About iridescence and other reconfigurations of the sensible

Info

For the opening of Iridescent Festival, we invite you to a collective and multisensory dinner with a menu prepared by Alexandra Andronic (MATERIA), to share the multiple perspectives on the iridescence phenomenon through its biological, physical, metaphysical, political and artistic, culinary and sound layers.

We encourage each and all of you to participate with ready-made ways to eat or think together.

Themes

About iridescence as a visual phenomenon, about the resemanticization of the world by its spectral coloring, about the surface of things disturbed by the geometries of the gaze, about the bright fur of the leopard and the glittering mind of the fox (Aesop), about Darwin’s journal and the rebellious bioluminescent sea creatures, about the symbiotic relationships (quorum sensing) of fish with luminescent bacteria, about the negotiation between inside and outside as a form of camouflage that suspends or collapses reality to allow new worlds to appear, about the visible and the invisible at Merleau-Ponty, about the surface as a place of densification and multiplication of experiences, about the rainbow in the puddle and the politics of capitalist glitter, about the unseen and dark face of iridescence, about the fascination immediately available but also dispensable, about the discovery of the green fluorescent protein (GFP) found in crystal jellyfish that revolutionized research in cell biology and dynamics of diseases, about territories of artistic research that produce intellectual sparkles, about so many other things that we can reconfigure together…

We invite you to a banquet (in the Platonic sense of symposium) of sharing the multiple perspectives of the phenomenon of iridescence in its biological, physical, metaphysical, political and artistic, culinary and sound folds.

Alexandra Andronic: I am fascinated by nature and man’s relationship with food. My goal is not only to produce food, but to feed those who taste my food. Most of the time, I use few ingredients, but I try to bring the most out of them. In recent years, I have discovered dozens of edible plants that grow effortlessly all around us and that I can no longer ignore.

I try to popularize the fact that nature can give us more than we have come to believe, that it is a huge source of food and safety, in which we must learn to trust and which we must deeply respect.

Ana Maria Krapal: Colors have different purposes in the animal world – warning, camouflage, defense, reproduction. There are two main categories of colors: those due to pigments and those due to optical phenomena. The latter are some of the most spectacular and are known as structural colors. Iridescence falls into this category and is defined by changing the color of a surface depending on the angle from which it is viewed. For example, a beetle can be green and suddenly, only if we move a little, we see it blue or red, even golden! In nature there are many examples of structures in iridescent colors with different roles. Thus, peacock feathers are dedicated to impressing potential partners, butterflies use metallic and iridescent colors on the wings to disturb predators, and mother-of-pearl is used by mollusks to protect the soft body hidden by the shell. Some species of butterflies or birds, shells and snails with fine mother-of-pearl and some beetles are among the species that aroused our curiosity, fascinated us and delighted our eyes with their surprising iridescence.

Radu Vancu: Sometime in the Middle Paleocene, or perhaps in the Oligocene, when the vegetation began to shrink, reptile species found themselves exposed to more light – making them more vulnerable to predators. (So ​​light was for them both life and fear — and pleasure, but also terror.) Chameleons found the solution to adapting to light by synthesizing guanine nanocrystals that made them almost invisible. The small photonic crystals in the skin were a response to fear. There are still chameleons that change color depending on the predator that observes them: the dwarf chameleon, called Smith, for example. It’s perhaps the most brilliant natural adaptation. Make yourself invisible from fear – it’s a fantasy that each of us has, owners of a huge brain that doesn’t know what to do with tissue guanine, but that little animal with a brain as big as a mustard has known how to make it real . If we had as much faith as the dwarf chameleon’s brain, we would succeed.

Literature is also, to a large extent, our way of reacting to excessive fear – or to excessive pleasure. It is our way of constructing our iridescence from words. I will talk about the light fringes of words – and how they rearrange our cells under the skin so that we can survive when we are overly vulnerable.

Mihai Ometiță: Usually, iridescence involves a movement of the object viewed and/or the subject looking. On the one hand, if we move the temporality of the movement in parentheses, we encounter a logical problem: a surface cannot have – completely and simultaneously – completely distinct primary colors (for example, both red, yellow, and blue). ). This limit of iridescence can be traced to Ludwig Wittgenstein. On the other hand, if we question the spatiality of movement, we open a phenomenological theme: a person can dance – at the same time – in partially overlapping sensory spaces (for example, in both visual and tactile space, and in the affective one). This embodiment of iridescence can be explored in the footsteps of Merleau-Ponty. Both philosophical approaches find their equivalents in visual environments: for example, freezing the movement of several faces and superimposing them on composite photography (see Francis Galton), respectively recording the movement of several bodies and making them simultaneous in perspective cinematography (see Zbigniew Rybczyński).

Bogdana Mitu: Light has always been a point of maximum fascination for mankind, and the change in external perception of the color of some surfaces, a phenomenon often encountered in nature, has led to the development of optical theories to the current level of knowledge. My proposal is to have a brief foray into the fascinating world of light, where you will learn how nature changes or survives due to the interaction of light with structures with amazing precision, but also how man has developed increasingly advanced systems and devices based on manipulating light to meet the requirements of the modern society.

Paul Breazu: Invitation to the Disco. A world mirrored in a thousand shards. If the mirror ball instantly makes you think about the disco culture and the kaleidoscopic universe it produced, what the Discoteca collective intended to do recently was to bring in contemporary clubs the dance music composed in Romania before ’89. I invite you to a discussion about the shades that colored the local disco music then and now.

Articles

“Iridescence, Intimacies” / e–fluxJournal
Tavi Meraud
Link articol