. It is also a cultural practice, formed by communities of thought and animated by imagination. “Science is culturally determined knowledge,” Domnitch said. “It is done by groups of people very closely associated with each other. In this way, science and art are very close. Science is poetry.”
That line could have sounded rhetorical in another context. In Helsinki, after the audience had watched a suspended droplet mimic forms that belonged equally to hematology, acoustics and astronomy, it felt less like metaphor than description.
Their broader body of work reinforces the point. Gelfand spoke of earlier experiments with sonoluminescence, the extraordinary phenomenon in which high-frequency sound causes microscopic bubbles in water to implode, reaching temperatures comparable to the surface of the sun and emitting light. Such research, involving five laboratories across the world, had once been dismissed as impossible at the scale they imagined.
Yet this is the territory they inhabit: phenomena so exotic that practicality falls away, leaving only the pursuit of perception itself.
A Different Vision Of Progress
At a gathering devoted to the future of humanity, FORCE FIELD served as a corrective to the narrow idea that progress must always be useful, measurable and immediate. It suggested that another kind of advancement is possible, one rooted in attention rather than extraction, in sensitivity rather than control.
The universal language, Domnitch said, is vibration. The task is to tune ourselves to it.
That proposition lingered after the presentation ended and the audience was invited on stage to inspect the levitation with the naked eye. It was an invitation not just to look closer, but to reconsider what counts as knowledge in the first place.
In the end, FORCE FIELD did what the most memorable works do. It altered scale, and with it, consciousness. In a single droplet of water held aloft by sound, Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand revealed a startling continuity between body and cosmos, experiment and artwork, matter and music. For a moment in Helsinki, gravity loosened its grip, and science spoke in the language of awe.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2017 Helsinki