Join us for the opening reception of Orbihedron at Fulcrum Art’s new gallery space! Conceived during their 2016 Fulcrum Incubator residency at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) at Caltech, Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand’s Orbihedron explores how hydrodynamic modeling can be used to understand and visualize the properties and behaviors of one of our universe’s most enigmatic phenomena: the black hole. With a few simple tools—a laser and a motor—Orbihedron produces dark vortices in a water-filled basin that emit rotating bursts of prismatic light. Akin to a radiant ergosphere (the space surrounding a black hole’s event horizon), Orbihedron evokes the relativistic and quantum interpretation of gravity, the reconciliation of which is essential for understanding a black hole’s behavior and the origins of the cosmos. Featuring a score by composer William Basinski, Orbihedron offers a tangible model of warped spacetime. Evelina Domnitch (1972) and Dmitry Gelfand (1974) create multi-sensory installations and performances that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices. Investigating questions of perception and perpetuity, their artworks exist as ever-transforming phenomena offered for observation. Because these exotic physical phenomena take place directly in front of the observer without being intermediated, they serve to vastly extend the sensory threshold. The immediacy of this experience allows the observer to transcend the illusory distinction between scientific discovery and perceptual expansion. Orbihedron is presented as part of Fulcrum Festival 2024: Waves Upon Waves and will be on view October 16, 2024 – January 19, 2025. Image: Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand, Orbihedron, 2017. Photo credit D. Gelfand.