Camera Lucida

"A gas-infused liquid is irradiated by high-frequency sound waves that are directly transformed into emissions of light by means of a phenomenon called sonoluminescence. Although it was discovered in 1934, it was only towards the end of the 20th century that the science of sonochemistry emerged in order to probe this elusive manifestation. All acoustic vibrations generate oscillating vacuums, comprising the anti-nodes of 'troughs' of a sound wave. If the wavelength is short enough, and the amplitude is high enough, these pockets of emptiness can incite the formation and implosive collapse of micro-bubbles in a liquid. The bubbles "appear by tearing the liquid with brute force (ultrasound for example). Because they are essentially empty, they are termed cavitation bubbles, i.e., just cavities." [Lauterborn et al., Advances in Chemical Physics, Vol 110, Prigogine and S.A. Rice, eds.: Wiley 1999]. With the sudden appearance of a cavitation bubble, a tremendous difference in pressure arises between its nearly vacuous interior and the surrounding fluid. Consequently, the bubble rapidly implodes under the liquid's pressure (at over four times the speed of sound), and its gaseous innards shrink into a core so dense that temperatures are reached as high as are found on the sun (10,000 K). At this stage, which spans far less than a billionth of a second, light is emitted from the center of the bubble. This emission recurs in phase with tens to hundreds of thousands of sound cycles per second as it traces the sounds' reticulate patterning and vortices. Though it has been established that the source of light arises inside of imploding gas bubbles, the sequence of events, starting from the collapse and leading to photonic emissions, shock waves and jet formations, remains predominantly unknown. As with all processes transpiring in such marginal quadrants of space-time, scientists are precisely limited by their instruments of measurement. Yonder lies the philosopher's and the artist's dominion, where the imperceptible and inconceivable serve to disentangle one's imagination from the burden of finitude. The documentations of sonoluminescence presented on this DVD originate from an amalgam of recordings that took place at the Physics Institute of Goettingen University (Germany) and the Institute of Advanced Science and Technology (Japan) between 2003 and 2006. The experiments were instigated by E. Domnitch and D. Gelfand with the generous scientific support of Werner Lauterborn, Alexander Miltsen, Thierry Lepoint, Reinhard Geisler, Dennis Kroeninger, Robert Mettin, Yasao Iida, Kyuchi Yasui, Toru Tuziuti and Teruyuki Kozuka. Just to be able to capture the phenomenon on video, it was necessary to achieve the brightest known sonoluminescence. According to the recipe of Professor Lepoint, 97% sulfuric acid, doped with xenon gas, was sonicated. From the raw footage emanated nine sonochemical compositions that became the basis for the collaboration with Line. The sound artists developed works out of ordinarily inaudible acoustic phenomenona (22 kHz - 140 kHz): most of this source material was recorded with a hydrophone (a microphone submerged in liquid that is sensitive to high frequencies), which translated into the human hearing spectrum the sound emitted by multiple ultrasonic transducers as well as the resultant bubble implosions. The artists would like to express their deepest gratitude to the sonic co-authors of this project." - Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand Developed in collaboration with scientific laboratories in Japan, Germany, Russia and Belgium, Camera Lucida (chamber of light or lucidity) is a 3-dimensional sonic observatory that directly transforms sound into light by employing a phenomenon known as sonoluminescence: ultrasound, propagating within a liquid, triggers the formation and implosion of micro-bubbles that reach temperatures as high as are found on the Sun, and emit light in the shape of sound waves. The authors of the installation, Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, joined forces with multiple sound artists to create the sonochemical compositions presented on this DVD. This DVD also contains a data partition with uncompressed high resolution audio files of all the works. Due to the detailed and subtle visual nature of this work and phenomenon the artists have chosen to use PAL over NTSC encoding to maintain the maximum resolution possible for the movie and sound files. This DVD is region free and can be played on any computer DVD drive. No region switching is necessary for television screen viewing, it can only playback on a PAL or multi-system DVD player. Playback in a darkened space with monitor brightness turned up is encouraged. Mastered at the Netherlands Institute for Media Art with the generous assistance of Ramon Coelho, Erik Urlings and Tez. Track 5 recorded at Audiplex Studios, Hamburg Limited edition of 2000 copies. Issued in a 4-panel DVD sized Digipak with clear tray.