Sinking Thoughts

Laser-lit clouds of submillimetre soap bubbles embracingly trace the air flow around an orifice. At a certain distance from the inhaling hole a horizon forms, separating the flow between inbound air and the rest of the substrate. Once the bubbles traverse this vacillating boundary they become entrained filaments that plummet inward. Besides tracing vortical motion, these luminous bubble trajectories lay bare a phenomenon known as the Coandă effect: when a fluid jet traverses an orifice it tends to follow adjacent surfaces and to entrain surrounding fluid so that a low pressure region emerges along the surface.
Though named after a 20th century inventor who exploited the phenomenon for airborne hovercraft technology, the original discoverer was Thomas Young in 1800 – a year before his legendary double-slit experiment.

Sinking Thoughts envisions the imminent elucidation of a black hole’s interior, where not only space-time but also its underlying qubits of information might become irreversibly warped. Alternatively, the information crossing an event horizon may remain intact, if it is quantum teleported through a wormhole throat. “The interaction between the boundaries implies that the radial direction is effectively a compact circle” [P. Gao, D. Jafferis, A. Wall, “Traversable wormholes via a double trace deformation”, Journal of High Energy Physics 17(2017)151].
This prototype of Sinking Thoughts was created in collaboration with the Crossing Parallels programme and physicist Fulvio Scarano at Aerospace Engineering, TU Delft. Fulvio Scarano and his team have pioneered the development of a helium-filled soap bubble system to profusely seed the air stream in large-scale wind tunnels. Enabling high-repetition rate tomographic PIV (particle image velocemitry), the system has significantly enhanced the measurement of three-dimensional velocity and vorticity, as well as aerodynamic forces and loads

Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand

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Dmitry Gelfand (b.1974, St. Petersburg, Russia) and Evelina Domnitch (b. 1972, Minsk, Belarus) create sensory immersion environments that merge physics, chemistry and computer science with uncanny philosophical practices. Having dismissed the use of recording and fixative media, the duo's installations and performances comprise 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 one’s sensorial thresholds.

Domnitch and Gelfand have collaborated with numerous scientific research facilities including the 3rd and 5th Physical Institutes at the Goettingen and Stuttgart Universities in Germany, the Center for Integrated Quantum Science and Technology of the University of Ulm, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Pasadena, California) the Institute of Advanced Sciences and Technologies (Japan), Ricso Lab (Russia) and the Meurice Institute (Belgium) and are permanent fellows within their own lab at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.

Their art is recognised around the world and has been featured in numerous exhibitions including presentations alongside Auguste Rodin, Anish Kapoor, Karel Appel and Christo. In 2007 the duo won the Japan Media Arts Excellence Prize (2007) and received five Ars Electronica Honorary Mentions (2007, 2009, 2011,2013, and 2017).

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www.portablepalace.com

Fulvio Scarano

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Prof. dr. Fulvio Scarano currently leads the AWEP department (Aerodynamics, Wind Energy, Flight Performance and propulsion) as a director. The research interests cover the development of particle image velocimetry (PIV) and its applications to high-speed aerodynamics in the supersonic and hypersonic regime. Notable developments are the image deformation technique, Tomographic PIV for 3D flow velocity measurements and its use to quantitatively determine pressure fluctuations and acoustic emissions in wind tunnel experiments. Recent works deal with the combination of PIV data with CFD techniques, extension of PIV to large-scale wind tunnel experiments and applications ranging from sport aerodynamics to ground vehicles, from aircraft to rocket aerodynamics.

Fulvio Scarano graduated in Aerospace Engineering at University of Naples in 1996. He obtained the Ph.D. in 2000 (von Karman Institute, Theodor von Karman prize) and joined TU Delft at the faculty of Aerospace Engineering in the Aerodynamics Section in the same year. Since 2008 he is full professor of Aerodynamics and acts as head of section since 2010. Starting director of Aerospace Engineering Graduate School (2012). His research was awarded by the Marie-Curie grant (1999), Dutch Science Foundation VIDI grant (2005) and the European Research Council grant (ERC, 2009). He was European project coordinator (AFDAR, Advanced Flow Diagnostics for Aeronautical Research, 2010-2013). Fulvio Scarano promoted and supervised more than 20 PhDs, was author of more than 200 publications and delivered more than 20 keynote lectures worldwide.