Presentation of the residency Atom Chasm by Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand

Can you introduce yourself? 

We are an artist duo creating immersive installations and performances that merge physics, chemistry and uncanny philosophical practices. Having dismissed the use of recording and fixative media, our artworks 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 sensorial capacities. The immediacy of this experience allows the observer to transcend the illusory distinction between scientific discovery and perceptual expansion. 

Can you present your project Atom Chasm?

The Atom Chasm projectseeks to develop a laser-cooled atom observatory probing the slippery frontier between quantum and quotidian reality.  The first artwork to ever be presented on the atomic scale, Atom Chasm will be an immersive ion trap installation, enabling audiences to directly confront such paradoxical phenomena as quantum jumps. These confrontations will prompt a variety of pivotal questions as to the nature and provenance of matter, as well as to the limits of human knowledge.

What do you expect from this residency? 

The residency at the 5th Physical Institute of Stuttgart University will lead to a highly intimate installation, entailing unmediated encounters with individual atoms suspended in a quadrupole ion trap. Our intention is to sensorially enhance such state of the art experiments through unique large field-of-view optics, accompanied by live quantum jump sonifications. Instead of having to look into the eyepiece of a microscope extending from a vacuum chamber, viewers will perceive a constellation of glowing atoms as if they were hovering in the darkness of outer space.