AxS Incubator Symposium at ArtCenter

Time-exposure representation of the LIGO Interferometer in Livingston, Louisiana | Image courtesy Pasadena Arts Council

Last week, CalArts students in the Integrated Media program participated in a four-day workshop with visiting artists Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gefland. The Amsterdam-based duo is in Southern California for a month-long residency at LIGO/Caltech, where they have been researching the dynamics of gravitational radiation and black hole sources, alongside LIGO’s theoretical and experimental physicists.

The workshop was spent developing Orbifold, “an artwork prodding the peculiar dynamics of the recently detected gravitational radiation as well as its black hole sources. Combining experimental advancements in water-wave gravitational modeling and quantum hydrodynamics, a diversely mobilized liquid environment served as an arena for staging perceptually challenging analogues of gravity.”

Together with guest-curator Isabel de Sena, Domnitch and Gefland are the first participants in the Pasadena Arts Council’s (PAC) AxS Incubator, a program that supports “dynamic investigations into the intersections of arts and science.”

Their residency will conclude this Saturday (Dec. 10) in a symposium hosted by ArtCenter College of Design. The event is taking place in conjunction with the exhibition Uncertainty, currently on view at the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at ArtCenter’s Hillside campus. Joining de Sena, Domnitch and Gelfand at the symposium are Tom Leeser, director of the Center for Integrated Media and the Program of Art and Technology in the CalArts School of Art, and Rana Adhikari, professor of Physics at Caltech.

This project, initiated by de Sena, will develop into an installation for her 2017 exhibition in Berlin titled Time Out of Joint in collaboration with CTM Festival for Adventurous Music and Art.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is designed to open the field of gravitational-wave astrophysics through the direct detection of gravitational waves predicted by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. LIGO is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).